How many channels do you use to attract new clients in your business?
Most small business owners typically use one or two main channels to bring new leads to their business. However, when you use only one or two channels, your business results cannot be stable. Think about it: you can’t grow significantly if you rely only on one marketing tool (channel) and most importantly:
what will happen if this one channel just stops working for you.
I have experienced both personally and with my clients situations where suddenly something that has worked well simply stopped working. Google, and all social media change their algorithms and what has worked before may now work now. Or the ads may become much more expensive for you… Or you may rely solely on referrals but at some point you may not have enough referrals… If something like that happens, you’re likely to experience a drastic drop in your revenues. Maybe you’ve experienced something like this before.
What is the solution to ensure a
constant flow of new potential clients?
The solution is to be everywhere. This means using different channels to attract clients – both online and offline. For example, if you have 5 or even 10 different channels through which you attract clients, it is unlikely that you will experience huge drops during difficult situations. Yes, one channel may stop working, but others are likely to continue bringing you new clients.
But here’s the more important part:
if you attract clients through 5-10 channels, you are everywhere…
or at least you leave such an impression on your potential clients. People see you and find you at various places (both online and offline) and that gives them the impression that you are everywhere. And when someone and something is everywhere, guess what: it means they provide quality service and they are an expert in their field. The big companies achieve that by spending huge money on advertising but we can achieve it by just being at more and more places.
Long ago, I had a situation where I did an online advertising campaign, which was for something very specific (webinar for presentation skills), but that generated heavy traffic to my web site. As a result, my web site went up on the search engines at that period, which led to traffic to me from clients who had nothing to do with the advertising campaign. At the same time, we conducted other offline campaigns related to networking, referrals and direct mail to potential clients. As a result, many people talked about us being active and doing a lot of things, which led to interest from clients who didn’t even find us on the Internet, but simply “remembered” us from before, or were left with the feeling that we did a lot of things, i.e. we were active. And people appreciate when you are active.
Therefore – be everywhere.
Identify many different ways to attract clients : referrals from existing clients, building strategic partnerships, networking, direct mail, offline advertising, follow-up communication to those who are interested, public events, trade shows, online blog, podcast, email marketing, social media advertising, etc. This will allow you to attract traffic to your business from different places and create the feeling (which is true!) that you are everywhere. This will ensure that you will never run out of clients and your risk of a sharp drop in sales even in a crisis will be minimal.
Let me know in a comment below how many marketing channels do you currently use to attract new clients and what you can add to increase your marketing presence.