While simple in theory, working to grow your customer base is a pretty complicated process to master. In most cases, reaching customers takes a lot more than providing a great product. The marketing process plays a major role in positioning your product most effectively.
Digital platforms like social media have opened up a new avenue for reaching your customer base. Regardless of the medium, we’ll be going over some tips to use to better reach, and grow your audience, with conversion in mind.
Know Your Audience
First things first, you need to know your audience. Without this, you’re pretty much shooting in the dark. Knowing and understanding your current customers is the key ingredient to growing that number. Otherwise, how are you going to know what they want?
Targeting
“Anyone” is not a target. You need a specific ideal customer in order to expand. Start with a buyer persona profile to sculpt your ideal customer. You want to have a good picture of what your target audience looks like, from their typical day to specific interests. The more detailed you can get, the more you’ll be able to specifically position yourself.
Customer Relationships
Providing the best customer service is easily one of the best and most effective ways to grow your customer base and here’s why. An outstanding service will very rarely go unnoticed, and it is even more likely that the customer will share that experience with others. A positive word of mouth will grab the attention of others and incline them to be a customer as well.
- 72% of customers are likely to share a good customer experience
Do your best to ensure a positive customer experience, regardless of the situation. Not every customer will be as understanding as the next, but maintaining excellent service will still set you above the rest.
Keep Fresh Content
Staying Relevant
Regular content posting is a must in staying relevant and on target buyers’ radar. Ideally, you should have a general schedule for posting, and have the content prepared to go live at those times. This keeps things consistent for easier flow.
Social media is a massive channel for reaching customers. A great way to connect with potential customers, or learn more about them is through social media. There are different strategies to doing so, including targeted content publishing, but that is up to you to understand how to best reach your audience.
You can learn more about social media strategies here
Being Unique
You should always try to make your content repostable. This doesn’t mean it’s easy to copy, but that it’s so well put together that others feel the need to share it. This can be accomplished in a couple of ways.
- Put together content that requires knowledge and expertise
- Put together content that requires resources
- Put out content that’s too perfect to replicate
Sometimes a message is so well put that nothing else could make it better. In that case, people are more likely to share your message than draft their own that isn’t as powerful. The same goes for the first two points. Time, money and knowledge are big factors that are hard to match if you simply don’t have them. Sure, there are ways to mimic great content, but sharing could be just as effective.
Repurposing
Long form content like blog posts are easy to repurpose for other channels. Creating original content to stay relevant may seem daunting. But blogs are a great cheat code. They can be chopped up into bite size pieces for other platforms, allowing you to be consistent and scale without requiring too many resources.
Understand Current Performance
You need to understand what’s going on now to understand where to go. Not only do you need to understand your audience, but also the numbers surrounding them. Certain metrics will give you insight on what may or may not be working for you.
Analytics
Analytics such as traffic and conversion rates will tell you how effective your current methods are. High traffic with low conversion may signal a missing step that needs to be taken to help convert. You can also utilize analytics to see where prospects are coming from, which content had the most interactions, which times and days worked best, etc. All these little things make a difference. Being at the right place at the right time involves knowing and understanding these analytics, so that you’re at forefront whenever a customer is searching.
As you grow your customer base, you can further qualify leads to see which are the most likely to follow through and be successful. To help you on your journey, we’ve provided a free lead scoring template for you to use.
Set Performance Goals
While setting goals seems like the most basic step, it’s arguably the most important. Without a set timeline it’s difficult to drive improvement. Specific goals that are time-bound are more likely to be followed through, therefore achieving results. When considering a customer base, you should set milestones for a number of customers, leads, etc., since those do indicate growth in their own way.
Test & Assess
If you find a certain strategy doesn’t produce results by a certain deadline, implement changes. Finding the magic formula requires testing performance and reassessing once done so. The first strategy you pick will likely not skyrocket your customer base, it will take fine tuning and experimentation, but it should always be backed by the goal of driving improvement.
Provide Incentives
Incentives are an effective tactic to get a customer’s foot in the door. It is a lot more challenging to sell someone something than it is to give. This is where free offers come into play. A free offer gives customers virtually nothing to lose. Some exchange of personal information like an email and that’s it. However, it introduces the customer to you as a business. From there you can introduce them to your full product and generate more interest.
Some incentives you could offer are:
- Trials
- Samples
- Advice
Depending on your product/ service, each will exist in a unique way. These incentives serve as a gateway for your customer, from which you can nurture and grow into returning customers.
Wrapping it Up
These were just a handful of tips to help grow your customer base. Each will need it’s own fine tuning and application based on your specific needs. Take the time to set goals, understand your audience and the ways to connect with them and you’ll find growing that number significantly easier.
If you’re looking for more advanced customer growth and inbound marketing strategies, feel free to check out some of our specialized packages.