Guide to Attracting Potential Customers to Your Business

#1

Consider Your Ideal Customer

When figuring out how to attract new customers, it’s important to consider who your ideal customer is. Of course, this doesn’t mean closing the door on customers who don’t fit your exact parameters, but rather, it means pinpointing who is the most likely to show interest in your small business, interact with your brand, and eventually make a purchase.

Let’s go back to our landscaping design business example. Your ideal landscaping customer is likely old enough to own a home with a yard with enough disposable income to put toward lawn care and gardening services. Therefore, you probably won’t want to target high school- or college-aged students who aren’t homeowners yet. And you’ll likely want to go after customers in a specific financial bracket.

Understanding this kind of information about your customers can help you home in on those who are more inclined to do business with you, but it also helps you determine how and where to target them.

#2

Segment Your Potential Customers

With a better idea of the types of customers you want to attract, you can begin segmenting prospective customers. Customer segmentation is the process of dividing your potential customers into groups based on factors like demographics, location, behaviors, and more. Some examples of customer segmentation include:

• Demographics: A customer’s age, gender, income, marital status, occupation, and education level
• Geographics: The county, state, and city where a customer resides
• Psychographics: A customer’s interests, values, attitudes, personality, and beliefs
• Behavior: A customer’s purchasing habits, tendencies, and frequencies

In short, segmenting your customers allows you to organize your customer base and better understand their wants and needs. With this information, you can:

• Create ads and marketing campaigns that resonate better with each segment your potential customers
• Communicate with prospective customers via their preferred channels
• Customize your content to align with their needs
• Navigate potential challenges or obstacles that your customers face

#3

Create Customer Profiles

Once you’ve segmented your prospective customers, it’s time to build customer profiles. Basically, this is just further organizing the information you already gathered to create profiles that let you individually market to each group.

Think about how some of these factors would influence how a potential customer would interact with your brand and how you can control and alter your narrative to appeal to them. Chances are, you’d market your content much differently for a 20-something-year-old male car mechanic in Chicago than you would a middle-aged female dentist with a family living in Phoenix.

Grouping like-minded customers with similar traits together will help when it comes to your marketing campaigns. The more you know about these groups, the better you can communicate with them and even generate new leads. But a word to the wise: This isn’t just a one-and-done activity. Be sure to periodically analyze your data and update your profiles based on new information and findings.

#4

Build Customized Marketing Plans

This is where you can get strategic. With the insight you gathered through your customer profiles, you can develop targeted content to appeal to each of your customer profiles.

For instance, maybe you’ve found that the group of younger, unmarried, college-educated customers like to engage with your social media posts and SMS marketing campaigns, while your profile of middle-aged, married homeowners prefer to receive newsletters and promos via email.

Why waste your time and money trying to market to all your customers at once when you can tailor your marketing efforts to each group based on their preferences and behaviors?

#5

Incorporate Multiple Marketing Strategies

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: The best marketing strategies involve using multiple tactics at once. If you want to reach the potential customers you’ve been eying, then you’ll need to employ various marketing tactics, particularly those that will best align with your customer profiles. Maybe you’ll want to use Facebook target ads to entice one group of new customers and email marketing to drum up interest with another group.

Of course, SMS marketing is one of the most viable marketing tactics right now. Aside from its successful open rates and high conversion rates, the beauty of sending SMS texts to potential customers is that they’ve agreed to receive your content, so you know they’re already interested in your brand.

From here, texting marketing platforms like EZ Texting offer contact management tools that let you create groups and segment your customers who share similar locations, preferences, and interests. You can use these tools to send target notifications or customized messages to specific groups, upping your chances of getting a bite.

Of course, SMS platforms also have analytics and reporting tools, which encourage you to track the performance of your marketing campaigns and make tweaks until you see your desired results.

#6

Hold onto Your Customers

Now, if all goes according to plan, you’ll attract those potential customers and turn them into loyal customers. But just because you got them to make a purchase doesn’t mean your job is done. You’ve got to keep your customers hooked. This requires focusing on your customer retention efforts so that your new customers don’t wander off elsewhere.

From creating VIP programs to sending out special promo codes, it’s important to incentivize your customers into staying with your company. You can even use your customer profiles and customer management tools in your SMS platform to send customized content to certain customers.

For example, maybe you pinpoint those who haven’t made a purchase in a while and send them a 10% discount code to encourage them to make a purchase or offer them a perk for referring a friend. A little love goes a long way when it comes to holding onto your customers.