The question that keeps many consultants awake at night is - 'How does a business acquire more new customers?' While the business kick-starts with a fresh infusion of clients, keeping the inflow of new customers alive is something that has tormented many consultants and small business owners. The key to acquiring new customers and having a steady flow of them lies in the better understanding of your potential clients. Although there is no secret magical remedy to this issue, it sure does take a lot of time, efforts and persistence while trying to acquire new customers on board for your business.
The secret lies in forming meaning relationship and connecting with both your potential clients and existing ones. Looking for newer avenues to explore and foster relationships is essential and one tool that would help you achieve it with little monetary investment is through blogging. All big and small businesses alike have made maintaining an active company blog as one of their top most priority, and they are now even managing to get an infusion of new customers for their products and services.
Harnessing the power of the Internet and Blogs is one of the route you can explore to acquire more customers and below are the 10 ways you can achieve it through some time and efforts dedicated to it.
Research your target audience and demographics
Knowing your target audience better helps you in formulating a healthy relationship with them. The key to success here would be in analysing your target audience and their social media demographics. For a target audience described as a male in the 20's-30's, with a specific education level and income should be described to make it even easier for you to post your blog topics catering to their needs. The knowledge of your target audience will also be helpful when you try to reach out to them through social media platforms, clearly dominated by specific demographics.
Trending topics should be carefully monitored through keyword researching and have it covered on your blog. Understanding what your potential customer wants or expects from you should be the priority while trying to find new customers from your blog.
Have a firm stance on your brand's Personality and Values
People still do highly value their motives and ideals and they only respond positively to those which share their ideals and morals. Your business purpose and values mean much more and does not apply to just yourself. Businesses acquire new customers who believe in the values of the brand and when they admire their work and motive. You can reflect this motive and values of your business through your blog posts, which tend to establish a personality among the minds of the customers. What your brand stands for says more and is of more value to the customers.
Through your business blog, you can make it easy for your potential customers to see what you stand for and your business' motives. A blog will help you in ways more than one if you manage to establish such a personality through your blog postings.
Blog better, Blog more frequently
The most successful business blogs who post multiple times a day have acquired more new customers from their blog. People wouldn't bother visiting your blog if the last time it was updated was when the business first began. Either have an active blog or don't have one at all. Blogging informative and interesting content and churning them out at your fastest convenience is one way to gather more customers from your blog itself. Blogging more frequently has been the witness to rise in traffic for many businesses and that takes you one step closer to catching their attention and turning them into customers.
Post regular updates weekly and see to it that your blog content doesn't suffer in this process.
Create visually appealing content more often
Online users tend to shift more towards visually appealing content in the form of videos, infographics and images. Visual content speaks louder than words in this era with minimal attention span and considering posting such content often will help you gain more traffic and in turn convert them into long-term customers. You can consider video blogging to post some of the content as video snippets, which are far more likely to be accessed and appreciated by your customers.
Presentations on SlideShare, Videos, Infographics, in-post images are some of the visual content you can make use of on your business blogs to appeal to your audience better.
Strategically place your Call-to-Actions (CTA)
Call-to-Action buttons are your key to gaining new customers from all the traffic that your blog has now fostered. Strategically place your Call-to-Action's in between posts and also interlink relevant posts from your previous content, which would boost your SEO efforts and also help your customers find related content. A/B testing of your Call-to-Actions is also necessary for better understanding of what performs the best and adhering to it accordingly.
You can also consider using Call-to-Action buttons on your brand's Facebook profile that now allows up to seven different CTA buttons, including Sign up, Shop Now, Watch video and more.
Place Opt-In boxes where they perform the best
Opt-in boxes in-between posts drive more Email subscribers through your blog and are valuable for your business. Driving new customers through Email subscribers is highly valued as Email Opt-ins has been proven to drive a majority of new customers for many brands and businesses. At the comments section, sidebar, In-between and at the end of post opt-in boxes are some of the most converting locations for driving new customers through your blog.
Using A/B testing, you can chalk out a plan to place your opt-in boxes where they perform the best.
Promote your Blog on multiple platforms
If by now you have your brand's target audience and demographics sorted out, promoting them on suitable social media platforms would be a bit easier. The different social media platforms are based on their individual demographics and targeting them should be easy once you have your target audience defined.
With many platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram and more to consider, promoting your blog across a multitude of these platforms is essential for driving more visitors to your business and in turn, more customers.
Build your Blog Authority
Whom do you trust when it comes to gaining insights into the products or services before you buy them? Definitely from someone who has a better experience and authority on the subject. The major edge that business with an authority image has over the rest is that they are the ones customers head towards for acquiring new products. You can use domain authority checker services to get a better understanding of how your blog is performing in this regards, and tweak it accordingly to perform better on these factors.
Insights and tips from an authority blog squander all qualms that a customer would have regarding a specific product or service.
Repurpose your blog content as e-books
If you have managed to achieve the previous factor perfectly, repurposing your valuable content in other forms like long-form print articles or standalone free or premium E-books is one way to gain more new customers. This way you can improvise on your already well performing blog content and repurpose them as an E-book that would help you reach out further to more potential customers, driving traffic to your website and resulting in increased sales.
The one trick to have more 'repurpose-able' content is by producing more evergreen content that remains informational and relevant even after years of getting published for the first time.
Evaluate and Track Key Analytics
The final step in attaining new customers is to never end the search and keep iterating upon your strategies to find the one that best fits your needs. The key to doing so is through tracking key analytics of your blog. These insights from your blog will help you understand the intangible information as to how your business is performing on the market front. Each network that you are active on has its own analytics tracking in addition to the host of premium tools built for the same. Being active in tracking these analytics of your business blog will help you target your potential customers better.
Analysing how well a blog post performed will lead you to insights that would be helpful in molding your further posts and target your audience with pinpoint accuracy.