Are you finding new customers effectively?
- Ruth Harvey
- Jul 21
- 5 min read
For most businesses, customer acquisition is a high priority, but it can certainly feel like a constant challenge.
Whether you're launching a new product or service, expanding your existing offering, trying to grow or simply maintain market share in a competitive environment, the challenge for all businesses is - how do you identify and attract new customers?
1. Do you really understand your customers?
Before you delve into fixing and creating solutions, you need to make sure your business fully understands its existing customers. This will help you identify they types of companies you’re serving and the markets they operate in, as well as potentially being able to group customers by their purchasing drivers and behaviours.
Some useful questions to get you thinking:
Who are your best customers?
What problems are they trying to solve?
Why do they choose you, and why do others not?
How did they find you in the first place?
This information will provide meaningful insight into who values what you do and where you can find more of those customers. It will highlight potential opportunities, and importantly - who to not waste time and effort on.
If you don’t routinely capture this type of data about your customers, this is your friendly reminder to start! But seriously, it’s essential for high-performing businesses to understand their customers and undertake regular research and surveys. But it doesn’t have to be complex – it could be as simple as talking to a few customers you have good relationships with, and/or reviewing your enquiry and sales data.
And if you’re just starting out, then this is the prime opportunity to undertake some market research.
2. Are you targeting the right customers?
It’s easy and therefore tempting to try and appeal to everyone, but that’s a huge waste of time and effort. When it comes to trying to attract new customers, being targeted with your focus is more impactful and ultimately profitable.
Using your existing customer or market research insights, you can group customers together based on their needs, attitudes and behaviours. Try to determine:
Are there sectors or industries that respond better to your messaging?
Are there types of companies within these sectors that behave differently from one another?
Are there lapsed audiences you could re-engage?
Are you missing an opportunity with a new segment altogether?
That said, don’t cluster if there are no clear differences either – don’t make things overly complicated for yourself. And be very clear on what groups you’re saying ‘no’ to.
If you’re able to identify different groups to target, you can better position yourself to their needs and be much more focused in your efforts to reach them and ultimately be much more cost-effective.
3. How do you want customers to see your business?
What do you want customers to think and feel when they find your business? Is your messaging clear and relevant? And how are you standing out in a competitive environment?
How you position yourself – or the messages you communicate – is very important, especially for customer acquisition, where they’re seeing you for the first time. How are you different from your competitors? What makes you distinct – visible and memorable? With focus and energy in these areas, it enables you to influence potential customer purchasing decisions. But the key is to keep it simple!
Your positioning is how you communicate your value in relation to you target customers’ needs – it’s not about you. To help you develop or refine your positioning, think about:
Does your brand stand out? Are you visible where your customers are?
Is your messaging clear and compelling?
Are your strengths and benefits front and centre?
Do your brand and tone of voice match the segments you’re trying to attract?
Put yourself in your potential customer’s shoes – does your message resonate with you?
4. Are you marketing where you customers spend their time?
In today’s marketing environment, there’s no shortage of channels to communicate or be visible on, but the key question is – are you selecting the right places for your chosen audiences? Or are you just hoping they’ll find you with a ‘spray and pray’ approach?
It’s easy to be swayed by chasing ‘likes’ and ‘impressions’ on various platforms (e.g. competitor X is active on Y channel, so we need to be!...), but that’s meaningless unless your customers are active on those channels.
So go back to your existing customer data and look at what it’s telling you or ask customers themselves what type of media they consume to help inform your promotional activity. Again, being targeted and focused in selecting your optimum marketing channels will help to improve your outcomes and be more cost effective.
Try and understand:
Where your target customers spend their time
What they’re searching for online
How they like to buy
Who or what influences them
If you want to get more advanced with your approach, it’s proven that marketing campaigns using multiple channels to amplify and maximise their reach are more effective – as long as they’re relevant to you chosen audience and you can afford it, so be careful.
And to take your promotional activity up another level, think about both long-term brand building activities to increase the salience of your brand, as well as short-term sales activation campaigns. Long-term brand building investment is proven to amplify your short-term activities.
5. Do you know how your customers find you?
If you don’t understand how customers are finding you, how do you know where to invest your valuable time and money?
One of the biggest challenges in marketing, especially in SMEs, is the lack visibility around performance. Without this critical information you can’t make informed decisions for your business.
At a minimum, you should be measuring:
Where your leads are coming from
Cost per lead or acquisition
Conversion rates across different channels
Customer churn rate
Even simple approaches like asking “How did you hear about us?” can give you valuable insight. And once you know what’s working, you can do more of the same, and invest your budget more wisely.
Finding new customers is hard, but it’s not just about who shout’s the loudest or spends the most money. It’s about understanding you market and customers and making smart choices. From targeting the right people, showing up in the right places where they are, and learning what works and doing more of it.
If you're not sure where to start, or don’t have the time, or even if you're doing a lot but just not seeing results, I can help you make sense of it all and build you a plan that works for your business.
If you need a fresh perspective or help developing a customer acquisition strategy, then get in touch – I’m here to help.
