3 Simple Steps to Gain Clients and Grow Business

The majority of companies spend most of their time continuously looking for ways to expand and grow their customer base and, therefore, their business. Growth is one of the most challenging processes for small business owners and a key metric for success – after all, if no one knows about your business, it can’t grow.

Qualifying new leads and creating a steady stream of income is one of the fundamental elements of growing a business, but not everyone is a good fit or ends up being the perfect client. Here are three steps to gain the leads you want and grow your business without wasting time and draining resources on proposals for the wrong clients. 

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Identify your perfect customer

The first step to qualifying good quality leads for your business is identifying who your target audience (or perfect client) is. To successfully target and attract a new lead, you need to know exactly who they are, and to do that, you need to create a client criteria. This way, you know who to spend time and effort on, allowing you and your team to be more efficient throughout the entire process. Before you dive into creating a proposal, ask yourself some questions first, such as:

• Who is your ideal client, and how do they match your targeted customer profile?
• Where are they based? 
• How much money do they make, and how much are they willing to spend?
• What problems do they have that your business could solve?
• Which industry are they in, and what kind of lifestyle and personality do they have? Does it match with your business ethos?

Create a marketing strategy that works

Creating a good marketing strategy is more important than ever and should include a mix of both social media and inbound and outbound strategies. Social media allows small businesses to create and participate in conversations with prospective customers, attracting and engaging a potentially brand new audience. By creating a company page on the major social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, you can generate new clients and lead them down the sales funnel, turning them into new leads for your business.

When it comes to inbound and outbound marketing, while outbound can be effective, inbound is more cost-effective and shouldn’t be forgotten. Ensure that all of your communication is personalised and create fresh new content with a different perspective via blog posts to draw in your target clients. These, alongside SEO, are some of the best conversion tools to ensure that your target audience discovers your services.

Small business SEO is driven by data and focuses on providing solid returns on your marketing investments. You want to rank on the first page of a Google search because most consumers don’t look past the first page of their query results. Producing high-quality SEO will provide those results and bring more traffic to your website.

If you aren’t confident in your technology or marketing abilities, there are plenty of excellent marketing software tools currently on the market and at your disposal. We recommend MailChimp for your email marketing,  as well as Google Analytics, which is a great digital marketing tool for analyzing your website data. Combine the latter with the visualization tools provided by Improvado.io, and you will get a better handle on the data you receive. Or you could hire an expert with the sole purpose of putting your small business on the map, so consider outsourcing if you don’t have the time or abilities to focus on the marketing needs of your business properly.

Create your own sales funnel

Once you have identified and targeted your ideal leads, you need to have a strategy for collecting their information via your very own sales funnel – and creating one is easier than you might think. Start by funnelling your prospective clients onto a landing page on your website that encourages them to share their information through a call to action.

To successfully get them to part ways with this essential information, a common strategy is to offer them a free incentive. This could be anything from signing up to a weekly or monthly newsletter or offering a free coupon or product sample from your collection. You can then keep track of your potential new leads through a CRM database.