Get Customers! | MarketingZone

How to Get Customers

More than 86 ideas for how to get customers. This list on how to get customers focuses on:

Offers and marketing approaches that will help you get customers who will be most profitable and pleasant to serve
How to get customers as inexpensively and quickly as possible

Our Editors update this article regularly. Share your ideas.

In a business where you sell to clients? Then read this: How to Get Clients

Who you want to attract as customers: people who will be profitable and pleasant to serve as customers

You do not want switchers as customers. Switchers are people who buy whatever is on sale. They are the looking only for the lowest price. They switch from brand to brand, store to store. They're not loyal. They're not profitable. They rarely return and when they do, their expectation is to pay the same low price they paid before. Learn how to make promotional offers that will attract profitable and pleasant to serve customers.

Large companies use the term "customer acquisition" for what small businesses refer to as "get customers." Learn how large companies set up performance measures for customer acquisition.

Customer Acquisition

The basics you need in place to get customers

Why should someone buy what you're offering?

How-to guides to help you with:

What’s your elevator pitch? Can you succinctly explain and differentiate what you offer or sell when you meet someone at a networking event?
If you're selling yourself, you'll want to learn about Personal Branding

TIP for getting customers

Messaging Research is a very good investment because your messaging (how you describe your company, products or services) is the foundation for all your sales and marketing. There are fast and inexpensive ways you can test your messaging.

To get customers, intersect them when they are looking, searching and researching

1. Are you listed in the reputable online directories?

Google is the modern version of the (printed) Yellow Pages.

As a generalization, older people and lower income people tend to still use the (printed) Yellow Pages. For most people, Google (and the other search engines) have become the modern version of the Yellow Pages.

How to Set Up Your Google Places Listing - this is free

See more reputable places to create a Free Listing for your business online.

2. If you're selling to other businesses, you'll want to market yourself and your business on LinkedIn. That's free.

How to Market Yourself & Your Company on LinkedIn

3. Make sure people on mobile phones can find your business! With so many people buying web-enabled phones, the Internet has become the new Yellow Pages. You need to make sure that anyone with a phone that has web access can find your company (you don't need to have a website to do this).

Mobile Marketing How-to Guides

4. Do you have (and need) and ad in the printed Yellow Pages?

If so, here's a How-to Guide on Yellow Page Advertising

5. Do you have a website?

50% of small businesses don't have a website. A website often functions like how brochures used to. There are a lot of templates and services that make it relatively easy, fast and inexpensive to create a professional-looking website.

A blog is a mini website. There is great easy-to-use software to create blogs. If you plan to have a website and blog, do you need both? Could you use your blog as your website?

Know this: If you are buying a website address (called a domain name) from another company or person, be sure to check the history of that site. If they've been blacklisted by Google for spam or other reasons, that means you will be too. It's like being on the TSA watch list at the airport. Your search results will suffer and you'll have to go through a process that takes several months with Google to have them review and reconsider your site.

How to Choose a Website Address (domain name)

Is your website set up so Google and the other search engines will list you on search engine results pages? Have you done this for all the keywords and phrases prospects are searching for related to what you are selling or offering?

Keyword Research is what you do to learn what words and terms people are searching for that are relevant for your business.
How to get more website visitors
Search engine marketing how-to guide

Know this: It’s not just your home page that needs to be set up for the search engines. All the key pages on your site should be set up so they can be found by people searching on Google. This is a wonderful free way to get new customers! Most small businesses have a website but don’t do what they need to so that all the pages are set up to be search-engine friendly.

From our experience: Focus on Google. The majority of searches are done on Google (some sources claim up to 80%). They will index your web pages faster than the other search engines. Within one month of launching MarketingZone, Google had indexed half of our web pages. Yahoo and Bing had only indexed 5 pages.

TIP from a founder of a start-up: The great thing about search engines is that you don’t have to do anything — if you have a good service or good content, Google will generally make sure people find it. SEO tweaks can increase these numbers. But in the early days, SEO is generally a bad way to spend your time; gains will likely be insignificant.

Help people earlier in the buying process who are at the "learning" stage.

Create a buying guide related to your industry and post it on your website. If you sell a product, focus on the different specs, installation, uses, etc. If you offer a service, focus on the best questions to ask when evaluating a vendor, the different types of services.
Write a white paper detailing a specific issue affecting your industry, what it means and your take on it. Get other experts to share their opinions as well. Include them in the whitepaper. Ask people to share their name and email address with you to download your white paper. You now have a potential sales lead.

Learn more about the Purchase Process and how you can help people at different stages of their buying process. There's some great research on this from the consulting firm McKinsey that we summarize in this article.
Content Marketing Ideas - Content marketing is a great way to create valuable new business leads and to reduce your costs for pre-sales by educating prospective customers/clients with content (eBooks, articles, videos, white papers, etc.). It's a win-win for you and your prospective customers.

Make it easy for people to schedule a meeting with you.

From the MarketingZone.com Blog - new software to add to your blog and website to help with scheduling appointments

How to do marketing. What it costs.

Who can help. How to get it done!

How-to Guides

Most Popular Articles

How to Get Customers!

How to Get Customers

Who you want to attract as customers: people who will be profitable and pleasant to serve as customers

The basics you need in place to get customers

To get customers, intersect them when they are looking, searching and researching

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