When it comes to finding new customers and leads, these business owners swear by these five helpful strategies.
Advertising can be prohibitively expensive for smaller companies, and marketing efforts can sometimes seem scattershot. We asked five business owners to share the methods they used for discovering powerful new customer lines that actually worked. These grassroots efforts show that you don’t necessarily need to have to spend a lot to reach a new market and discover new customers.
Giveaways
“We do product giveaways every month for the wholesale merchandise we sell. Last month, for example, we gave away $5,000 in products to nonprofit organizations that support kids. We started these giveaways after Hurricane Katrina, when nonprofit groups came to us looking to buy blankets and other items for people affected by the disaster.
“At the time, we weren’t doing any business in the nonprofit world, but we recognized the opportunity. We started reaching out to nonprofits with these giveaways, and now half of our business is with nonprofits, including national contracts with the Salvation Army and Kiwanis.”
—Marc Joseph, former CEO & President, DollarDays
Partnering
“The demographic for our men’s laundry detergent is very specific—22- [to] 30-year-old single males with above-average spending who care about appearance, scent [and] the details surrounding their life. Paramount Pictures and MGM reached out to us because they understood our demographic was very close to their target for the new film Ben Hur.
“We agreed to put them on a lot of our digital in late August, timed with the film release, and they gave us tickets to give away to new customers. For the customer, if you buy a bottle of our detergent and get free Ben Hur tickets, that’s a much higher value proposition than just buying the detergent. We are only two-and-a-half weeks into the partnership, but already we’ve seen an amazing decrease in customer-acquisition cost. We’ve beaten our best sales months by 25%, and we have earned 1.9 [times] our normal amount for this ad spend.”
—Leif Frey, Founder, Frey for Men
Social Media & Email
“We do social-media giveaway promotions for our bodysurfing handboards about once a quarter, when we have a new product or something exciting going on that we want to promote. The way it works is people need to share a specific photo via their social media, [t]hen their followers see it and they want to enter. We gain a lot of new emails, which is our goal.
“Our bump is anywhere between 200 to 500 new emails per promotion. Then, right after each campaign, we set up targeted emails to those new, potential customers with a coupon offer. About 30% of our sales come from our email campaigns, so that’s why our big focus is on growing that email list.”
—Angela & Steve Watts, Owners, Slyde Handboards
Sampling
“We hosted a beer-tasting room at the Insight Innovation Exchange in June 2016, where visitors played one of our gamification-based experiences as part of the beer-tasting exercise. We published real-time results of the most- and least-favorite beers on tap, but, more importantly, we were able to capture over 100 leads for a total cost of under $10,000. The sales cycle is fairly long in our industry, so many of these leads aren’t likely to generate revenue for another three to six months, but in just eight weeks, we’ve already converted enough beta participants to cover the cost of the event. As an online subscription service, this was tremendously effective for us.”
—Jason Anderson, President, Insights Meta & Datagame
Listening
“I started doing a listening tour during the Great Recession in late 2008, early 2009 to strum up new business. I was already scheduled for some travel around the country in Q4/Q1 for meetings, so I used the trips as an opportunity to hear from current clients and prospects about how they were handling the downturn.
“Themes started to emerge. For example, on one trip everyone was asking about social media and whether or not they needed a blog. After several discussions, I summarized my notes and sent them out to share what I was hearing. Then, given all the questions around social media, I offered to put together a talk and workshop to discuss current trends. I immediately got replies asking me to book, and it all led to more work. Now it is just something I try to do regularly to keep a pulse on the market and find new work.”
—Paige Arnof-Fenn, Founder & CEO, Mavens & Moguls
Find more small business tips here:
https://blog.dollardays.com/2021/06/21/ideas-for-starting-a-small-business/