Whose Today’s Guest?
Tionge Nyirenda is the Managing Consultant at CerebraZM.
Attracting Customers as a New Business
As one seeks to attract customers as a new business, one will need to start thinking about the business goals and what the motives of starting that business is. This will help you begin to identify your market (who needs your product to solve).
Once you identify whose need your product solves it will be easier for you to develop tools that will allow you to market your product to those specific customers. It makes it a whole lot easier to attract clients when you have an idea of who you’re building the product for. Let’s imagine you’re car manufacture, you can build a car for people that are interested in flying.
Your product is best suited for individuals that are interested traveling by road and those are the ones that you should seek to attract.
- Get your Whole Team Involved
Get everyone in the business actively supporting the product. This means ensuring that everyone in the business becomes part of the sales team.
- Focus Marketing on Specific Customers
As stated above as a business owner you will need to spend much time identifying your target market and their characteristics that make up the ideal buyer. Once this has been identified you can focus all your marketing and advertising efforts on those specific customers.
- Proper Utilization of Tools
Using the right tools to enhance your advertising and marketing will be vital if you are to attract clients to your business, for small businesses a major tool they can use to their advantage is Social media.
- Leveraging your Personal Friendships and Their Connections
Connect with your friends and their connections, allow them to create a buzz around your product or service. This will ideally enable others to do the marketing for you through the word of mouth.
- Professional Advertising
For a small business, this is something that is rare as it is quite costly but if budgeted for by an SME it is very effective.
Startup vs Established Business in Terms of marketing and Advertising
There is a difference between the two, for a startup they will be actively learning what their market is, where the niche is and how they fit in while the established business already has all the answers to their advantage. They already know the techniques that work and those that don’t and how they apply in different businesses.
Marketing your Business as a Startup
You will need to create your own unique market position in the space that you venture into, what this means is you need to differentiate yourself from the competition so that you can create your own competitive advantage.
Let’s take for instance you run a garage, in order to have your own unique market position, you can incorporate a system of providing your clients with a courtesy vehicle while their actual vehicle is being worked on or you could provide a time frame on how long it will take to fix the car and stick to that time frame.
By doing so, you will create an environment fostering customer satisfaction which will lead to recurring customers. This will lead to more customers willing to refer their friends and family to your garage. So to market your business as a startup, you need to ensure that your customer service is exceptional.
Determining the Unique Value Proposition
This can be determined by looking at these three(3) things:
- What do you do well as a company?
- What does the customer need?
- What does the competition do well?
By finding the answers to these questions, you will be able to identify where exactly you should fit in. Value Proposition helps your business stand out and attracts the clients to your business rather than others.
Engaging with Customers
There is a need to invest in a good customer relationship management system, this will help a business to actively seek and fulfill customer feedback. Ask questions about your product or service and determine if people like it or not because if they don’t, then it is pointless to create a product that no one appreciates.
A practical way of getting such feedback is through suggestion boxes and customer surveys. One can create a simple 3-4 question form that will ask concise questions that will generate enough information for you to develop a product that the customers need.
I should stress that not every customer is going to give you the best feedback, some will condemn your product, but if that person happens to be one out of ten they don’t pay much attention to them. In the event that the majority condemn the product, then there will be a need to find out why and how you can develop it in a better way.
Another way of engaging your customers is to create focus groups, get a random group of people to test your product right there and then, let them give you their thoughts on your product.
Handling Increased Demand for a Product or Service
The key will lie in developing systems and processes that will ensure that you can rinse and repeat the business process. The idea is the growth of the business, this means you will have to learn to choose your jobs wisely (specialize in one field or area), invest in the right technology and equipment that will increase your capacity to produce and meet the demand.
Key Insights:
- Develop the right tools to help you reach your customers and grow your business.
- In order to attract and increase your clientele, you need to understand your business.
- Develop a unique value proposition to have a competitive advantage and attract clients.
“Attracting and increasing customers for your business is made easier when you know whose need your product or service is serving.”
