Attracting Potential Customers: 20 Effective Approaches

Vũ Khôi

Author at Wotech Electronics Blog

Finding and attracting potential customers is an essential task for any business. There is an obvious truth here: if you don't find customers today, your competitor will find them tomorrow. That means the profit that should have been yours will slip away. How do you avoid such a situation? Where do you find potential customers? How do you capture their attention? And which customers can be considered potential ones for your company?

SimCRM will answer all of these questions in this article!

Where to attract potential customers?

Your business is up and running, but the potential customers you are targeting still know nothing about it? There are several main ways to solve this problem. First of all, advertising must be mentioned. Today's advertising technologies give us the most opportunities to reach customers — from handing out flyers and sending marketing emails to running large-scale, sophisticated, and costly ad campaigns.

In addition, nowadays this method of attracting potential customers has helped many businesses grow, thanks to the widespread popularity of all kinds of social media. Perhaps the most effective and simplest way to attract potential customers today is through social networks. Of course, there are other ways to attract potential customers as well — for example, finding them at themed exhibitions, presentations, and similar events, reaching target audiences by promoting the company's website, making telesales calls, and many other methods.

20 ways and strategies to attract potential customers

There are many ways to attract potential customers, but here are 20 examples and solutions used by major companies around the world. Take a look and see how these businesses find potential customers!

1. Experiment until you get it right

The transportation company Lyft understood that to attract new customers online, it needed to strike a balance between the number of drivers (supply) and passengers (demand). Too few drivers with too many passengers waiting is a direct way to irritate the latter. Too many drivers and not enough passengers, and you'll frustrate the drivers.

So Lyft ran a virtual experiment like this: they hired their own drivers to work during the busiest hours. Passengers were delighted because enough cars were available in peak hours on the very first ride request, so demand for the company's service surged. Lyft then began recruiting drivers according to the pre-tested numbers.

2. Play fair — don't be afraid to share

In its first nine months of operation, Buffer, a social media management tool, attracted 30,000 users. Their formula for success was a combination of giving users publishing rights on their blog and, more importantly, the decision to openly share in-depth information about the company. Transparency is one of Buffer's core values, and in 2013 they stayed true to that principle by publishing a post with the names and salaries of all their employees. The bold move not only drew media attention and increased traffic to their website — the number of applications sent to the company also doubled.

3. Pay attention to the small details

The following example from Uber will inspire almost everyone. Think carefully about this one. Uber offered ice cream truck service and rose deliveries to its regular customers on Valentine's Day. Instead of spending millions of dollars on advertising to attract new customers, they focused on small, kind gestures that created waves of positive reviews and press coverage, driving traffic to their app and helping them win repeat customers.

4. Always stay up to date

Sure, you already know you should run social media campaigns, but you should also stay ahead of trends and never hesitate to update your product. For example, after being updated and improved, the video game "I Am Player" was integrated into Facebook's interface. Naturally, 4 million new users in just 6 months is a great result — but this would never have happened if the company had shied away from updating and from using marketing channels outside the standards of smaller companies to attract users.

5. Form alliances with the "big players"

Instagram with its accompanying stories is a classic example of an alliance. Instagram took off right after deciding to partner with existing services — for example, Twitter and Facebook. This is how the company quickly became prominent and spread across platforms with enormous user bases. This helped Instagram attract an astonishing number of users from its very first days.

6. Use customer management software

HubSpot is a classic example of this. They built customer management software and used their own product to attract new potential customers. The software's customer management and segmentation helped them understand each customer group thoroughly, so they could apply a different strategy to each segment.

In addition, other features of the sales management software gave HubSpot a more complete view of how they convert and attract potential customers. Information about industries, income, business types, and more helped them form a clear picture of their potential customers. Data on reasons for product interest or reasons for failure also helped them improve their purchase conversion considerably. Thanks to this data, HubSpot became one of the world's top customer management software providers within three years.

On the other hand, their pricing is fairly expensive and they do not support the Vietnamese market. So you might also consider other Vietnamese customer management software such as SimCRM!

7. Meet your potential customers in person

When Tinder first started getting people to use its app, the developers threw exclusive parties at universities across the United States — with one condition: every attendee had to install the Tinder app themselves. This move let the app boast a solid user base right after launch. Word of mouth then took over, and new customers grew by the day.

8. Incentivize your potential customers

The idea is simple: give in order to receive. In the beginning, Dropbox encouraged customers to follow them on Twitter and Facebook — for each sign-up, users received an extra 125 MB of cloud storage.

The result: Dropbox became one of the giants leading the cloud storage field.

9. Attract potential customers with influencers

This is the strategy LinkedIn used. They focused on attracting customers with large networks and influence to their platform. In return, they attracted new users to sign up. And as you can see, LinkedIn is extremely popular today.

10. You don't have to start from zero

Take Nasty Gal as an example. It was an online retailer that originally began with an eBay selling account. Starting small, she brought her existing eBay customers to a new platform, where she could focus on other aspects of running the business. Today that seller has more than 550,000 customers.

11. Build a subscribe platform

In its early days of growth, Facebook bought a number of email providers in developing countries. Although business experts judged the decision harshly, over time Facebook clearly ended up with a very large database of potential customers' email addresses.

12. Introduce yourself

One day, Airbnb — the giant of homestay accommodation search — realized it could attract new potential customers by reaching people who posted property rental ads on other sites, such as Craigslist. Airbnb contacted those Craigslist advertisers and asked them to post their listings on Airbnb instead. Somehow, miraculously, it worked.

13. Create a "forbidden fruit"

Clinkle, a mobile payment gateway company, was on the rise when its 22-year-old Stanford founder, Lucas Duplan, received an astonishing $25 million from one of Silicon Valley's most famous investors. That made them famous and attracted many users.

They restricted full access to the app's features to the existing user base, while putting new users who wanted full access on a waiting list. People on the waiting list could see how many others were queued ahead of them, but they could move up the list by completing simple tasks on the platform — simply sharing the app with others and liking their channels on other platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and so on.

14. Build a referral network that attracts potential customers

For any startup, it matters that people recommend it to friends and family, so the company gains new customers and begins to grow actively. It's a pity that PayPal's referral program took a bit too long, since they paid $10 to both the new user and the person who brought them in. But it was also how the company acquired tens of millions of users.

15. Don't neglect "traditional" channels

Fixed, an app that helps you avoid parking fines, hired a team of "heroes." Their only mission was to search for cars with parking tickets on the streets of San Francisco. They then attached a Fixed business card next to each such ticket. The number of business cards handed out this way reached 4,000 a day!

This approach solved users' problem and was effective at the same time. Later, when Fixed launched in a new city, the company ran a waiting list — exactly strategy #13, "Create a 'forbidden fruit'," mentioned above, to attract potential customers.

16. Capture users from other platforms

YouTube's rapid growth can be attributed to "taking over the platform" from MySpace. At the time, MySpace had 25 million users. The deal here was that MySpace allowed its users to embed YouTube videos on their personal pages for free.

MySpace's hosting costs were repaid with rewards in the form of YouTube's direct brand and user growth.

17. For a t-shirt, users will trade almost anything

To get users to leave their information, New Relic, Trak.io, and Invision gave away free t-shirts.

For example, Invision offered a newsletter subscription with a free t-shirt whenever users were about to leave the site — a technique that kept users on the page to register. This significantly increased their conversions and attracted potential customers. At the same time, the SEO data on their website also grew considerably.

18. A random act of kindness

Having a contact list is one thing; using it to attract potential customers and create new ones is another. Be aware that offering promotions such as a 25% discount doesn't always work. But what if you attach something free to the emails you send?

Squarespace selected the subscribers who engaged most with the email newsletters they sent, then sent them an invitation to extend their trial. This drove the number of trial users converted into customers to over 70%.

19. Attract potential customers through word of mouth

As SimCRM mentioned above, word of mouth (WOM) is what made Uber popular. The company used referrals and widespread popularity as part of its strategy: referring a new user earned you a discount code for your next ride. Statistics showed one new user for every seven rides — all thanks to the power of the WOM strategy.

20. Run contests to build a community

From the very start, YouTube's developers decided to use contests as the primary mechanism for building a community. They started small, giving away an iPod Nano to a random user every day for two months. Winning conditions were based on user activity, such as uploading new videos and inviting new users, which could boost the odds of winning. After running a series of contests, YouTube began attracting partners offering far more substantial prizes to users.

Apply and get creative in attracting potential customers

So the opening questions — how to attract potential customers and where to find them — have been answered. The 20 lead-attraction strategies above are just examples to give you a more concrete view of how it's done. The rest — the specific approach and strategy that suit your business — is up to you to decide. Take the 20 strategies you've just read, apply them, and make them your own.

Note that you should also pay attention to caring for and nurturing your customer base. Managing your potential customers well can raise your conversion rate. You should segment your customers into different groups — by priority, stage of interest, and so on. From there, you can decide on actions to increase your close rate.

In addition, managing your customers also helps you grasp why they come to you. This helps you know where to invest resources and money more wisely. At the same time, good customer management also helps you understand why deals fail. You can use the many customer management tools available today to explore this. If you haven't found a suitable software yet, check out SimCRM!

SimCRM is completely free to use and can be customized to your business's processes and needs. If you'd like to try it, click the button below!

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