Did you know that you have just a 5%-20% chance of selling to a prospective customer? This means, 80%-95% of the time, your efforts may go to waste, and you may be unable to increase your customer base. This is why businesses must be mindful of the techniques and strategies they employ to get new customers. With planning and some creativity, you’ll be able to put in less effort but reap greater rewards.
Here, we give you the best tips and tricks you can follow to increase your customer base:
Supercharge your social network campaigns
Almost everyone worldwide is on social media today, which makes social networks one of the most popular tools to acquire new customers. These days, the highest converting networks are still the Big Three of social media – Facebook, Instagram & Twitter. But platforms like Pinterest and LinkedIn are gaining momentum as well.
When marketing on social media, there are a few tactics you can implement to encourage people to visit your online store:
Optimize your social profile to make it visible to prospective buyers
You may not be finding buyers because your buyers don’t know that you exist. To make your brand visible to customers, you need to make your social network profiles findable. You can do this by including the most-used hashtags in your niche, in your profile.
You should also provide a link to your website, newsletter or contact form on the profile, so prospects can get in touch with you easily.
Create content that converts
Content is a great way to display your expertise in your industry. When customers see your expertise, they trust your brand and are more likely to purchase from you. These days customers love to read content like How-To articles, lists of tools, tips & resources, and mini-eBooks. Videos and podcasts are also very converting.
The trick to creating converting content is to follow the customer lifecycle. You must provide detailed information about the product/service in the introductory stage without referencing yourself too often. As the prospect gets closer to buying from you, you can actively promote your brand by listing out the benefits the candidate will receive by buying from you.
You should also include clickable content, such as tagged products and shoppable posts, which will lead audiences to your site when they click on your post.
Personalized advertisements can do wonders
Social lead ads can generate an extensive number of site visits. It’s best if you track your prospect’s social media users using the many analytics tools that networks like Facebook and Instagram provide. You can use this information to create highly targeted social media ads, which pop-up when the prospect is browsing social media.
Social networks also allow you to create retargeting campaigns. If a buyer clicks on your ad, visits your site and puts a product in the cart, but exits without at the last minute, a retargeting ad featuring that product can be sent directly to that prospect. This helps push the prospect to complete the sale.
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Use the web to find leads
When prospects wish to purchase something, they often visit the web to search for information. They use a specific combination of words or phrases in the search query. These keywords/keyphrases, when used on your own website, can help you rank your website higher in the search results.
Studies show that sites on Page 1 of Google capture over 71% of all search traffic clicks. So, scanning the web for the right keywords to use, can help you capture qualified buyers.
When scanning the web for keywords, follow these tips:
- Type in a search for your product (without a brand name) and look at the list of pop-up suggestions in the search bar. These are the common search queries prospects use.
- Scroll to the bottom of the Google search results page and look at the “related searches” questions. They too can be used as keyphrases in your website copy.
- Use tools like “LSI Graph Keyword Generator”, “Google AdWords Keyword Planner” and “Answer the Public” to find out the most popular keywords customers use.
- Make a list of all the hashtags used on social media and use the most commonly-used ones as keywords.
Hook prospects with a well-timed SMS
SMS can be very beneficial in increasing your customer base. In fact, the average click-through-rate of SMS offers is 17%, which is pretty high. You can use SMS to build your customer base by using the following tactics:
- Less is more. State one primary benefit offered by your product/service and use a CTA to invite recipients to experience this benefit for themselves.
- Provide financial offers, incentives and the best deals in your SMS. It increases opt-in and contact rates. More than 90% of texts are read almost immediately, while only 10%-30% of calls are answered on the first try.
- Research shows that 8:00AM–12:00PM and 5:00PM–9:00PM are the two highest-converting time slots for SMS adverts on weekdays. For weekends, 8:00AM–12:00PM (Saturday) and 9:00AM–12:00PM (Sunday) works best.
- Always send follow-up SMS’s to push the prospect to complete the sale and personalize the SMS with his/her name.
- Use sentiment analysis to create the most compelling campaigns
Sentiment analysis is the process of analyzing prospective buyers’ sentiments by studying the text written by the prospect.
For example, a prospect publishes a comment on one of your social media posts advertising a product, saying, “This product looks interesting.” Sentiment analysis is used to evaluate how likely a prospect is to actually purchase from you, based on this particular sentence.
The person’s sentiments about the product – positive, neutral or negative – will be analyzed using data analytics and Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms. By comparing the prospect’s past engagement with brands, by evaluating culture and context, by understanding the tone in which the text was written (genuine, sarcastic, sadness etc.) and by analyzing any emoji or GIFs that are used with the text, sentiment analysis tools can come up with insights that marketers can act on.
This type of data-driven marketing can help you develop highly personalized and targeted advertisements/engagement campaigns, which can be used to elicit positive sentiments towards your product/service. By sending multiple ads or engagement posts to them, you can convert prospects and build your customer base.
