Customer attraction is one of the fundamental skills that any business owner needs to become (and stay) successful. Without good customer attraction ideas your brilliant product or business is likely to stay between you and companies house. That’s why we’ve decided to bring you this smorgasbord of Digital Customer Attraction Ideas to help you and your business grow.
This epic set of Customer Attraction Ideas is the first in our Growth Series Blog where we’re focusing on 4 key stages in the Demand Generation Funnel to help business owners and marketing leaders turbocharge their results.
Before we go any further we need to think strategically about just who you want to target. Attraction can often be the most costly part of your Demand Generation Funnel so making it too broad or too niche can lead to big problems down the line.
To help you map out your target audience try these big questions on for size:
Chances are you’ll have one or more potential customer audience – unless it’s one big mass of people/ businesses then drawing up a clear picture of just who you want to target is our first (and should be your first) customer attraction idea.
Getting this picture built will help you to understand where you should be focusing your attraction efforts – without it you risk spreading yourself over too many channels or worse still putting all your eggs in the wrong basket.
E-commerce or Online sales if you prefer, relies on bringing the right people to your store at the right time. We’ll cover their experience once they’re there in our next blog on Engagement but for now we want to think about how to attract them in the first place.
Promoting your products is a good first place to start – but where? We’re all familiar with the online marketplaces that are Google Shopping (Product Listing Ads) and Amazon and both platforms can be incredibly powerful for showcasing your products to the world. In fact, a whopping 85% of product searches start on either Google or Amazon. Missing these vital channels could mean losing your customer before you’ve even got started – but get them right and the rewards are there for the taking.
The flip side to these massive engines is that according to Google, 40% of product search start out with broad terms, which can mean devoting significant budgets to “play” in the market without a focus on your specific product. It’s not all bad news though as you can use broad areas to your advantage when looking for customer attraction ideas, bringing in new potential audiences. If you do opt for this approach pay very careful attention to your re-marketing and nurture strategies as you’ll need them to make sure you squeeze all the value out of your new found visitors.
If you’re getting started on Amazon then be mindful of seller fees and make sure you craft your listings to hit the following, key on page signals:
Keywords – know what you’re trying to rank for and why. Make sure you wrap high value keywords in longer tail phrases rather than separately to maximise space.
Titles that sell – Your title and product shots will be the first thing that your potential buys see so don’t half cook it – and make sure to include a CTA that gets people clicking through to your products.
Benefits driven Descriptions – Your bullet points are effectively your shop front at this point so if nothing else make sure that they’re benefit driven and easy to digest. Remember your audience and write for them – not you.
Clear, transparent Imagery – a picture tells a thousand words so make sure yours are up to scratch. As well as crucial product shots be sure to include benefits and important features as call-outs or close up’s in your product imagery.
As well as they bigger marketplaces there are specific sites that cater to particular needs and tastes Etsy for example caters for hand crafted and bespoke whereas Not on The High Street is an idea place for unusual gifts and Capterra is a broad software market place good for attracting software led sales. Whatever your business there’s a host of specific market places out there dedicated to your sector.
All of these marketplaces are great customer attraction ideas when your customer already knows what they’re looking for but what if they’re not for you or you need more scale? Cue the social channels.
Whether you have an e-commerce or face to face sales model, using social to attract new customers should be an important part of your strategy. Before we go on, we need to clear up some big myths about social, namely that it doesn’t work! For anyone that’s dabbled in social only to find that the cost per lead was too high or they didn’t get a stack of comments and shares on their posts we have good news for you. Firstly, you’re not alone – according to Hootsuite new customer attraction is the number one goal for 73% of organisations in 2021. Secondly 45% of “internet users turn to social media when researching products” and even better, Social ads were the 4th most popular source of brand discovery – so there is hope!
The first of our customer attraction ideas for social is to start with your audience, as great as your business may be the harsh reality is that “we” don’t predominantly use social to interact with companies. Most of us are catching up with friends, nosing through what’s going on in the world and generally looking for entertainment – which is well worth noting if you’re thinking about using social in any form.
We can broadly break social attraction tools into two key areas, Organic and Paid. Organic social programs rely on building communities of people who either like or find your content useful. Studies show that organic communities are likely to consist of people that already know or use your brand, not ideal for customer attraction. Whilst they can be a great way to build advocates and brand ambassadors organisations really have to provide something special to ensure your existing community is working to help you attract new clients.
Sneak peaks and exclusives to the community are a good way to ensure they feel valued whilst promotion led engagement can also help to encourage user generated content that helps fulfil your attraction goals. Whatever way you chose to engage your organic community be sure that you maintain a two-way conversation with them – not only does everyone love a re-tweet but it also shows the rest of the community that you care and are engaged.
If attracting new customers is your primary goal then Paid Social Campaigns should be on your agenda – increasing your reach to potential customers and layering specific demographics to ensure your targeting is as accurate as possible.
Before you embark on any paid social campaign do your research across your potential channels. Here’s a quick run-down on some of the most popular:
Facebook – 2.8 Billion users 4th most popular global website – 23 minutes average use
Instagram – 1.22 Billion users
LinkedIn – 727 Million users – largest business networking site globally
Twitter – 11th most popular global website – 15 minutes average – 353 Million users
Snapchat – 498 Million users
Pinterest – 200 Million users – 77.1% Female user base
Most, if not all of these channels have good advertiser tools that help you to see the potential reach of your audience. Building out your potential audience on each channel and mapping over any demographics that you know work for you will give you a good idea of how much potential there is for each channel. Whilst you’re at the research take a good long look at your competitors too, understanding what works and doesn’t work for them will help you carve out your own niche. Be sure to pay attention to user comments whilst you’re in spy mode too – remember they could be your potential customers so take the time to understand what matters to them before you start your own programs.
Once you’ve chosen your channels you’re probably itching to build out your first campaigns but before you do have a think about your sales cycle again. If you’re predominantly planning to use social to generate leads instead of e-com sales then your buyers may need multiple touches to get them to the right engagement stage. Broadly speaking you’ll want to think about early, mid and late-stage funnel stages as each of them will need a different “value exchange”.
Early on in the Demand Generation cycle your buyer is not at all likely to be considering you or your business so your customer attraction ideas will need to focus on challenging their current status quo rather than giving anyone a hard sell. Jumping straight into a pitch is likely to do more damage than good at this stage so focus your content on helping your customer. At the early stage ideas, stories and videos even tools that will be useful for them in their personal and professional lives are likely to give you higher engagement rates in your quest for customer attraction so be aware of giving your potential customers good value.
At the mid stage (Consideration) buyers might already be thinking about making a change or taking up a new service but rest assured they haven’t made their mind up about quite what they’re planning to do. As an advertiser focused on customer attraction you really need to take the mystery out of what you do and help your potential customers to visual themselves using your product or service. Demo’s and white papers or videos that show similar customers overcoming challenges using your business can be a great way to engage customers at this stage. Remember they’re not looking for case studies, we’re still in the world of social where attention spans are short so be sure to provide enticing content that really buys you that space in their feed.
Finally when buyers reach a late stage and are really ready to make a purchase or start a conversation with your team you still need to provide value in your ads. Just because you’re paying for ad space doesn’t give you carte blanche to “Sell, Sell, Sell” instead keep whatever you do value led and help your potential customers to engage with you on their terms. That could mean using in platform lead forms or training your sales team in social selling, whatever it means for you putting your customers first should be your first priority.
We love to talk about content and just how to use it to meet your customer attraction goals. Our number one tip is to keep it authentic, we’ve all seen the 200 page whitepapers that cost a fortune in research and send us all to sleep. On social, especially at early stages, we want value, entertainment and help. Keep your audience in mind when creating content, do they really want to watch a 45 minute presentation on you and your business? Probably not! Instead keep it useful and engaging – short format videos, online self service tools and even quizzes can be great ways to start your engagement with your new potential audience.
Shameless plug alert! If you do need to create new content, or even just a little help in re-purposing existing content for social then feel free to give us a call!
Finally pay attention to your ad and post formats – reels, carousels and videos have much higher engagement rates than single image posts so test your formats for what resonates best with your audience. If you are using video then make sure your message is clear in the first few seconds and definitely include titles – over 80% of users watch videos with the sound off so subtitles are a must!
Attracting new customers is a key element of any business and a core skill that all teams should have, whether you’re building an ecommerce empire or feeding a hungry sales team we hope this blog has given you some new ideas as well as expert tips that you can use in your own customer attraction goals. If we can help at all with your Customer Attraction then drop your details below and we’ll be back to you in a jiffy.
Posted by Helen Brookes on Thursday 25th February 2021
