5 Simple Steps To Increase Customers For Your Business

 

 “Make a customer, not a sale.”  - Katherine Barchetti

W

hether you are running your own business or you are working for others, you are always meeting with different customers on daily basis and are engaged in a relationship with them one way or the other – either directly or indirectly. It doesn’t matter what capacity you occupy in the business. What matters is that you understand the philosophy of putting your customers first, and watch your business grow in leaps and bounds.

Customers are the reasons we get paid at the end of the day. They are the reasons we are in business. When customers patronize you, your business stands greater chance of success. When they don’t, it becomes very difficult to sustain profitability and business growth. 

Therefore, to make your business survive and grow amid stiff competition from rivals and competitors, you must practice certain simple but time-tested and trusted principles that would encourage customers’ engagement with your business, as well as increase business traffic that comes from them. It doesn’t matter whether your business is online or offline, as long as your business approach is pro-customers rather than anti-customers, achieving tremendous business growth can be a great reality.  

These principles to attract customers for your business come in 5 simple steps.

1.      Define the specific market you target. You don’t sell kiddies shoes to an adult population. You don’t sell hip hop or disco music to the elderly, nor jazz and high life to the budding teenagers. Even though there are exceptions, you’ve just targeted the wrong audience for your business. Define exactly who your products or services are made for and channel your marketing approach accordingly – paying careful attention to demographics such as age, gender, geography, social class and status, educational background, economic status, occupation, etc.

2.      Connect with your customers. No matter the type of business you’re into, if you cannot connect with your customers on a personal level, then it becomes difficult to engage them. Connecting with your current and prospective customers involves creating and finding new ways to meet their needs and finding ways to meet these needs by introducing products and/or services that add value to their lives. In today’s business world, connecting involves as much of offline approaches as the online approaches. In the modern world, the social web offers perfect platforms for making these contacts as it has the added advantage of reaching those close and far, near and remote. Such social web involves social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, WeChat, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.

3.      Communicate value to your customers. Connecting is never enough. You need to start conversations that add value to your customers. You need to speak their language and understand them in return. For instance, say your target market is young middle class families, whose priority is largely job security, establishing a family, and settling in a stable career. Talking about retirement plans may not necessarily suit their needs at this point in time as would be issues concerning family planning, housing mortgages and an educational trust fund to take care of the arrival of children to the family. Understanding and communicating to your audience must not be focused on just selling to them, but on adding value. Your communications should be value driven. Do this and watch your business or brand catch the attention and interest of your customers – both current and prospective one.  

4.      Engagement is very important. Engage your customers – both the current and the prospective ones. Once you’ve determined your target market; you’ve connected to them and communicated value that attempts to meet and satisfy their needs, you must now appropriately engage them. This engagement must be interactive for it to be productive. This can be achieved through communicating rich contents as well as engaging in promotions that get users talking about your products and/or services. Such rich contents and promotions create avenue for value exchange that leads to awareness, trial, satisfaction and loyalty to the products and/or services you offer. And the greater the engagement, the greater the likelihood you will be making sales. Engagement instigates and triggers emotions. And if your products and/or services trigger the right emotions, then you’ve just opened the channels to your customers’ pockets.  

5.      Selling after the sales. After sales experience is one way to increase the number of customers for your business. Don’t just stop at selling to your customers and then go to bed. You must understand that customers are also stakeholders in your business. Treat everyone of them as if they are your only customer. Feel their feelings. Follow up on their experience of your products and/or services and ensure you get feedback on the service you’ve rendered. When customers feel they are valued as persons and not just because of the contents of their wallets, they’ll begin to identify with you and your business more. For example, say you own a beauty salon business and you just rendered a service to a customer who was preparing for an event. Try calling them after the occasion to know if they were complimented at the event. Ask them how they feel about their new look. Do they feel beautiful and confident? Are they satisfied? Do their friends love their new look? Such communications and engagements with customers on such personal and empathic level are the best kept secrets of attaining and sustaining customer loyalty. It gives a whole new meaning business-customer relationship.    

There you have it, the 5 Simple Steps to Increase Customers to Your Business. Practice these steps and watch your business grow from strength to strength till you’ve become top of the pile in your business niche in particular and the global business world in general.

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