Business isn’t only about the endless cycle of selling your products and services to people to gain a profit. Entrepreneurs starting a business with this mindset are unlikely to gain traction. To become a successful business, entrepreneurs should create genuine and meaningful connections with their customers, and this is where marketing and advertising come into play.
The ultimate goal of marketing and advertising is to reach your audience and hopefully convert them into loyal customers. How can you establish a dedicated and supportive customer base that puts trust into your company?
With this question in mind, we’re running down the eight ways to reach your customers effectively:
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Know Your Customers and Think Like Them
Consumers have different needs, preferences, and behaviors. It’s impossible to entice every single person in the world to commit to your products and services. Instead of trying to please everyone, look for people who will resonate best with your business, find common ground by knowing them well, and use that information to approach them at the right time and in the right place.
Getting to know your customers is an extensive process. You won’t immediately be able to identify who your best prospects are and who isn’t; that’s why it’s essential to allocate a substantial amount of resources to researching and analyzing the market.
As a starting point, take a look at your previous visitors and customers. Compare their demographics from the client demographics of your direct competitors—what do they have in common? Do these people buy because they need to or want to? Why are your competitors’ customers not buying from you?
After asking yourself these questions, it’s time to narrow down the specifics. Delve deeper into your customers’ demographics and find their similarities and differences. What do these people do in their day-to-day lives? How do they interact with other businesses?
The brand Old Spice is an excellent example of this. They knew their potential to reach the younger generation, so they centered their efforts on what the younger people will love—witty, entertaining, and concise marketing, all because they know their customers well and think as if in their shoes.
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Explore SMS Marketing
In this era, mobile devices have taken the world by storm. As of 2021, 62% of the global population owns some form of mobile device. Imagine how many potential customers you’d be able to reach on this compact piece of technology.
Through SMS marketing – which involves sending marketing campaigns via phone – you can initiate communication with customers without the need for internet access. Since most people carry their phones daily, sending text and voice messages is a straightforward and less invasive customer engagement method.
Instead of sending messages manually to every target customer, you can utilize text marketing software like Drop Cowboy that’ll do all the automated work for you. Thanks to these useful and easy-to-use solutions, you can also monitor your text marketing campaigns and allow Application Programming Interface (API) access to third-party marketing applications in conjunction with the text marketing software.
Take note of these tips when sending out text message campaigns to your potential customers:
- Send drip campaigns with rewards that accumulate along with your customer’s engagement
- Send exclusive offers and deals with urgency
- Utilize call-to-action (CTA) buttons
- Integrate this software with customer relationship management (CRM) software to observe campaign success
- Write clear, concise, and straight-to-the-point messages
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Invest In Effective Phone Systems
You can achieve the best of both worlds by combining your SMS marketing efforts with telemarketing solutions. Phone systems have long existed in the business landscape, but they left quite a bad impression on customers as many companies take advantage of them by being excessively intrusive.
Phone dialing solutions is a tried-and-true strategy in elevating communication with your potential and existing clients. While small business owners may think that a phone dialing system isn’t necessary due to the size of their venture, this mindset can actually restrict their business from growing. Implementing phone systems as guided by professionals like the 855 Area Code can give your business a significant competitive advantage.
These are only some of the benefits that you’ll reap from investing in phone solutions for your business:
- Easy installation, use, and troubleshooting
- Reduced operational costs from individual phones and phone numbers
- Achieve advanced features that assist effective communication, like automatic call forwarding, caller ID, automatic dialing, and voicemail delivery
- Integrate with CRM software to identify customers during a call
- Improve agent productivity and lessen agent idle time with automated phone dialing systems
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Get In Touch In Social Media
We can’t complete this list without including the most popular communication platform today: social media. With over 3.6 billion social media users today, you have endless opportunities to increase brand awareness, bring your business to new customers, and boost your sales. Make sure to promote your business on the most popular and successful platforms today, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
Since social media is an environment that mainly facilitates human connection, it’s crucial to show your brand’s personal side to connect deeper to potential customers. Once a few social media users have noticed you, it’ll only be a matter of time before your audience expands, given a cohesive strategy and output consistency.
When reaching out to customers through social media, utilize the platform’s unique features. For example, Instagram is the center of influencer marketing. Therefore, you can make the most out of collaborating with the right influencers that can represent your brand best. While this strategy may also work on Facebook, it’s not as good as using ads and promoted posts on the platform.
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Improve Your Products and Services
Bringing your products and services to customers will never be enough if your products and services themselves aren’t on par with their marketing hype. If you only focus more on advertising and neglect product development, you’ll only gain one-time customers and zero repeat business.
To improve your products and services, take a long-term view. You’ll have to create a plan to improve your offers, starting from ideation to costing, then divide them into small, measurable parts, and carry them out effectively. With this advice, we highly suggest taking your time and not rushing on the product improvement phase.
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Post Relevant Content
As mentioned earlier, creating meaningful content will give you a competitive edge. Besides presenting your products and services alone, you can add useful content to your online presence through content marketing. Essentially, content marketing involves creating and sharing valuable and relevant content to attract a target audience.
When jumping into content marketing, keep in mind that your content should belong to your niche. You can’t make videos about the best food recipes if your products revolve around clothing and apparel.
Hence, adding a blog section to your website is a great strategic approach for effective content marketing. Here are some tips on making and distributing your own content:
- Always prioritize content quality
- You can be a storyteller, but not necessarily all the time
- Use your brand’s voice and identity consistently
- Support arguments with valid data
- Never plagiarize content!
- Address complex customer questions with your content
- Make your content intentional and purposeful
- Monitor content success and work on improvement
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Be A Consistent Listener
The perfect formula for reaching customers involves understanding and listening to them. Previously, you’ve performed research about your target market—the group of people that you’ll hopefully bring deeper into your marketing funnel. However, another approach that can immensely help your business improve is listening to existing customers with transaction histories.
Ninety-three percent of shoppers read customer reviews before proceeding with a purchase. These customers look for social proof that it’s worth giving their money, time, and attention to your venture. You can utilize customer feedback to maintain your strengths and improve on your weaknesses.
Unfortunately, many companies abuse customer reviews by paying random people to write fake positive reviews. Opting to this path is entirely unprofessional and can damage your credibility in the long run, particularly when clients find out about the practice.
Here are some ways on how you can gather feedback from your customers:
- Create a reward system where legitimate customers get discounts on their next purchase after leaving a review
- Initiate email or SMS surveys upon a successful purchase
- Search social media channels for mentions of your brand
After collecting reviews and feedback, make sure that they aren’t for display only. Listening to customer feedback and taking the right actions to solve their pain points will make your clients feel involved and valued.
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Deliver Impressive and Steady Customer Service
Excellent customer service should always be a business’s priority. As an imperative element of the overall customer experience, client support can significantly impact your image, reputation, and revenue. Many large companies suffer from inconsistent customer experience, where they have outstanding customer support in one location but poor service in another.
Regardless of your business’s size and the number of branches, make sure to work on compelling customer service consistently. Treat customers fairly whether they’re inquiring about a product or asking assistance for their recent purchase.
With a combination of high-quality products and services and exceptional customer service, you can move closer to customer satisfaction. By having happy and satisfied clients, you can reach more people through a good reputation and positive public image.
Key Takeaways
Reaching customers is one thing, and keeping them is another. Once you’ve successfully reached and converted leads into your customers as discussed above, it’s essential to allow the same amount of resources and efforts in maintaining customer satisfaction amidst a competitive market.
