When you have a business, commercial lawyers are needed to ensure everything you do is legal and watertight, from setting up your business structure through to leases and contracts. But once your business is up and running, it may be that you decide that more growth is necessary to achieve your business goals. Again, legal help may be necessary to ensure everything is done properly and in a way that helps ensure the business has a solid base.
Most businesses, such as web designers need to achieve a certain amount of growth in order to remain successful, and one of the most important ways to do this is to expand your customer base. Even if you have many customers on your books, there will still be some attrition as people move, their needs change or they may decide to try out the competition. So it’s important to spend at least some time in getting more customers.
Here are some tips to help grow your customer base
- Understand your customers’ needs so your business can meet them. To do this you can ask for feedback to see if there are any other products or services you could provide them with.
- Go the extra mile with your service. When you offer excellence and come through with it, people will talk about it to the friends and family, who will be convinced to try you out. Word of mouth is the greatest recommendation.
- Stay in contact with your customers through an email newsletter that offers good value with tips or sales and ask them to forward it to their friends.
- Use social media to ‘listen’ to what people may be saying about your business and find out about what they want and what the general trends are. Places such as Facebook and other social media sites can help you build your business profile and gain new customers.
- Go to networking events which will help build relationships and can spread the word about your business. It encourages other business people to refer customers to you when their own customers mention what else they need.
- Host an event such as a Biggest Morning Tea for your customers offering some freebies and bargains and encourage them to bring their friends.
- Participate in your community. You could sponsor a community club in part or in full, depending on your resources. Or you could participate in some community event to raise your business profile.
- Analyse and measure as you go. You can refine or change things that don’t work, so you are not wasting time or resources for little results.
- Learn about online marketing strategies for your business as you can often get many more customers when you go online.