We all know that the interest of our customers is in large part what dictates our daily profitability. If no one is interested in what our business has to sell, we are usually left high and dry, no matter the quality of our goods. To a certain extent, excellent products will sell themselves, but you need to get the ball rolling before you can expect that in any reliable capacity, and you should never take it for granted day by day.
No matter if you run an eBay shop, an Etsy store, pop up shops around your city from time to time or perhaps your own small business, it’s important to head out and find a larger audience for your wares if you hope to grow. There are many methods of sustaining and expanding your client list, and they are as follows:
Rewarding Regular Customers
Rewarding regular customers is a vital key to ensuring that they continue to be classed in this category. Those who feel that their business is appreciated are more likely to try and return with that business, particularly if they are tiered in rewards. It might be you decide to implement a points system that a customer may redeem in the future for free products or services. This not only encourages future purchasing but enables a customer to feel as though their business is valued. Of course, rewarding regular customers may take different forms. If you run a bar, allowing a regular a drink or two on the house now and then can keep them coming back. For more professional settings, an added free accessory when purchased with a large product might help a customer feel that sense of value once more. These efforts also encourage new customers to return and spread the word about you.
Heading To Trade Shows
Heading to trade shows such as a wonderful gift fair can help you present your products to those who may have missed your advertising or organically reaching your storefront. This will help you present a more curated output depending on what you have to offer, as well as helping you network with people who are interested in your given niche. Trade shows allow you to engage random passersby looking for that new product, that new service, that new business to engage with. Allow them to do so. These platforms can function as excellent spaces to offer something new to an audience, and show what really makes your business shine.
Social Media Accounts & Promotion
If you haven’t opened social media accounts for all of your business efforts yet, it might be a great time to start. Open an Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and maybe even a Snapchat account for your business to post from, and ensure that you promote this with every merchandising product or packaging insert you give out. Rewarding people for following, be that a discount on a good or service or perhaps many other considerations.
If you do this, you can directly reach your social media audience with solid content, and as such grow your own community, and allow for your own free advertising and promotion. The best part? None of this is exploitative as perhaps mainline advertising is. If people would like to engage with you, they can, and they’ll see what you have to offer. If not, they are under no compulsion to do so. However, it’s essential that you continually provide that platform where it’s due, as potential reach is better than no reach at all.
Providing Free Content Online
A great way to raise your platform online is to provide something called ‘goodwill content.’ For example, let’s say that you are selling kitchen knives. You could decide to pay for a highly produced commercial that will run its ad space on the main morning television channels for a month, and this could cost you several thousand. Or, you could hire a competent chef, or perhaps someone skilled on your team to run an online cooking segment, fixing up convenient recipes and teaching simple chopping techniques.
Which one of these options has more permanence, potentially future reach, immediate availability and the chance to go viral? Of course the second. This doesn’t mean you have to eschew one option in favor of the other. Perhaps you’d like to hit the goal from both fronts and present with both. No matter what, goodwill content can allow you to push your products while also fostering somewhat of a community online. This can feed into your social media following and website conversions among many other things.
Generating Goodwill
Just like goodwill content, general goodwill effects can do wonders in helping your business thrive. It might be that you decide to ally yourself with ethical practices, and thus can use this as a method of promotion. For example, you may decide to undertake a cause such as helping to donate to disparaged farmers in another country or something to that effect. This works best when you steward a relation to your product offering, such as offering 1 out of every 10 mattresses sold to a homeless shelter.
Generating goodwill could be considered as somewhat of an exploitative marketing technique, but honestly, if it’s helping people thoroughly and there are only beneficial results because of it, what does it matter? No matter your mood when giving to a cause, the fact of giving to that cause remains true. Generating goodwill can not only help you raise your profile but ensure that your business is conducted in the most ethical manner. Luckily, you’re not a business that will use this solely for the profile, as people aren’t usually inclined in that manner. Doing good is doing good, and it’s likely your team will care about this with you.
Sponsorships & Investments
To raise money you’ve got to spend a little money. Sponsoring someone on Instagram as an influencer to use your products can work tremendously well, but only if you sponsor in the right avenues. For example, a manufacturer of sports isotonic drinks may decide to sponsor a home gym athlete, or perhaps a YouTuber showing fitness guides to the world. Investments could also be a great method of raising your profile, from donating goods to be used by someone with a platform or to become connected as the official sponsor of an event.
It might be that the trade show you attend we previously mentioned in one of these tweets would be happy to take you on as a sponsor as you present, helping the success of the trade show flourish while you conduct your own outreach protocols.
While how you’re seen matters tremendously, sometimes this takes a secondary place to WHERE you’re seen. Finding the right exposure opportunities could only help you in the long run.
Build A Community
Building a community can often work wonders for you also. You may decide to open discussion forums on your website or host a form of content gathering that people can interface with. For example, if you’re selling sports nutrition items, opening a Wikipedia website of the worlds greatest athletes might help you generate traffic that you can then direct to your brand, fostering a community in one field and drawing it to your monetization efforts in another, connected field.
Communities help you share your social media posts, will support you at trade shows, and can help provide you with feedback. They will also snowball once you reach a certain point, meaning that this could be one of the most exponential and thus valuable tips in this list.
With these tips, heading out and finding a larger audience for your wares will become second nature.
I hope you enjoyed this article about how to find a larger audience and pool of customers for your business in the long run.
Interested in more articles about growing your business brand?
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