Attracting and retaining new customers is key to the success of any business. For small businesses, however, you probably won’t have the team or resources for fancy campaigns. Instead, let’s take a look at some simple and budget-friendly ways to widen your reach and grow your customer base.
Article Breakdown
Offers for New Customers
To help bring in new customers, you may consider offering an incentive for signing up to your services, making their first purchase, or simply joining your mailing list. This is a tried and tested technique in many industries – just take online casinos, for example. New players can find casino promotions at Paddy Power and other online platforms such as bonus rounds, free spins on slot games, golden chips for roulette, deposit bonuses, and weekly rewards. This allows players the opportunity to try out different games to find which ones best suit their playing style, making for an immersive and authentic casino experience.
In retail settings, this same logic can be translated to free shipping on new customers’ first order, exclusive discounts, or a free gift with their first purchase. For those that provide services, it could be a free consultation or your first session at a discounted rate. Or, if your business uses a subscription plan, you may consider offering a free trial. These offers attract new customers to your business, and reward them for choosing you, building a relationship of mutual value, trust, and loyalty between you and the consumer.
Consistent Social Media Presence
For small businesses, it goes without saying that you aren’t working with large budgets. With this in mind, paid social media ads might not be appropriate just yet. However, you can make the most of social media as a business just by creating an online presence. Most social media platforms are free to sign up to, and have the ability to widen your reach, linking people back to your website.
According to Forbes, the key with social media is to have a consistent presence, both in the style of your posts and in the posting schedule that you keep. Whilst each platform will come with its own voice, the voice of the brand needs to remain the same across every post. This allows you to build an online persona that consumers can relate to, organically growing interest in the brand.
Ask for Reviews
Reach out to your existing customers, either in a newsletter, personalized email, or as part of the invoicing and delivery process to request reviews. These reviews may sit on your own website or on third party review sites such as Google or Trustpilot. Though it may not seem like much, reviews help to legitimize your business and build trust, which can help sway a purchasing decision for someone who is on the fence.
You can also encourage users to recommend you to their peers. In fact, word of mouth advertising such as reviews and recommendations remain the most trusted form of advertising. According to a survey by Nielsen, 92% of people trust recommendations from family and friends above all other advertisements. To incentivize this, you could combine this with the welcome offer by rewarding both the new and recommending customer upon the first purchase.
And there you have it – just a few simple and budget-friendly ways that small businesses can grow their audience, attract new customers, and sustainably retain them. With these tips in mind, all that’s left to do is open the curtains – your audience awaits.