3 Creative Ways to Get New Customers for Small Businesses (Free Methods)
It’s hard being a small business out here, doing everything in your power to compete with these huge conglomerates. If you want to have a fighting chance, you need to get creative, especially if you want to get more customers.
We all know marketing strategies that involve paid advertising. But how about some small things you can do for free to get ahead of the curve? So today, we have compiled creative ways to accepting new Clients that you can implement right now to start growing those sales numbers.
And here comes the best part! None of these methods involve spending a single dime. Let’s begin!
Leverage Online Reviews
In this day and age, nobody buys anything before checking reviews. It’s important to know what others have to say about a product before making a purchase. Funnily enough, even your dentist is answerable to their reviews on Google or Yelp. Reviews might be bad news for a fraudulent business. However, for great companies, online reviews are their greatest asset.
Online reviews serve as social proof. Not only do they create a conversion uplift, but they also help you in taking new clients altogether. Here are a few key areas to focus on to master online reviews.
1 Awareness:
Inform and encourage all your existing clients to leave a review. Especially the happy clients. Because the unhappy ones will always find a way to post about you, so drown their negative reviews with the positive ones.
Another aspect of creating awareness involves sending out your products, particularly to famous influencers and bloggers. There are people out there who charge money to post a good review. But the most respected reviewers in their space generally don’t do paid reviews. So make sure you get your products to these reviewers. And hopefully, you’ll gain new customers when they post about it.
2 Social Media:
Most of us on social media regularly check on our friends’ stories. You can leverage some profit from this phenomenon. Start by asking your long-term clients to post about your products on social media. If possible, give them a discount on their next order. Or experiment with other incentives. The friends of your loyal customers hold similar interests to them. So it’s highly likely that they’ll also be interested in your product.
Think about it! If you could only convince ten customers to post about you, then, at the very least, you would get ten new clients. All without any extra work or marketing costs. Alternatively, you can run a hashtag campaign. Ask your clients to post pictures of your product using a hashtag. Always remember, you need a lot more engagement with your customers. It would be best if you built a connection before running a successful hashtag campaign.
3 Engagement:
This part will take a little effort. But it’ll be all worth it. Have you seen all those big corporations replying to tweets? Corporations do that for important reasons. They want to stand out and be more memorable in the minds of their customers, especially if they are a part of a considerably competitive market.
Keeping this in mind, you must leave personal replies under each review. Contact them privately if they have a negative experience. Encourage and engage them further if they have a positive experience.
Partner With Other Businesses:
Larger-scale corporations are partnering all the time. Multiple multi-billion dollar acquisitions and mergers happen every single day. But what’s weird is that small businesses are overly hesitant to partner with other small businesses. The thought of partnering may never occur to small business owners, even when both parties are selling complementary products.
Here is a simple way to double the size of your prospective customers. Go online and search for businesses targeting customers. Make sure they are targeting virtually identical interest groups to yours. Pick the ones that run a similar or slightly larger operation.
Now, you need to contact these other small businesses. Ask them for possible collaboration. However, make sure you refrain from competing with any of their products.
The collaboration can be as simple as sharing each other’s email lists or hosting a joint event. Remember! These are businesses targeting similar interest groups. So, their client list is highly relevant to your marketing. Therefore, these clients on the list will have a high conversion rate.
From here, you can go a step further. Host complementary products in each other’s shops or websites. And depending on how the relationship grows, there is always a possibility of a healthy merger in the future.
Affiliate marketing:
First, let me start by explaining affiliate marketing – in simple terms.
There are thousands of influencers with sizable followings on social media. Using affiliate marketing, you can get access to their audiences for free. In exchange, you’ll offer them a percentage of every sale they generate (only if the sale is confirmed). The commission you have to give on the sales is totally under your control.
Traditionally, software development was expensive for a custom tracking solution. Running an affiliate program was only possible for mid to large-size businesses. But in this era, where running an ecommerce business has so little overhead. You can pick an affiliate marketing solution virtually for free.
What’s more, if you want a custom solution. You can outsource the work to low-income countries and get extremely affordable rates. New technologies can do so much for small businesses, especially considering the power of AI and data analytics. However, we do understand the journey can be scary to cover alone.
Thankfully, some companies can help every step of the way. We at Hub Digit specialize in aiding digital transformation for small businesses. So contact us for a free consultation call right now!