Attract More People to Your Business!
Would you like more customers for your business? You bet your bottom dollar you would. Here are 5 reasons why you are not attracting new business and the advice you need to get people queuing to work with you.
1. You are Not Following up!
When new people get in touch with you and leave their phone number or email address are you following up with them? Be honest with yourself here, because if you are not you are quite literally leaving money on the table.
Someone has shown interest in your experience that automatically catapults them towards the top end of your sales funnel. Ignoring that opportunity could be leaving the prospect thinking:
- This person does not want my business!
- If they are this poor at getting back to me when I want something, how will they be when I have a problem with their service?
- This company is so unprofessional I am going elsewhere.
If you don't have a physical follow up procedure in place where the prospect gets a phone call, an email or a series of effective emails, or even better, a face to face meeting, then the chances of you actually progressing to a sale are slim to none.
2. You Are Going For the Jugular
If any business can turn around and say they have too much business then my name is Mary Anne! There can never be too much business and most companies struggle getting business because their lead generation campaigns go straight for the jugular. They are after the sale.
The simple fact of the matter is this: as a consumer if I don't know you then I am not going to buy straight out of the gate. Nor will anyone else. Perhaps you can prove me wrong here? Do you?
There is so much information, especially online, that people take a step back do some research and then while doing that research find someone else who is better positioned to begin a relationship with them.
The key here is "begin a relationship" with a prospect. I have purposefully not mentioned "sale" here because it is not the sale, it is a relationship. It is asking for permission to communicate with that person again; to learn more about that person, to inform them about your experience and to educate that person on how your experience can help them satisfy their needs.
This is where the follow up system comes into play from point one.
3. You are Neglecting Your Existing Customers.
Your existing customers should be a huge lead pool for your business. If you are ignoring them then the likelihood is that you are not just missing out on repeat business, but also missing other pre-qualified and interested parties for your business offerings.
The best way to get more referrals from your existing clients is quite simple: have a great product or service. Without that then there is nothing to talk about. Nothing!
Forget about satisfying your customers' needs, focus on surpassing them on every level. Think about ways in which you can deliver an experience that impacts the customer in such a way that they want to shout from the roof tops about how good they feel and how proud they are of the results they have achieved thanks to your business.
Reward those customers who are loyal to you, the most profitable small businesses know that existing customers are the bread and butter of their business success and should be treated so. Just because a customer comes back of their own accord it doesn't mean that they don't deserve to have their passion for your business stoked from time to time.
A word of mouth referral from someone who has been a loyal customer of your business for years could be absolutely priceless.
4. You Are Not Social Enough
If you could fantasize about the perfect ways to attract new clients, you might come up with ones that:
- Help you pinpoint prospective clients.
- Provide opportunities to build your brand recognition.
- Encourage customers to share your site, services, and products with their friends via online word of mouth.
- Facilitate two way communications so that you can listen to customers concerns and respond quickly.
- Involve little to no upfront marketing cost.
In theory this is social media and given its rapid rise in popularity and hundreds of millions of worldwide users, you might think that social media is the missing link to your inbound marketing strategy.
It can be, but you have to know how to use social media for business the right way to win sales and business otherwise it can just be a drain on your limited resource as a business owner.
Done right, social media gives you the opportunity to interact with people and continue to work on building that relationship cultivating business whilst increasing your brand awareness.
5. You Don't Know How Successful or Not Your Last Marketing Campaign Was.
Let's face it if you have spent money on something then you want to know the results it generated. Right?
If the campaign generated a positive return on investment then repeat the process. In fact take it one step further, tweak the campaign and make it better.
If you don't know where you are going right or wrong then you have no way to remedy that. Keep a beady eye on customer winning strategies, trash the ones that don't work and optimize the ones that do.
Quite often attracting new business comes down to the fact that you are not trying hard enough. If you take the time to really think about what you are doing and how you are doing it you can have a truly effective inbound marketing campaign that floods your business with leads, business and happy, repeat customers.
What would you say are the best ways to attract new and repeat business? Share your comments below!
Images by : JuicyRai, Casey Serin, Garret Dimon