Top 49 Ways To Get More Customers for Business.
If you are a business owner, the question: ‘‘How to Get More Customers for Business?’’ would have crossed your mind not once or twice. The reason is, you need to keep your business alive and growing to survive the market dynamism.
A customer is an individual or business that purchases the goods or services produced by a business. Attracting customers is the primary goal of most public-facing businesses, because it is the customer who creates demand for goods and services.
An internal customer is a customer who is directly connected to an organization, and is usually (but not necessarily) internal to the organization. Internal customers are usually stakeholders, employees, or shareholders, but the definition also encompasses creditors and external regulators.
Getting new clients or customers take time, energy, and lots of effort. To get a steady pipeline of clients or customers, you have to invest time into building relationships, networking, and marketing your consultancy.
In this post, you will learn 50 strategies you can use to get new customers or clients. You may be familiar with many of these at a glance, but reading through would help you avail helpful advice, resources, and tools for each.
1. Browse Job Boards
This is really another no-brainer, and chances are you already use job boards. If you don’t, bookmark all of these below and check them daily for new projects. This is probably one of the easiest ways to get new clients. These boards include design, development, marketing, copywriting and miscellaneous jobs. Positions cover remote, full-time, part-time, contract and more, so there are plenty of options.
• Authentic Jobs
• Dribbble
• Behance
• Juiiicy
• Folyo
• Reddit For Hire
• Smashing Jobs
• Krop
• We Work Remotely
• GrowthHackers
• Inbound
• Stack Overflow
• GitHub
• AngelList
• Layervault
• YC Jobs
• Elegant.ly
• Product Hunt
• Tuts+
• Indeed (try keyword + your location (or) remote (or) contract (or) freelance, etc.
If you don’t want to check these boards daily, you can subscribe to a service like Workshop (design and development only) or Working Nomads (remote only). They’ll email you the best leads from job boards daily (note that only some boards are included).
2. Partner with Agencies
Partnering with an agency is a great way to bring in new clients. Experts have used this exact strategy and built a partnership with an agency that sends them at least 1 new client per month. You should also make sure the agency is larger than your consultancy, so you are not competing.
It is discovered agencies usually pass on work because:
• The budget is too low
• They have no interest in the project
• They don’t have availability
• They don’t have the required skills or expertise
Normally when an agency turns down a prospective client, they’ll refer the client to a new company in their network. That’s where you come in.
You can reach out to a dozen or so web agencies with a personalized email offering to partner or take on any work they pass up. You will receive responses from about half, and set up phone calls with each to discuss further.
You can email the person in charge of business development, since they were focused on building relationships with outside vendors.
3. Follow up with lost clients
This could be referred to as clients you may have spoken with or sent a proposal to in the past, but didn’t win the business.
Go through your email and find clients you lost 2+ months ago. Send them a follow up email asking how their project is coming along, and if there is anything you can do for them.
This tactic is about being helpful and showing you care about the client. This can lead to a small project or even spark a new conversation about hiring you, if they are unhappy with their previous selection. If not, you’re still putting yourself on their radar and might see some referrals coming your way.
4. Follow up with your network
Browse through old email conversations with colleagues, connections and people you’ve spoken with in the past who could be a fit for your consultancy. Follow up with each, asking what they’ve been up to and how you can help.
Asking how you can help the person, whether it is giving feedback, advice, tips or doing a small task, can be rewarding, and it helps you build up relationships with the right people. Remember, if you go out of your way to help someone for free, they’ll likely return the favor and help you.
5. Run an ad campaign
Facebook ads and Google Adwords are great ways to advertise your consultancy to prospective clients. Both platforms let you set a small daily budget for those that are cash-strapped, or want to test the waters.
Facebook ads are easier to use than Google Adwords, which definitely has a steep learning curve if you’re new. PPC University is an amazing resource to learn about running effective campaigns, or check out Kudu, a service that will manage and run campaigns for you.
For visitors who come to your website and leave, you can use retargeting services like Adroll or Perfect Audience. These platforms allow you to track who visits your site, and lets you later serve ads to them via Facebook, Twitter, and other online marketing channels.
You can also try buying display ads from BuySellAds. However, there may be a higher minimum budget, depending on the sites and creatives you select.
6. Start blogging
Blogging is an amazing way to build relationships and become an expert consultant. Start by blogging about topics that tie into your services, and will appeal to prospective clients. Peep Laja writes a blog about conversion optimization, which is filled with articles that help companies increase their conversion rates, and make more money. By posting quality content, Peep is viewed as an expert on conversion optimization, which helps him build an audience and generates new business for his consultancy.
The big question that comes up with blogging, is how to drive traffic to your posts. After publishing an article, you can post it to GrowthHackers, Inbound, Reddit (find a subreddit for your blog niche), Hacker News, and your twitter feed. You should also email each company or person you mention in the post, with a note that you’ve mentioned them.
You can also reach out to your network and send a link to people who you think might find your post interesting. This is usually enough to get the ball rolling and to get some traffic to the post.
Blogging takes a lot of time, especially since you need to do it consistently, for better results. Scripted is a great content writing service you can use to outsource your blog post writing.
7. Write an eBook
Write an eBook that can help solve a business challenge or create value for your prospective client. Are you a Marketer? Write an eBook on how to decrease shopping cart abandonment. Are you a Writer? Write about how compelling copy can help a business make more money. Are you a Designer? Write about how user onboarding is key to getting customers to use, and later pay for your product.
Write the eBook and give it away for free or sell it on your website. If you give it away for free, be sure to capture emails in exchange for the book, that way you can build a list of prospective clients to market to.
8. Guest blog
Find blogs that your prospective clients read and ask to guest post on them. You should write about a topic that fits within the blog, but also something that readers will get tons of value out of.
Guest blogging is great because you can share your expertise and grow your brand by tapping into someone else’s audience.
Alltop is a good place to find popular blogs in your industry.
9. Generate leads
Generating leads consists of finding prospective clients that could benefit from your services, and coming up with a plan to reach them.
In my previous post, I detailed the process I used to generate leads for a cold email campaign, which is something you can replicate right now.
There are also services that can do the lead generation and sales process for you, like Leadgenius, Hiplead, and GetProspects (shout-out to Scott, who happens to be a reader of the blog!)
10. Use Twitter search
Twitter search is a powerful way to find real-time tweets from people and companies looking to hire or that need help. You can find these tweets by using certain keywords and phrases like below:
Hiring a [your keyword here]
Looking to hire a [your keyword here]
Looking for a [your keyword here]
#hiring #yourkeywordhere
Be creative. Try different search phrases and you’ll discover some great potential clients and projects. You can use Warble to automate your searches and have them delivered to your inbox each day.
11. Network online and offline
Instead of sitting behind the computer all week, plan to go to a meetup or a conference, where your prospective clients may be mingling. If you go to conferences and meet-ups where all your competitors are, you’ll have a hard time finding people that need your services.
Online networking is important as well. Complete a LinkedIn profile with up-to-date information and work samples. Import your contacts and connect with as many people in your network as possible. Share your blog posts, website and other interesting content directly to your LinkedIn news feed.
Just like going to meetups or conferences that your prospective clients attend, join LinkedIn groups where they post. There are groups for every industry on LinkedIn, so this is an excellent way to get in front of prospective clients.
Answer questions, offer help, post useful content and you’ll not only grow your connections, but you might also land a new gig.
12. Be on demand
Share your expertise and skills on marketplaces like Clarity, Liveninja or Google Helpouts. These sites have a lot of people to choose from, so consider giving away a few free sessions, to build up your profile.
Some experts built up their profile by giving away free calls to people in their network, which resulted in great reviews and referral business.
13. Create a course
Create a course on Udemy to tap into a large audience of students and prospective clients.
Tapha Ngum wrote a course on Building and Selling a Niche Website From Scratch, which has thousands of students. Tapha made money from selling his course, and from people who reached out to hire him directly.
14. Productize your services
Productized consulting is a powerful way to create recurring revenue and get new clients. With productized consulting, you bundle your consulting services into “package” that the client can purchase for a monthly fee.
Best of all, you’re creating predictable, recurring revenue.
If you offer services like design, marketing, development, writing and so on, consider selling your offerings as a package that clients can purchase.
Here are some examples of productized consulting to get you started:
WPCurve
• Impress
• Bench
• Correlation
• Linowski
• Draft Revise
• Kudu
15. Capture leads
You might already have a contact form on your website, but this is normally used by people who are ready to hire you, or say hello. Most of the time, a potential client will browse your website, then leave – without ever contacting you.
In order to establish trust and build up a relationship with visitors, you can try to capture their email by giving something away. Give visitors an eBook (as mentioned above), a whitepaper, a free 30-minute consultation or even a step-by-step guide to increase their conversion rates, in exchange for their email.
You can later turn these leads into paying clients through a drip email campaign or by contacting them to find out more about their company.
16. Write a playbook
A playbook is a great way to attract new clients, as it provides detail on your process, how you work and how you can help the client.
The team over at thoughtbot have the best playbook I’ve seen to date. It covers their processes from design, development, sales, hiring, operations and more. It gives prospective clients an inside look at how projects get done at thoughtbot.
You can also check out playbooks by Zurb and The Phuse.
A playbook is a powerful marketing tool, as well as a good “closer” to win new business.
17. Start coworking
If you work from home, consider coworking at least once a week. Coworking spaces are great for meeting like-minded individuals and becoming part of your local community.
You’ll build up strong relationships and be a go-to consultant for people at the coworking space. Most spaces also host events, meetings and conferences, which are great platforms for connecting with people and spreading your brand.
Find coworking spaces by Googling “coworking + your zip code”, browsing the Coworking directory or by searching on the map at DeskSurfing.
18. Always offer advice and help
A long-term strategy to bring in new clients is to help people who are connected to your prospective clients. Offer ideas, intros, feedback, thoughts or help them in any way possible with their business challenges. This is a bit different than following up with your network, mentioned earlier, because its an ongoing process. You might not close a client or get referrals immediately with this strategy, but its a proven tactic to build relationships and win new business over time.
A friend of mine, Brandon Pindulic, uses this strategy to build relationships and get new clients. He helps out anyone who gets in touch, whether its giving advice, feedback or helping with some marketing stuff. Though he says this strategy is pretty taxing and can take up a lot of time, he’s landed big clients and received referral business just for helping.
19. Send a handwritten letter
If you’re looking to land a new client and really want to get their attention, try sending a handwritten letter.
Find the person at the company that is most likely to hire you. Write and send a letter that focuses on solving their problems, and also include an easy way to reach you.
This strategy is also great to use when following up with acquaintances, prospective clients (“hey it was great meeting you…”) or keeping current clients happy. A letter in the mail adds a nice personal touch and shows people you truly care.
You can write the letters yourself, or use services like Handiemail or MailLift to have the letters written and sent for you.
20. Piggyback on platforms
What do platforms like Shopify, WordPress and Drupal have in common? Besides being great content management systems, they are home to millions of customers who rely on these platforms to run their blog, website or store.
“Piggyback” on these platforms (and others) by tailoring your services to directly help their customers. For example, market yourself as the go-to design shop for Shopify stores, the Drupal experts or WordPress pros. Piggybacking on platforms is a proven method to tap into a large customer base, where help is almost always needed.
21. Utilize industry networking sites
Almost every industry has networking sites that bring the community together. These sites are an amazing way to grow your brand and land new clients.
If you design, make sure you have a profile on Dribbble, Behance, Coroflot and/or Krop. Also join the discussion on Designer News.
If you’re a developer, be active on GitHub, Stack Overflow and Hacker News.
If you focus on marketing and writing, dive into the conversations on Growth Hackers, Inbound and Reddit marketing.
22. Answer questions on Quora
Find questions on Quora in your industry, and write thoughtful answers. Fill out your profile and link to your website, so people can learn more about you.
Be sure to not just spam your website around Quora. Instead, build up relationships with people and be helpful. Millions of people search for answers on Quora (and most questions are heavily indexed in Google) which brings traffic and visibility to your replies.
You can start this strategy by answering 1 question a day, or a few per week. You’ll be amazed at the responses and relationships you’ll build up in the community.
23. Get press
To get press for your consultancy, you have to come up with a unique angle that would be appealing to reporters and their audience. Don’t pitch your services and company, instead act as an expert on a certain topic – increasing productivity, hiring employees, remote working, managing teams, etc.
HARO, PitchPigeon and Muck Rack are great resources for pitching the press (you can also go to Product Hunt and search “press” to see tons of other tools available).
Coming up with your own story and getting in touch with the right reporters can be difficult. Try contacting local PR firms and offer your services in exchange for some PR work.
If you have a budget, you can hire someone with AirPR or use a service like Bite Size PR.
24. Create a presentation
Create a presentation and upload it on SlideShare and Speaker Deck.
If you’re a marketing consultant, create a presentation on 10 growth hacks startups can use to get more customers. If you’re a management consultant, create a presentation on how companies can improve their workflow and processes.
The possibilities are endless, and creating an engaging presentation will bring in traffic, social shares and new leads.
25. Write a guide
Similar to the SlideShare tactic above, write a guide on a specific topic that you have expertise in.
Guides is a great place to distribute your guides, along with your personal network and on social channels. Creating a guide is proven way to drive traffic, capture leads and become an authority on a topic.
26. Write a case study
Case studies show prospective clients your results and success with a particular project.
A case study usually covers the client, challenges, process and results of a project or engagement. Ben Gran has written an in-depth post on how to write case studies.
These are some awesome case studies to help you get started:
• Big Spaceship – BMW
• MojoTech – Groove
• Paravel – Microsoft
• Zurb – McAfee
• Neil Patel – TechCrunch
• HubSpot case studies
• Amazon case studies
• Dozens of marketing growth studies on GrowthHackers
• Even more case studies on Inbound
27. Create controversy
Mark at Tiger Tiger told me a story about a local design consultant, named Justin, who took a controversial approach to land a new client.
Justin found a company in his home country of New Zealand, who he thought could benefit from his services. He then bought the crappiest beer in New Zealand and visited the company’s headquarters. He walked into the CEO’s office, placed the beer on his desk, and said, “this beer is like your website…it’s nice on the outside, but tastes like absolute crap.” After a discussion, the CEO agreed, and Justin left with a contract to work on the company’s website.
This is just one example of creating offline controversy, but can certainly be replicated online. Unbounce has written a great post on the science of controversial content.
If you’re going to take a similar approach, make sure you don’t cross the line by doing something harmful or illegal.
28. Be extremely personal
If you’re replying to a job ad, or cold emailing, it is a good idea to be personal to stand out against your competition.
You might have come across a post by Devesh Khanal, on how he landed a paid contract from a CEO in 1 week. Why was Devesh able to get the CEO’s attention and close a contract in just 1 week?
He made his email super personal.
Devesh recorded a screencast of the CEO’s website, and offered steps he could take to increase his conversion rate. The CEO was amazed by the effort Devesh had put into his cold email, as well as his expertise on conversion optimization, so hiring him was an easy decision.
This is one of the best examples of how to be extremely personal to win new clients. Clients are normally bombarded with emails from consultants that contain a bio and website link. Devesh’s approach is personal and captured on video, so it is easy for the prospective client to understand his ideas.
A personal touch like this can be replicated in so many ways, whether its doing a redesign of a website, revising marketing copy or coding up a quick prototype. Being personal takes time, but its likely to help you stand out and close more clients.
29. Speak at industry conferences
Attending conferences is great, but you should also try speaking at them. Find conferences in your industry and reach out to an organizer about speaking. Pitch them on topics you’d like to speak about, and back it up with your skills, expertise, experience, website, blog and more.
This isn’t going to be for everyone, especially new consultants (or people afraid of public speaking), but its a great way to build up your personal brand and forge new relationships with a live audience.
30. Make creative business cards
Business cards can be an effective marketing tool, if executed properly.
Mark from Tiger Tiger hands out business cards printed on 600 gsm stock letterpressed, which are of high quality and make a great first impression. They cost 3 bucks a pop, but have helped him close some serious deals with companies.
When he gives these business cards to prospective clients (or people connected to his clients), they’re immediately impressed with the card quality, which is a reflection of his brand. They end up being shared around the office, at meetups, on social media and more.
This post has 30 of the most creative business cards ever, which are guaranteed to spark some creative ideas for your next business card.
31. Have an SEO strategy
Search engine optimization is a great long-term strategy to drive targeted traffic to your company website. You won’t see overnight results with SEO, but with a sound strategy in place, you can drive traffic over time and convert visitors into paying clients.
Here are some great guides to get started with SEO:
• The Advanced Guide To SEO
• Beginner’s Guide To SEO
• Google’s Starter Guide To SEO
32. Partner with non-competing firms
You read earlier about partnering with agencies. Another strategy is to partner with a non-competing company to offer your services as an extension of their business.
Find non-competing companies and pitch your services to them (as mentioned in #2) to form a partnership.
33. Get More Customers with Website & SEO Upgrades
Why isn’t your website getting more traffic? We’ll get to promotion later, but first it’s important to recognize that there are common website problems that could actually be holding you back. Let’s build the foundation first make sure all your future hard work isn’t in vain.
34. Fix Common Problems Plaguing Your Site
The way your website was initially created can have a huge impact on your business’s success (or failure).
The first place to start? Let’s find and get rid of all the “dead ends” on your site. These come in the form of 404 errors, or broken links where a user hits a wall and can’t find the information they’re looking for.
Screaming Frog is a brilliant free tool that can help you quickly find all the broken links lurking in your site. It’ll also help you identify other common issues, including duplicate content.
For example, do you have pages with duplicate meta data (including titles or descriptions)? Chances are, you got duplicate content too.
Fix broken links and 404 errors by either (a) removing the links or (b) setting up permanent, 301 redirects from the old pages that may have moved to the new ones that have taken their place.
There are also a few ways to fix duplicate content, but the easiest include:
• Rewrite the page, duh!
• Add a canonical link. Advanced, but effective.
• Noindex your WordPress archive pages including Tags and Categories.
The next step is to speed up your website, because it has a surprisingly powerful impact on conversions – decreasing page loading times from 8 to 2 seconds lifts conversions by 74%.
Pingdom is an excellent advanced tool if you’re looking for more bells and whistles. However Google’s PageSpeed tool is also great (and free), quickly diagnosing why your page speeds might be lagging, along with providing helpful recommendations to fix them.
35. Refresh Your “Low Hanging Fruit” Content
How many times have you visited the second page of Google? Never, right?
You probably have tons of pages right now with good search potential that are stuck on the second page of Google.
The first few search results tend to get the vast majority of clicks, so being lower than the first few positions on page one isn’t going to do you any good.
So let’s find that stuff with decent potential and improve it.
Make sure your site is verified with Google Search Console (another helpful, free Google tool) and check out which pages are currently on the second page. Go to the “Search Analytics” tab and rank your queries by “Position.” Anything ranking between 10 and 20 is on the second page.
These pages should be your low-hanging fruit for priority, because a few simple tweaks or improvements could net a good return in a short amount of time.
For example, you can comb through these pages looking for ways to improve or expand the content. Brian Dean from Backlinko analyzed over one million search results and found that on average first-page results have around 1,890 words per page! If your content is pretty “thin,” you’re gonna need to start with adding more content first.
Start with new facts or statistics which might help add depth to your current page. From there, you can try adding new media types like images or video to increase the page experience to keep people around longer.
Upwork is a good place to start looking for inexpensive, creative help including both content and design.
36. Local Optimization
Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) have evolved tremendously over the past few years. Not only have the advertisements been reshuffled, but they now also commonly include other search vertical information like images, video, and local places.
That’s an important distinction because it’s an example of how search engine results are increasingly personalized based on who’s doing the searching. The person’s local geography is one of the prime considerations.
You can take advantage of this by making sure that your business shows up properly, with a specific focus on the business address or location.
For example, the Moz Local Search Ranking Factors includes a list of the top factors dictating whether your business will show up or not in local search results. Here are the top characteristics that impact success:
Right at the top of the list is the “consistency of structured citations.” That’s a fancy way of describing the information that shows up in your local listings like Yelp, Google Maps, and more.
Get started by making sure that you’ve set up Google My Business properly, including the all-important category associations that help dictate where (and when) your business will show up.
Yet another free Google service that will help you show up properly in local listings and in maps searches.
Don’t scoff at map inclusion or silly little Google+, as these reviews will show up front-and-center on local search queries. (And online reviews are trusted as much as personal recommendations by 88% of consumers!)
If you’re slightly technical (or can find someone to help), take the extra step to setup schema markup as well. (Check out WordStream’s beginner’s guide to schema here.)
Once you’ve got the Google business listing set up, head over to Moz Local. For a low price of under $100, you can (a) distribute and (b) manage most of the top local listings – saving TONS of time in the process.
he example above depicts one business with multiple locations (the names have been masked to protect the innocent). As you can see, a quick review of their primary location reveals multiple issues including inconsistent or incomplete business information in some of the most influential local listings.
Addressing these issues is another fast, quick win that can help local customers find you MUCH faster.
37. Get More Customers with Website Conversion Upgrades
Site conversions low? Typically that means there are a few different bottlenecks that are tripping up potential customers as they come to your site and browse around. Here’s a few quick recommendations fixing the most common issues.
38. Create Different Offers for Each Step of the Funnel
It’s time to face the harsh truth: 90%+ of the people visiting your website will not purchase anything. If there’s nothing there for them, they’re gone, wasting all that hard work it took to get them there in the first place.
The trick is to put together a few different offers for people in different frames of mind to capture the most possible people and nurture them over time.
How? Consider these stages:
• Awareness: No need awareness? No problem! Start with an educational, topic-based guide, eBook, or checklist that walks people through how to fix a problem they’re struggling with.
• Information: Now that they’ve begun researching alternatives, give them an easy, interactive way to compare. For example, a calculator or tool that tells provides personalized feedback can help create a memorable first impression.
• Evaluation: When people start evaluating their options, they’re comparing dollars and cents. Provide case studies and other information that positions your product or service pricing as an investment, not a cost.
• Purchase: You know the drill!
This sounds like a lot of work. And it is. However it’s the best possible chance you have at converting the most visitors who land on your website, giving yourself a chance to succeed by converting them later.
39. Help People Find What They’re Looking For
Here’s one of the dumbest, yet most effective tips in this list.
Wanna know why a specific offer’s conversions are low?
Chances are, not enough people are seeing it in the first place. Especially if that page is buried behind layers of other content, and not obvious to find.
You can verify this by firing up Google Analytics and heading over to the Behavior Flow section. This fun little graphic visually shows how people are, well, flowing through your website from one page to the next.
After viewing this (in addition to your most popular content), you’ll find that the homepage (you know, the single page everyone loves to scrutinize) may not be your most viewed page. Neither are the most recent posts. More likely, it’s stuff from years ago that continues to bring in the most new visitors to your site.
So here’s the stupid-easy part: Find out which paths are most popular (and which pages too), then add more internal links from those pages to the page you’re trying to increase results for.
Yes, it might really be that simple.
40. Test Big Landing Page Changes (Not Small Ones)
The path to high conversions is NOT through tiny changes of your button color from orange to green. Instead, it’s through creating massive, differentiated changes.
Sure, there are some basic landing page mistakes you should avoid. But these are mostly intuitive. Otherwise, it’s the offer that you’re promoting on a page that will have a more significant impact on results (like new leads or sales) than the basic headline.
A perfect example is Lowe’s Lawn Care Plan, which provides visitors with a completely tailored recommendation in under a minute. It’s unique, memorable, and valuable.
Beyond the offer itself, another way to mimic this approach is through adding more context to your pages.
There are many ways to do this, but one particularly effective (and new) one is the rise towards personalization. Layering in contextual information like this can help increase sales by 20%, simply by making your website or page reflect who the visitor is that’s coming to your site.
At the very least, you can use some basic information to personalize that visitor’s experience.
For example, if you visit Optimizely in the morning, they will tell you Good morning!
41. Automate Your Email Follow Up
451%.
That’s the increase in qualified leads companies might expect from using marketing automation.
Social media might be awesome for brand awareness and engagement, but email’s still king for driving sales.
Better yet, automating your emails gives you the unique ability to:
• Add scale and leverage to your marketing, helping you…
• Provide more personal, timely emails, which will…
• Increase results like click-through rates or conversions, allowing you to…
• Do something else, not worrying about checking it several times a day.
This ain’t just a flashy, web 3.0 thing either. Golden Gate Wine, who is obviously NOT a technology company, used marketing automation techniques to increase sales 150%.
And the best part is that even basic, inexpensive software like MailChimp can do this.
For example, let’s say you have a hotel. Setting up an automated workflow to go out to visitors who just checked out can help you (a) get reviews to inspire new prospects, (b) generate referrals to friends of recent guests, and (c) cement the guest’s positive experience to ensure they’ll be back (thereby driving up the Lifetime Value of a Customer).
Head over to MailChimp’s Automation section and create a new sequence for the specific goal or purpose you’re after.
Now if you’re old school, you could always manually export contacts from your CRM or POS (what’s with all the acronyms?!).
Obviously this ain’t ideal. So if there’s no native integration with your tools, see if you can use a tool like Zapier to help you connect them with MailChimp or whatever email tool you might have. (Here’s an in-depth guide to doing this.)
Next, you can identify the “trigger” that places people on this automated sequence and begin setting up the email frequency for when you’d like them to go out.
Start by outlining this process, along with the basic objectives or messaging for each individual email, in a document or on a whiteboard.
Once you’ve got an outline to work from, putting together all the moving pieces becomes a lot easier and more manageable.
It takes a bit of work, but setting up marketing automation sequences like this can deliver better results with little (if any) extra out of pocket cost.
Get More Customers with Content Marketing Optimizations
You’re probably already blogging. But is it working? Or are you just cranking out 300-word posts about your company’s latest news whenever you’ve got a free second (which is rarely)? Here are a few tips to make sure your content marketing efforts are delivering value.
42. Emphasize Unbranded Content
Creating and publishing content is one of the best ways to bring in traffic from search engines.
Here’s the rub though.
If the vast majority of that content is about your own brand, you will most likely rank for only brand terms. Which means if people are going to find you online, they have to know your brand name and this means you’re leaving a lot on the table by not attracting new people who’ve never heard of you before.
But wait, it gets worse.
There are over 2 million pieces of content already published daily. That means your bar (or barrier to entry) keeps getting higher.
In other words, those 300-500 word blog posts about your company ain’t gonna cut it. Instead, you need to create content around unbranded topics that are top of mind for potential prospects.
For example, one of ourfavorite examples is PayScale. They take seemingly boring statistics or data, and turn those into compelling infographics that get featured by the likes of Mashable.
HUGE media publications like Mashable would never publish (or care) about your latest product update. Instead, they care more about the narrative and how it can help their readers. (Ok, maybe Mashable’s not a great example as they’ll publish anything. But you get the point.)
43. Repurpose Your Best Stuff
Now that you’ve (hopefully) begun cranking out top notch, ‘unbranded’ content, you’ll begin to notice something…
It’s hard! Super time-consuming and resource-intensive.
So re-use what you’ve done already! Obviously not verbatim, but you can refresh older content in several ways to make it appear new.
The simplest form of content repurposing is by taking your blog posts and turning them into iTunes podcasts, YouTube videos, SlideShare presentations, offline speeches (and vice versa). Simply switching up the formats like this presents the content in new light, allowing you to emphasize different aspects depending on how the medium changes.
It also helps you better leverage the initial time spent researching, writing, and designing that original piece.
The other hidden benefit of taking the initial nugget of information from old blog posts is that you should already know what works well or not.
Need to put together a speech? Go check out your blog analytics to find the most popular content topics and angles to work from. That way you’ll already know ahead of time that your speech is sure to be a hit – assuming you don’t bomb the delivery of course. (Which you won’t; I have faith.)
Another quick tip is to go back to older content and give it a refresh. Bring in new facts or statistics, add some diagrams or images to help explain the content more effectively, and you’ll boost the effectiveness of that old piece (without having to create a full new one in the process).
44. Think Social Distribution (Not Just One-Time Posting)
OK, so you’ve created unbranded content. You’ve repurposed it several ways to get the most bang for your buck. Now it’s time to promote it.
That’s commonly where social media comes in. But don’t just send a single tweet.
Instead, think of it like distribution (you know, 1960’s style 4-P’s distribution).
That means you should have a fully fleshed-out content publishing schedule that dictates how your content should be set-up for each individual network or channel. (Look no further than this excellent guide from Buffer.)
Next up, head over to your favorite social voting sites, similar to Hacker News. You’d be surprised what a quick Google search digs up for you own industry. These shouldn’t be relied on too heavily, as most of the traffic is fickle (or will bounce after a single read). But it’s a great, easy way to increase awareness.
You can even do a little content repurposing (remember that?) on different mediums like Medium (clever), LinkedIn, or Quora.
There are unique communities of people in each of these places looking for new great content. Each also can leverage network effects, meaning your potential for leverage – or don’t make me say it, virality – is huge.
Get More Customers with Promotion & Outreach Improvements
You’ve done the hard work up to this point. You’ve laid the groundwork with a solid foundation. Now it’s time to fill your pipeline of steady leads. Ready? Hang on.
45. See What Competitor Campaigns are Working
There’s a dangerous tendency to overly obsess with the competition. That’s not the point here.
Instead, the goal is to see what they’re doing that’s working – and then do it better.
For example, pull up Open Site Explorer from Moz to see which website are linking to them. Start looking for patterns that emerge, which might indicate how they got those links in the first place.
The above example shows the Hard Rock Hotel in San Diego has successfully run holiday promotions in the past that have been picked up by major news outlets. There’s your next campaign idea!
However, simply copying the same approach isn’t newsworthy. So push yourself (and your team) to build on this idea, trying to take the initial concept and elevate it to improve the eventual effectiveness.
You don’t want to compete head on with the larger competition. Somehow, someway, you need to do something different that will leverage your small company’s own unique characteristics—you know, that whole USP (unique selling prop) thing.
46. Cross Promotions & Partnerships
Please fight the urge to roll your eyes on this one. Yes, cross-promos are so 1995. But they still work! (Assuming, of course, you’re doing it better/different/cheaper.)
They also work for virtually any kind of business.
For example, product company? Check out Moz Perks which hooks you up with awesome partner deals. (I’ve personally used these introductory deals to find new tools, and now use at least 5 of them.)
You can promote each other out of the goodness in your hearts. Or you can make it interesting by setting-up a referral fee, commission or revenue split.
The best way to set up effective cross promotions is to simply ask prospective partners what they want most. Some might want exposure, others only green backs.
47. Do Targeted Outreach
Referral traffic is so named because it’s based on people referring you. The best potential referrals come from people who have influence over a larger community that’s relevant to your business.
Bloggers and journalists are the obvious first step. Not only do they wield influence over large groups of people to send you traffic, but editorial links are also among the best ways to improve your organic rankings as well.
The first step is to build out a proactive media list (or a simple spreadsheet) with the top potentials.
One place to start is Followerwonk, which provides analytics on Twitter accounts. Do a fast search for bloggers or journalists in your industry and you can sort the results based on followers, recency and social authority.
Buzzsumo is another helpful tool to find influencers in your industry who might make good potential outreach targets.
Another of my favorite recent tools is the LinkedIn Sales Prospector. It makes finding key people easy. However more importantly, it helps you with the next step, which is to get on their radar with small interactions (before thebig ask).
The LinkedIn Sales Prospector makes this easy by providing updates in a single inbox from your key contacts to make it insanely easy to comment on, like, or get in touch to discuss a shared common interest.
You know, kinda like stalking. Hi, Larry! 🙂
48. Leverage Event-Only Content
Events are perfect places to network and meet these influencers you’ve just found. An event puts you directly in the mix of people you’d like to meet.
Volunteer, host, speak, sit on a panel. Hell, even help set stuff up or take it down if you need to.
A past client also put a unique spin on this approach by attending local meetups, recording the sessions’ content (with approval of course), and releasing that as podcast content. They then also had a built-in audience (the people at the event) ready to promote it to.
Similarly, Campaign Monitor helped supply detailed notes for everyone at the recent Unbounce conference, so attendees didn’t need to worry about taking notes.
Beyond the event’s content, there’s no better way to get in the guests’ good graces than plying them with booze. Moz and CallRail recently sponsored the official Pub Crawl at the same Unbounce conference, putting them front and center during crazy karaoke shenanigans. Fun, but expensive.
Replicate this tactic on the cheap by hosting a private dinner, or better yet – a few simple apps and drinks – at a local bar close to the event.
49. Run Contests & Promotions
Another oldie-but-goodie to finish off the list: Contests and promotions are another staple in most marketers’ toolbelts. However, the goal, as we’ve seen in previous tips here, is to stretch a little without relying on the same boring Facebook photo contest that every other competitor is doing.
For example, years ago I worked with a company that sent 4 bloggers across several cities over the course of a few weeks. Along the way, we got hotel rooms donated and events comped in exchange for the social promotion. Incorporating partners kept the costs down, but it also gave us a bigger audience to promote the campaign to as well.
The trick was to throw a contest prior to this campaign to decide who’d be the chosen bloggers. That created buzz and interest, ensuring we had a built-in audience already primed to pay attention once the event kicked off.
Organizing said event took time. A lot of it. But it wasn’t technically challenging, difficult, OR expensive. It simply took some googling, a bunch of cold emails, follow up calls, and a neat little document showing what each partner would receive in terms of content, views, and social exposure.
Even better, is if you can show them what these metrics would typically cost, thereby landing at a dollar amount of what the proposed agreement could be worth if they had to pay for it (instead of simply donating their piece of the puzzle).
Then, once you have this grand thing in place, advertise to give it extra exposure.
You’re not using direct-response style ads like AdWords per se, but social advertising options on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter are perfect for providing additional distribution that’s sure to warrant interest from neutral or brand-unaware people. Social ads are also generally much cheaper than other forms of online advertising.
Most companies are short on dough. Small ones especially so (#rapskillz).
The trick is to realize that if you’re short on one resource (like money), you’ll need to use other ones (like time and possibly some risk-taking) to make up for it.
Fortunately, some of the best strategies to bring in more customers online don’t rely on big ad budgets. Fixing up your website, improving how people find important information, getting more leverage from your content efforts, and promoting your business through ingenuity can do enough to fill your pipeline and get you off the ground.
At the end of the day, all the capital in the world can’t make up for a delightful website, a great product, an amazing customer service experience, entertaining content, or a super-clever promotion. Top 49 Ways To Get More Customers for Business.
