How to Attract and Retain More Customers To Your Business pot

Step 2 Identify your Customer Step 3 What do your Customers want?. It is important to keep reviewing these steps regularly so as to attract more customers to your product or service.. Th

How to Attract and Retain More Customers

To Your Business

Lesson 1 - Attracting Clients To Your Shop/Office

All rights reservedISBN: 9781476224893

Author: Peter Adams

How to Attract and Retain More Customers To Your Business

from the publisher

Published by Swell Accounting Services For further information, contact:

Swell Accounting Services,

PO Box 4184,

Elanora, Qld 4221

Telephone - 0452395519

Fax – 61755224593

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All attempts have been made to verify information provided in this publication and any attachments, neither the author nor the publisher assumes any responsibility for errors,

omissions or contrary interpretation of the subject matter herein

The recipient of this publication and any attachments assumes responsibility for the use of these materials and information Adherence to all applicable laws and regulations, including federal, state and local governing bodies, business practices, etc is the sole responsibility of the recipient

Welcome

Introduction

Problem Areas for Not Attracting Clients

Step 1 What can you do for your Customers?

Step 2 Identify your Customer

Step 3 What do your Customers want?

Step 4 Are you better than your competitors?

Step 5 Develop your USP

Step 6 Networking

Step 7 Removing your Customer’s Fear or Perceived Risk

Step 8 Cross Promotion

Step 9 Referrals

Conclusion

Thank you and welcome to our mini series of lessons that will help you with getting more customers to your business Our mini course is a 4 part series and will cover the following topics:

Lesson 1 – Attracting Clients to your Shop or office

Lesson 2 – Attracting more clients via Social Media

Lesson 3 – Call to Action

Lesson 4 – How to Retain Your Customers

Even though the ideas expressed during the series of the mini course have been tested, some

of these ideas may not be suited or work with your business The idea of this mini course is to pass onto you, our valued member, the opportunities for you to gain and retain customers to your business It is up to you to determine which ideas you are willing to take, measure this opportunities Please note that we have listed only some of the opportunities, not all, that will work for you

It is important to keep reviewing these steps regularly so as to attract more customers to your product or service

Please have a look on the last page as we have included our special offer to you

New customers are the lifeblood of most businesses and if you were to ask any business owner, and they were truthful, their answer would be – they do not have enough of them ….How do we attract new customers? How do we attract those new customers for a reasonable cost? And it really can cost less than a postage stamp to contact a potential new customer If you know how

The table below shows the profits earned by retaining your customer This subject will be explained in more details in Lesson 4

The single most important thing you must know before you begin:

To attract a new customer you must understand one very important concept –

customers do not care about you What they do care about is what you can do for them!

You can spend lots of money on advertising with little return on your investment In this lesson, we will show you some ways on how to attract customers to your business without a lot of cost If you adopt some of these ideas, keep working on these ideas, we are sure that you will gain customers

There are thousands of people out there offering new ways to attract customers These

include coaches, consultants to advertising companies and advertising sales people or DIY marketing courses

Equally there are a thousands of ways (or more), of attracting new customers to your business which are wrong and will waste your hard earned money and time

Businesses have been told to advertise their product or service using social media such as Facebook and Twitter Unless you social media correctly, you will be wasting your time and money Our next lesson will cover attracting more clients using social media

We need to look at new strategies for advertising as the old methods such as Yellow Pages and Trade Shows are starting to fade Have you noticed that Yellow Pages and White Pages

advertising are now online? Who wants to fumble through a thick book of telephone names and addresses to find someone’ telephone number It is so much better to search online.When was the last time you went to trade show? Most advertising for trade shows are done online.

Take a good look at the issues raised in the article below regarding decline in traditional advertising This article lists how we are not getting new customers through the traditional forms of advertising Hence, we have to look at alternative methods (and keep looking) of gaining more clients

The facts are shown below

(Source - http://www.goldcoastsocialmedia.com/statistics-on-traditional-advertising/):

Statistics on Decline of Traditional Advertising

March 31, 2010 at 3:32 am by Cam

Tags: advertising, marketing

If you are an small to medium sized Australian business it may be time to think about how you spend your advertising dollars

Why, well the statistics speak for themselves:

Traditional Advertising Channels are Fading

Trade shows: Trade show attendances have decline on average 38% in the last decade, whilst costs to exhibit have risen 50% (source: tradeshow magazine)

Yellow Pages: Over 13.4 million Australians did NOT read the Yellow pages last year (source: core data research report)

Print: Newspapers advertising has fallen over 28% as people move to other sources to read the news (source: Mediapost)

Television: advertising is continuing to fall, with estimates that it will fall over 75% in the next decade (source: contact magazine)

Radio: advertising is continuing to fall with a further 15% decline predicted for this year (source: mediapost.com)

So what is working?

Well Social Media marketing can certainly be effective as a channel But we must be weary

on how we do it

Problem Areas for Not Attracting New Clients

Most people do not want to look at issues and face truths about their business I was like that once but I have had to have my opened for me Otherwise, I was going to be doomed

There are four possible reasons why you are not attracting customers to your business Outlined below are some but not all, of the reasons why you are not able to attract customers

to your business Let’s have a brief look at what some of these problems are

Problem Area 1 – Your Investment

Possible reasons:

- Not enough money, time, and effort invested in promoting

- Promoting in the wrong places with low concentration of potential clients

- Your message is weak and can’t break through the marketing clutter your prospects are already exposed to

Problem Area 2 – Wrong market or customer

Possible reasons:

- Wrong target market

- Wrong or unclear message

- Poor sales skills

- Initial risk is too high (credibility)

- Perceived value is too low (believability)

- Service/product is too expensive or too cheap for the target market

Problem Area 4 – Product or Service

Possible reasons:

- Poor quality of product or service

- Poor customer service

- Lack of variety of services and products

- No long-term strategy in place

Now that we have identified the four problem areas, we will look at identifying some of these issues in our lesson

Topics to be covered in this lesson are:

Step 1 What can you do for your customers?

Step 2 Identify your Customer

Step 3 What do your customers want?

Step 4 Are you better than your competitors?

Step 5 Develop your USP

Step 6 Networking

Step 7 Removing your Customer’s Fear or Perceived Risk

Step 8 Cross Promotion

Step 9 Referrals

The life cycle of attracting new customers

Let’s have a look at these steps and if you follow these steps, you will increase your customer base Be mindful of ensuring that when you are increasing your customer base that these new customers will be profitable customers You do not want this (or any) customer to be a

“deadweight” for you A “deadweight” customer is a customer who keeps hassling you about cheaper pricing thus reducing your margin, does not pay their bill and is generally a nuisance

to you

Are you ready for your first lesson? Let’s jump into it

Step 1- What can you do for your customers?

As mentioned in our introduction “To attract a new customer you must understand one very

important concept – customers do not care about you What they do care about is what you can do for them!”

A few steps that we need to do in our business

1 What is our business? Let’s ask ourselves some basic questions What products or services

do we offer to our customers? What benefit does our customer get from using our product or service? Is our customer satisfied with our product or service? Now that we have identified the answers to these core questions, let’s move onto the step

2 What do our competitors do? Now that we have answered the core questions above, we need to understand what our competitors do This is called Competitor Analysis Prepare your own worksheet to write down the information about your competitors The worksheet is designed to understand the S.W.O.T analysis, what they do best, which customer they are targeting and their various price points Do this exercise, and regularly do this exercise

(perhaps 3 monthly), you will then be well knowledged about your competitors

3 How can we be better? After you have reviewed the two points above, you can then work out how you can be better You will need to develop your niche for your product or service or perhaps you may need to reshape your product or service to meet your niche

For example, (Service) all law firms in your area and the town concentrate on preparation of wills and conveyancing You are a new solicitor to arrive in town which is predominately a mining town with the demographics being young families What do you see as a niche to develop with your business? Answer – commercial law for the mining companies, family law (hopefully not to be used) for the families in town

Now let’s look at an example based upon a product You are new in town (using the same features of the town and its people above) and looking at setting up a business selling

electrical appliances You already have two competitors in town – one competitor selling whitegoods and one competitor selling browngoods None of these competitors offer

extended warranty on their products just the standard 12 month warranty How can we be better?

Answer – we can develop two niches to our customers:

a We can offer our customers both whitegoods and browngoods in the one shop How is this better for the customer?

b We will offer extended warranty on all of our products (you can consider introductory offers) so as to give you customers peace of mind for a longer period of time

Now it is exercise time ………

Exercise 1 – Thinking about the three points mentioned above, list down:

What is our business?

What do our competitors do?

_How can our business be better than our competitors?

_

Step 2 - Identify your Customer

Our next step now is to identify our customer What do you know about your customer? Who are they, what do they do, what are their biggest problems, where can you find them? Start thinking about a large target market, than narrow it down to your niche market.

We have developed our niche from completing step 1 or you may already have your niche Now we have to apply that niche to our customer and our niche market Some questions that

we need to consider about the type of customer that we are seeking at this step are as follows:Age,

Frustrations and many more

These are just some of the factors that you will need to identify and consider about your customer – current and new customers Is this the type of customer we want? Answer is predominately yes, as they are bringing the income into you However, is this your ideal customer?

Exercise 2 – Identify your current customer? You may have more than one type of customer depending on the type of product or service that you are offering Objective is to identify the customers to your existing products/services If you have identified a niche from step 1, set

up your own table in your own format to help you identify your current and new customer by looking at such factors as Age, Sex, Nationality, Religion, Fears, Income and so forth

Create your own table After completion of this table you will have a better understanding of your current customer(s) and your potential customer(s) based upon the products/services or potential niches that you have identified

Ideal Customer

Let’s have a look now at an “ideal” customer We have now identified our customer from above Applying the factors from above, how can we best define our ideal customer? Let’s ask ourselves the following questions.

Who is your ideal customer?

What are the features that apply to our ideal customer?

Are our current customers the ideal customer?

Does your product or service match the wants of our ideal customer?

After you have identified your ideal customer, is your product/service matching the wants of your “ideal” customer?

You may wish to complete Exercise 2 again now that you have defined your ideal customer

By knowing who your customers are, you are more able to meet their needs

Radio stations and television stations conduct regular market research to find out who their listeners and viewers are and often adapt their programs to suit the audience Radio stations particularly have become niche service providers as they specifically aim their product at a particular group, or niche

Step 3 - What do your customers want?

Have you considered what your customer wants?

Customers will pay for needs such as electricity, food, clothing, most services but what do they really want? People have the same basic needs things they must have for survival, including food, clothing, shelter, and the supplies and equipment necessary to conduct and manage their lives Then there are the things people would like to have they want certain things, and they buy them with money left over after their needs have been met

Identify what your customer wants………… unless you are in the “Needs” business

However, customers are cutting back on needs Your customers may not be buying the $100 pair of shirts but will pay $30 for a shirt (no or little brand loyalty during uncertain economic times) which may mean they will go to another retail outlet rather than your shop People identify the word FREE

How do you identify what the customer WANTS? I like to do the following strategies to see

what my customers want Try the out Please remember to test and measure each strategy

a I like to do a Survey to my customers and potential customers I use a programme called Survey Monkey whereby I can design my own survey and ask my customers to complete the survey I tend to offer my clients something for free in return for their opinion Go to

www.surveymonkey.com You can sign up for FREE

b Speak to your existing customers Each customer will have a different want from you Perhaps you can tailor make your product or service or develop a niche around their wants so that you can track new customers

c Telephone potential new customers to determine their wants Are you able to profitable match their wants

d Contact your friends and family to determine their wants