13 Ways to Find New Potential Customers for Your Business

Vũ Khôi

Author at Wotech Electronics Blog

Whether newly launched or long established in the market, many businesses still struggle to find potential customers. Within a business, it's easy to understand that the company's profits depend largely on the number of customers it has. A formula you've surely heard before: no customers = no revenue = a business struggling to survive = no customer acquisition system = no customers. In this article, let's answer together the question of where to find potential customers and what advice businesses should follow in finding them.

Why Isn't Your Business Attracting Many Customers?

There are many reasons why your product/business isn't attracting many customers. Here are some worth mentioning — weigh them carefully and come up with sensible plans to improve your company's situation:

• Your product/service is outdated or of poor quality.

• The business lacks the knowledge and up-to-date know-how on how to attract, retain, and work with customers.

• No target customer profile has been drawn up: perhaps you don't clearly understand who your product/service is for or the characteristics of your target customer group, and you don't yet know what customers want and need.

• No control over information: your business doesn't thoroughly collect data on advertising campaigns, marketing moves, and the effectiveness of particular tools.

• The company's campaigns lack any standout advantage over competitors.

The Main Reasons Some Businesses Fail to Attract Many Customers

When it comes to Marketing, there are 2 main groups: (1) businesses that don't think they need Marketing. These businesses are usually convinced they'll operate just fine without it; they hardly understand why they should spend so much money on advertising and marketing activities; and (2) they understand the importance of Marketing and try to learn its features. They try their hand at new opportunities, experiment with marketing campaigns on their products/services, and this brings them a stream of new customers.

Newly founded businesses often fall into the first group, believing that "I've created my business with good products, so orders will come to me on their own." But as time passes, your customer count still isn't growing. So what's the problem here?

Where Will a Business Find Potential Customers?

Finding Potential Customers for Newly Founded Businesses

To quickly find ways to gain potential customers, try putting the following strategies into practice to identify your target customer source:

Boost your product's trustworthiness first:

First, beyond running campaigns to raise community awareness, the core issue every business must consider seriously is core product quality. Customers certainly won't buy low-quality products or services — or if they do, they certainly won't come back. So build trust in your product by improving its quality, as our forebears used to say: good wine needs no bush!

Share with family, friends, or acquaintances

Tell family and friends about your product/service, let them try it, and listen to their feedback. Through their perspective, you may discover who actually fits your product/service — this is also a good test of who your target customers are.

Draw a potential customer profile:

Once you have a quality product in hand and have run testing with a small group, you need to focus on customers immediately. With a new product, your business should concentrate on sketching the potential customer profile. Knowing which target customer group will buy and use your product makes it much easier to craft suitable sales pitches. Sketch out the traits of potential customers and see what they need/want from your product/service!

Focus communication on social media:

According to NIELSEN's latest report, many customers find what they need by browsing social media. Most of today's young customer group are called connected spenders because of how often they use social media every day to search for information, shop, and share. Leverage this effective advertising channel with quality content, and you'll reach a source of potential customers that matches your customer profile — and is plentiful in number.

Step up your personal presence on social networks

Show up on social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn) with an attractive profile that inspires trust. You'll become an invisible KOL who gives customers solid confidence in the products your business sells.

Proactively cold-call:

In the early stage, a business will hardly have a loyal customer base. Instead, quickly reach out to them before they mention or even know about you. Some people are very uncomfortable making cold calls. However, done right, this can be a promising sales channel for reaching new customers.

Finding Potential Customers for Established Businesses

If you're a business that has been in the market for a while, with a certain customer base but not enough, and you want to take your business further and earn more profit, follow the 7 methods below to help your business attract more customers:

Contextual advertising

In this type, ads are shown to fit the context — meaning the ads match what the customer is viewing, increasing the chance they'll click the displayed content. When customers want to find a particular product, they can see you instantly on the first pages of the search bar. Your ad placement doesn't depend on your position in the SERP (search engine results page). A very popular tool for contextual advertising you can consider is Google Adwords.

Social media

In the 21st century, social media keeps expanding its reach. Daily account registrations on these platforms are growing at an astonishing rate. That's why it would be an extremely wise decision for a business to promote its products on these platforms. Promotional activities can include: running ads, posting articles and photos, and organizing contests. Businesses can sell products directly from social media, thereby building an army of loyal customers. Today, worth mentioning are finding potential customers on Facebook and on Zalo — the two most popular social platforms at the moment.

How to find potential customers on Facebook:

Finding potential customers on Facebook delivers results worth expecting for businesses, simply because in the Vietnamese market, 70% of the population uses Facebook as their main social network. Additionally, advertising on Facebook simplifies the customer's path to the product and to ordering, improving customer experience and order volume for the business. Before running an ad campaign on Facebook, keep in mind: minimal content — eye-catching images — posts that reflect the brand.

How to find potential customers on Zalo:

Like Facebook, Zalo is also one of the social networks used heavily by Vietnamese people, delivering incredible results for reaching potential customers. With Zalo Marketing, businesses can gain an enormous customer base and market products at low cost.

Email newsletters

Almost every Internet user has an email. That's why the email newsletter is an effective advertising channel for attracting more customers, and one of the effective ways to find potential customers. With the help of email newsletters, you can notify buyers about new products and all kinds of promotions. You can send customers highly useful products and offer paid products. Well-designed, carefully crafted emails help sales keep climbing and customers grow ever more loyal.

Viral marketing

This type of advertising calls for creating an image, video, or audio file, etc. — anything capable of capturing users' attention. When a customer is drawn in by one of these pieces, they share it with their friends, creating a chain effect that builds a sharing customer base. This type of marketing works especially well on social platforms. Producing great content allows your brand to introduce its products to customer groups that have never heard your name before.

Teaser advertising

An opening ad campaign is a short message published alongside the campaign's original image. Suppose you want to advertise a new yogurt — place a teaser ad on a portal with the message "have you tried it yet?" Paired with an appealing image that doesn't reveal everything, it can spark many users' curiosity; that activated sense of intrigue can lead viewers to follow the ad link. This is rated as an affordable and effective form of advertising.

Targeted advertising

This type of marketing is shown only to users likely to be interested — quality audiences with the highest chance of buying from you. For example, a customer searching to buy "shoes." The customer lands on a website where they find exactly what they want. They close it and keep exploring other options on the Internet. However, later they see the very shoes they were searching for at the start. When lured back to the site, the web reminds them that they forgot to buy — and the customer will very likely place an order right away.

Outdoor advertising

Outdoor advertising is a fairly expensive form of advertising. It can capture the attention of a huge number of people, and customers find it hard to miss because it is so visible and directly attention-grabbing. It is also rated as an effective way to build brand recognition.

The Solution for Businesses of the New Era — Managing Potential Customers Effectively with SimCRM

Once you've found your customer source, your and your business's tasks now include: filtering that customer source into different groups based on defined criteria to identify your own potential customer group; storing the customer system information; and managing the customer groups.

In this article, we introduce readers to one of the most effective potential customer management solutions — SimCRM. With this application, businesses can easily store large volumes of information and consolidate all potential customer data in a single CRM platform: not only information from sales and marketing, but also service process information. Try it free for the first month to experience the CRM management toolkit, including: Customer Management (CRM), Sales, Project Management, Social Media Marketing, and more.

Conclusion

This is only a short list of feasible ways to attract customers to your business, but using some tools — such as leveraging social media — will help you gain your first regular and loyal customers. Even more importantly, using customer management tools like SimCRM to store and manage customer information is absolutely essential!

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