Which should you spend most of your time on: gaining or retaining customers? The most appropriate answer is: “it depends.” Your decision to focus on gaining or retaining customers will be reliant on various aspects, like your business goals, marketing efforts, customer behaviors, profitability, and the direction of your company.
It’s wise to master different strategies for attracting and keeping customers so that you can optimize your efforts on both sides, as you’ll be required to toggle your focus during your company’s journey.
Here are six different ways to gain and retain customers.
Keep Your Online Platforms Updated
Consumers are likely to learn about your brand, connect with your business, and make purchases from you online. Because of this, one of the first things you should do to gain and retain customers is to keep your digital platforms updated.
For instance, be sure to update your website and social media profiles. Social media is one of the most powerful tools for building brand awareness, brand recognition, and promoting your products and services. Your website is also essential for growing customer relationships.
The last thing you want to do is turn customers off with inaccurate, missing, or irrelevant information on your website, social media, or another online platform. Instead, draw customers to you with professionalism, consistency, accuracy, and value on all of your online platforms.
Another way to attract and retain customers is to lean into social media.
Lean into Social Media
Millions of people engage on social media daily. Smart business owners are taking full advantage of this by promoting their businesses and growing their brands on social media.
Be sure to consider the following when using social media to gain and retain customers:
- How to create quality social media content
- What your ideal customers’ favorite social media platforms are
- What kind of content your ideal customers are consuming on social media
- How to schedule social media content with automation tools
- What messaging resonates most with your ideal customers
- How to create a comprehensive social media marketing strategy
- How to follow best practices for businesses on social media
- How you’re going to track performance and success
- How analytics work on each social media platform
Learning the ins and outs of SEO will also help you gain and retain customers.
Learn the Ins and Outs of SEO
Many customers will learn about your business by using a search engine like Google to search for products and services like yours or look up information about your business and close competition. This makes Search Engine Optimization or SEO much more critical if you’re hoping to attract and retain customers.
You should take time to learn the following about SEO to ensure you’re taking full advantage of its influence on gaining and keeping customers:
- SEO best practices
- How search engines work
- The purpose and value of SEO
- Natural link-building techniques
- The main factors considered when a website is ranked
- Keywords and phrases your customers type into the search bar
- How to implement keywords and phrases into your content naturally
You can also attract and retain customers by experimenting with content types.
Experiment With Content Types
Much of your success with gaining and retaining customers will rely on your content. Of course, quantity and consistency are crucial when it comes to content, but the quality of your content is also vital to your strategy.
Experimenting with content types is the key to consistently creating quality content in a high quantity.
For example, video content is becoming the most popular content type. Pre-recorded videos are great, but live streaming furthers your impact on new and loyal customers. Live-streaming can help you connect and communicate with your customers even more because people love how personalized the experience can be.
If you’re going to implement live-streaming, be sure to always use a background that communicates professionalism and your commitment to providing customers with a positive impression of your brand.
You should use live-streaming and video content with the following to ensure your content strategy is diverse:
- Images
- Interactive content
- Blog posts
- Articles
- Email content
- Infographics
- Tutorials
- Ebooks
- Guides
Providing excellent customer service also aids your efforts to attract and retain your ideal customers.
Provide Excellent Customer Service
Whether in-person or online, you can ensure you’re connecting with new and existing customers by adequately addressing customer complaints, concerns, needs, and desires.
You should also address things that don’t go according to plan calmly and positively. Providing exceptional customer service in light of crises is a surefire way to become memorable to customers because you handled a difficult situation with poise.
In addition, providing excellent customer service includes prioritizing customer onboarding. When you make the onboarding process seamless for your customers, they’re more likely to return to your business because of how wonderful their first purchasing experience was with your company.
Another way to gain and retain customers is to develop a loyalty program.
Develop a Loyalty Program
Retaining customers is much easier when you have a solid loyalty program in place for customers. Therefore, you should absolutely explore developing a loyalty program as an incentive for repeat purchases and brand loyalty. Whether it’s a points program, tiered rewards, or another type of loyalty program, your customers will love it.
Not only do you want to develop a loyalty program for returning customers, but you should also consider offering discounts, specials, and promotions to attract new customers. Sometimes all a potential customer needs to become an actual customer is a valuable offer.
Conclusion
This is just the beginning of a long list of techniques to gain and retain customers. Whether you’re implementing the tips above or other tried-and-true methods for attracting and keeping customers, be sure to monitor success and make adjustments to your strategies to keep the ball moving forward.
