In an ideal world, you’d have a steady stream of new customers jumping into your net. Alas, this isn’t an ideal world. With competition for customers more fierce than ever before, it’s imperative that brands go out there and bring new customers into the fold, rather than simply waiting for them to turn up.

Happily, in this day and age, there’s no shortage of effective strategies for attracting new customers. If you’re looking to push your business forward, then try one or more of the approaches that we’ve outlined below, all of which have a proven track record of success. 

Update Your Market Research

You’ll have — or should have — conducted thorough market research in the early stages of your business. However, it’s important to remember that trends do change, and so do customer expectations.

By updating your market research, you can breathe new life into your understanding of your potential customers, developing insights into their pain points, lifestyle, and how you can help them. Ultimately, by making small adjustments to your market research you may be able to appeal to a whole new audience. 

Offer a Discount

Want a quick and easy way to make your business more appealing to a potential customer? Then offer them a discount. While it won’t turn everyone into a customer, there’ll be a decent percentage of people who are willing to become someone who hits the ‘buy’ button if they’re offered a 10% discount. 

If you really want to gain an influx of new customers, then look at offering even more worthwhile offers. For example, you could offer more significant discounts, offer 2x1, or include free upgraded shipping. 

Offering a discount can, in some instances, be a long-term investment. For example, you might offer 10% off in exchange for subscribing to your email newsletter. In that case, your visitor might not become a customer today, but they might in the future. 

Broadcast Your Positive Reviews

You know how good your products/services are. Your existing customers probably do too. Your potential customers? They’ll require a little bit of proof. One way to provide that proof without sending them free samples is to use the reviews and testimonials of your previous customers. 

You and your team will be flattered to receive an excellent review but don’t just circulate it internally. Put it to work! It’s impossible to calculate just how much of an impact a positive review can have on a potential customer’s buying journey. It’s not an underestimation to say that it could be the difference between them becoming a customer and looking elsewhere. 

Boost Your Bank of Educational Content

People are looking for your products, and they don’t even know it. What they do know is that they’ve got an issue, or a passion, or whatever else, and they’re looking on the internet for information. And if you’ve invested in your bank of educational content, then what they’ll find is your website.

Let’s say, for example, that you sell bags of premium coffee. Someone interested in your product might search ‘premium coffee buy now’ on Google. Or they might ask, ‘how to make better coffee at home,’ which is another way of saying that they want to buy your product, they just don’t know it yet. If you’ve invested in your educational content, then you might well have an article that outlines how people at home can make delicious coffee. And once they’re on that page, it’ll just be a short jump before they buy one of your products. 

Work With Influencers

You’ll reach a lot of potential customers through your digital marketing campaigns. However, there’ll still be a lot of people who are beyond your reach. The effects of a PPC campaign on someone who has an adblocker installed, for instance, will be zero. One way to reach these people, along with many others who you can’t speak to via other methods, is to use influencer marketing strategies. These days, it’s easy to find partners to work with — and once you have, you might find that you can tap into an unearthed market that results in many new customers.

Real World Promotions

You can see why online brands spend virtually all of their marketing budget on digital marketing. After all, that’s clearly the best way to reach new customers. However, in some instances, it can be worthwhile exploring offline strategies, too, even if you’re an exclusively online brand. 

Real-world promotions can benefit your brand in a number of ways. For one thing, it can simply result in more sales. Let’s take the example from above, and say that you’re a business that sells premium coffee. Exhibiting at a gourmet food market could be an excellent way to bolster sales. Other ways real-world promotions can benefit your brand is the increased exposure and the ability to come face-to-face with your customers; you’ll learn a lot from data, but you’ll learn more by speaking to them directly!

Enter New Markets

It is possible that you’ve exhausted the number of new customers you can reach. That’s the case if you’re a real-world business, and everyone already knows who you are. You might have a steady stream of customers, but new customers? There are simply none around.

In that case, you might consider expanding into a new market. This can often sound like a big and intimidating task, but it’s not really, especially if you’re staying within the same country. In that instance, it’ll be a matter of mostly replicating what you did with your original location, just somewhere else. 

Note that you will need to conduct thorough market research for this. It’s like opening an entirely new business, essentially. 

Boost Your SEO

It’s 2024, and improving your SEO is still the best way to attract new customers. And that’s for a very simple reason: people use Google, and they use it a lot. In fact, a good way to demonstrate that statement is to ask about your own typical customer journey. Think of everything you’ve bought in the past few years (besides groceries, etc), and it’s likely that Google played a role somewhere along the way. 

There’s no avoiding the fact that SEO is more complex than ever before, and also more competitive. In truth, your best bet will likely be to simply outsource the task to a marketing company that knows how to improve your Google ranking. Do that today, and within a few months you should notice that you have more visitors to your website. 

Go After Lapsed Customers

If you’ve been in operation for a while, then it’s possible that there are customers from your past who have all but forgotten about your business. Bringing them back into the fold will be as good as winning yourself a new customer. If they’ve bought from you once, then they’ll have had an interest in your brand before, so maybe they still are. 

You might need to work a little harder to get them to make a purchase, however. For instance, you may have to offer a special deal. Once they’re back onside, then you can work on keeping them there. 

Referral Programs

Referrals are one of the best ways to get new customers. In fact, word-of-mouth recommendations can be considered the holy grail of marketing strategies. That’ll sometimes happen all on its own, but it’s best to increase the likelihood by offering a referral program. In this instance, your existing customer will benefit (say, free products/money off) and you will too since you’ll get a new customer. While it’s unlikely that your referral program will form the backbone of your success, you’ll be surprised at how many new customers this approach can get you. They’re also relatively easy to set up, and studies have shown that referred customers are more likely to become loyal customers. 

Offer New Products/Services

There’ll be a lot of people interested in your current crop of products and services. However, there will also be people who are broadly interested in the theme of your business, but who don’t need the actual products that you sell. In that case, you may be able to attract their business by offering new, related products and services.

Let’s say, again, that you have a website that sells gourmet coffee. You may not be able to attract people who already have a coffee that they love, but you might be able to sell them coffee-related supplies. Another option would be to sell a selection of hand-selected teas that your customers can’t find elsewhere. 

Conclusion 

All businesses hit a wall at some point. After the initial burst of customers, growth can begin to slow down slightly. It’s important to remember, however, that there are plenty of things you can do, as demonstrated in this article, that can get things moving in the right direction. The final strategy is to go into the next phase of your business with belief and determination; if you throw yourself into the venture, then there’s no telling where your business might end up.