How to Find More Customers and Increase Your Online Business

If your business has an Internet presence (and let’s face it, for most businesses it’s an essential requirement these days), you should constantly be on the lookout for new and innovative ways to increase your customer base.

Here are some simple ideas for winning new customers:

Discover Your Target Customers’ Other Interests:

If you are selling health-related products, for example, you probably already market via health forums, health blogs and other places where ‘health’ is the main topic of conversation. This is all well and good, but remember this is where your competitors will be concentrating their main marketing efforts too. So this time ask yourself: “What might my ideal customers’ other interests be?”

Although your customers are interested in staying healthy, they could also be avid sports fans, or movie buffs, or pet lovers, or DIY enthusiasts, so it’s worth casting your net further afield so that other potential customers get to hear about you and your products or services. Bear in mind also that people with the same interests tend to group together, whether that’s in the real world or the virtual one!

Vary Your Offering:

You know you provide a great product or service, but getting more people to try it can be a challenge, even for larger companies. Every now and then, a ‘household name’ will change the look of a product’s packaging (even though the product itself hasn’t changed) to appeal to a wider audience, or a different market sector. You could do the same.

If you are selling an ebook, you could turn it into a downloadable podcast for those who would rather listen to the spoken word than read your content. Again if you use video as a marketing tool, you could enable your site visitors to upload it to their MP3s so they can listen to it anywhere they want. By providing these additional options, people can choose how they connect with you.

Offer Free Stuff

Whilst you might not be ready to launch your own Freemium (free premium magazine) as seen on a recent episode of The Apprentice! giving away free content is a time-proven marketing tool for pulling in more customers.

If used correctly, this strategy may be all you need to get people to pick up that phone
and call you, or subscribe to your online newsletter.

If you are an estate agent, you could create a free report about "How to get more value from your home sale."

By creating content around a specific title like in the above example, you will primarily attract people who are considering selling their property. In building a rapport with your target audience, while establishing yourself as an expert in your field, who do you think your followers are going to ask to market their home for them?

Other freebies you could offer depending on the nature of your business:

 Free shipping
 Free sample of your products
 Free trials
 Free estimates
 Free DVD tutorials
 Free personalised stuff (with your company name on, naturally).


Use Social Networking to Attract More Customers:

There’s nothing more tedious than companies banging on about themselves and their achievements all the time. Savvy social networkers on the other hand provide entertainment without the hard sell. Innocent smoothies, with their amusing anecdotes and off-the-wall humour, are a prime example of how to do social networking right.

Think about how powerful these social networks are in spreading news and information. So be the source that influences other people. How do you do it? Look for the "in thing" or the "hottest trends" that could interest your potential customers and share it with them. Use Google Reader to glean this information.

Website

Most importantly you should have a website which matches or over delivers your potential customer's expectations. Using a professional Lutterworth Website Design team could help you to increase your web presence and sales.