Without lots of customers, it’s not easy for a business to grow. If you’re facing challenges gaining customers, content marketing can provide the solution you’re looking for.
It’s time to learn how to attract new customers to your business with content marketing.
And, because you’re here, you’ll learn tips from someone who does this for a living! Let’s take a closer look at how you can start seeing new customers roll in by having a content marketing strategy.
Table of Contents
1. How to Attract New Customers? Learn What They Want.
People on late-night infomercials aside, most of us aren’t even close to psychics. With that in mind, it’s no wonder so many companies struggle to know exactly what their audiences want.
Sure, you could spend time learning how to use new tools. After doing a little digging, you can find out more about your customer demographics. But what if there was a better way?
When you create new content, you’ll have a great way of learning how to attract new customers. Hint: They’re the ones liking and sharing your content!
While they might seem like simple gestures, these likes and shares are visible signs that your brand is doing something right. Keep doing it by building on the topics getting the most engagement (likes/shares/favorites).
Also, when you see people liking, sharing, and commenting on your content, engage back with them. Respond to comments. Leave a few likes on their pages.
You never know, they might become your company’s biggest brand ambassadors in the near future.
2. Target Customers With Authority
Another major benefit of content marketing is that it builds authority. And, if you want to know how to attract new customers, being authoritative helps.
One of the key ways to build authority is through content marketing. With a content marketing strategy, you can start writing content for websites, social media pages, emails, you name it.
Where can you go to show off your expertise? Quite a few places, actually. Here are some of the best options:
One of the most popular websites, Reddit is a community of content chosen by the people. To categorize content, this platform uses “subreddits.” As I’ve personally learned early on in my marketing career, the Reddit community does not like being pitched to. So, make sure you’re posting content here that legitimately adds value.
Yahoo Answers
Another great source for information, Yahoo Answers has questions about all kinds of content. Create an account, add your answer, and toss a link back to your website.
Industry Forums
An incredibly underutilized way to get traffic and links, forums should be an essential part of your company’s content marketing plan. With enough time and effort, forums are great sources of help regarding how to attract new customers.
Quora
Quora is like Yahoo Answers, but way more popular. Create an account, find your niche, and start posting answers.
As you get more comfortable showing those skills off, launch a website if you haven’t already. If your company has a website, create a blog and place your new content there.
3. Put Your Business in Front of a New Audience
No list of tips for how to attract new customers would be complete without guest posting. Companies have been using this strategy for years to expand their reach.
What is guest posting? Guest posting is simply content on a website from someone who isn’t a regular writer. Now, this is a simple explanation. Let’s look at why guest posting is so important in example form.
For example, let’s say that you own an automotive repair business. You’re trying to gain new customers, but having some difficulties. In the meantime, you get a guest post placed on another automotive-related website.
Let’s also say that this website gets 50,000 monthly readers. 10% (5,000) of them read your post. From there, 1% of those 5,000 readers become new customers.
Doesn’t sound like much, right? But 1% of 5,000 is 50. So, this would mean that one blog post resulted in 50 new customers,
Now, does it seem more worth it to guest post? Guest posting does take time and energy to find the right places to partner with. However, guest posting is something that definitely needs to be a part of your company’s marketing strategy.
In many cases, the rate at which your company’s target audience grows will begin to slow down. If your company is struggling with how to attract new customers begins to slow, don’t worry. Instead, use this situation as an opportunity to connect with other audiences by guest posting.
Guest posting is when one website accepts and publishes content from another website. Chances are, you’ve seen this marketing strategy used in many creative ways. The process behind guest posting is fairly simple:
- Your business finds other companies (not competitors).
- Speak with these companies to publish a guest post.
- Create content for this other business.
- Your company’s content gets shared with a new audience.
With a great guest post, you can attract customers to your business from other companies. Plus, getting guest posts published acts as a type of word-of-mouth advertising. More companies are likely to let you share content if your business has other published guest posts.
4. Attract Potential Customers With News About Sales
Many people think that content marketing means typing hundreds or thousands of words for a new post. In the words of Dwight Schrute: “False.”
If you’re presenting digital content to an online audience, it’s content marketing. This means that email newsletters, social media posts, YouTube videos, they’re all content your company markets to an audience.
When your company is having sales, use content to let the public know about it. Maybe you could write about a few things that will be on sale.
You can also create a few digital coupons that only email subscribers get to use.
Your options are unlimited.
5. Flip the Tables With User-Generated Content
I completely understand if you’re scratching your head right now. User-generated content might sound strange when it comes to attracting new customers, but it’s a simple concept.
User-generated campaigns involve text, videos, and images that a company’s customers create. After this happens, the company benefits from new content created by their customers.
I say this is a way to “flip the tables” because your business is off the hook when it comes to making this type of content.
With that said, user-generated content will take a bit of work. If your company doesn’t have a following yet, keep building content and that will soon change.
Even if your company doesn’t have a fanbase, you can still start working on a user-generated campaign. This is a great type of marketing for smaller companies.
Look for people that might be interested in your brand by seeing what similar brands others follow.
After building up a list of individuals, message them and let them know about your business. You could make them an offer to send them product samples or free products in exchange for a shout-out in one of their posts. Boom, your brand is now getting user-generated content.
6. Reconnect With Customers
As the saying goes: you can’t win them all. But you can use content to reengage with lost customers online. If you have previously collected feedback from your customer base, use this information as your starting point.
You can also take a look at content you haven’t created before. After that, think about sending out this content through social media sites. Also, send it out in an email marketing blast. It could reach some of those people who haven’t made a purchase from you in a while.
7. Use Reviews in Your Company’s Content
Every business wants happy customers and more clients. One of the best ways to achieve that goal is by creating and marketing content involving reviews. Of course, these won’t be just any reviews. We’re talking about positive reviews about your business!
Reviews are powerful ways for a company to recognize how to attract new customers. One reason that reviews bring customers to your business is that they’re trusted. A review that someone reads on the internet acts as a type of online referral.
With that said, your company’s customers might not have the time or energy to check out review sites all day. So, get out the positive word-of-mouth about your business by displaying reviews in your company’s content.
If you want to make even more of an impact on your company’s target market, start publishing testimonials. Think of testimonials as types of long-form reviews. Customers love a good story. What better of a story to tell than a true one mentioning how much your company helped another person or business?
8. It’s Time to Get Social
I can’t have a list of how to attract new customers without mentioning social media. What makes social media such a great way to attract more customers? For one, hundreds of millions of people around the world use social media platforms. With so many potential customers coming to social media websites, your company can get seen by many people if you’re social savvy.
Another reason why it’s important to use these websites is because they’re great platforms to interact with people. Whatever you do, don’t make the mistake that many companies make after joining a new social media platform: ghosting it.
Leverage social media as a way to let existing customers know what your company is up to. You can also let prospective customers learn why doing business with your company is such a great idea.
9. Launch an Affiliate Program
Don’t want to make engaging content on your own? I totally get it. If that’s the case, consider starting an affiliate program. It’s fairly easy to understand how an affiliate program works.
First, you have affiliates. Next, these affiliates utilize their marketing efforts to get traffic to your business. If these people make a purchase from your business, the affiliate who sent them gets paid a portion of this sale.
You’ll spend money after affiliates successfully bring you new customers. However, the increase in sales that affiliates bring can make them extremely valuable business partners.
Having affiliates in your corner is one of the most popular marketing strategies, especially for online businesses.
10. Optimize Your Content (If You Haven’t Already)
What if you already have this magical content we’ve spent so much time talking about? If so, that’s great! You can do what many smart companies are doing while attracting new customers, and that’s optimizing their content.
With over a decade of helping companies with their search engine optimization efforts, I could, and have, written thousands of words about optimizing websites.
Since you want to learn about attracting more customers, I’ll keep the SEO discussion brief. If you’re even somewhat skilled with computers and programs, performing basic website optimizations shouldn’t be too difficult.
If you want a perfectly optimized website, are in a highly competitive industry, or don’t have time for SEO, I’d recommend leaving this work to a trained professional.
Getting back on subject, let’s talk about why optimizing existing content is so important. If you want a successful business, optimizing your content is great because it gets your company’s message out to as many people as possible. It’s also great for attracting new customers.
A business can create perfect content that’s perfect for its target market. Unfortunately, not many people will never see this content if it’s not optimized for search engines to find.
11. Start Making Videos
In 2022, one of the best ways for attracting new customers is through video. By creating helpful videos, you can reach your customers at all times (even after your business hours are over).
Best of all, video creation is now a low-cost way to attract more customers to your business. These days, you only need a smartphone and some decent lighting to get started.
It’s understandable if this method of reaching local customers or national customers feels a little nerve-wracking. But, with enough practice, even the most camera-shy small business owner can be a video rockstar. Let your industry expertise shine and your business could have many future customers. Plus, the right videos can help improve search engine rankings by showing up in the results of relevant keywords.
What’s also great about a video marketing strategy is that it can lead to your business starting to show up in search engine results. Search engines like Google love displaying video content to its users.
12. Start a Referral Program for Existing Customers
Sometimes, if you want something bad enough, you have to ask for it. This rule also applies to understanding how to attract new customers. One way to achieve this goal is by setting up a referral program.
Instead of an affiliate program that almost anyone can join to get paid, referral programs operate in a slightly different way. Even though you might be speaking to a loyal customer, it’s still a good idea to offer something in return. What can you offer to them? Free or discounted products!
Understandably, most companies don’t exactly want to give out free stuff. But if giving out a few things gets you a wave of new clients, that’s a small price to pay.
After you find a few potential clients for your referral program, ask them to share your company’s content. By doing this, your online business could start growing its amount of current customers quickly.
13. Ask for Shares in Your Content
If you want to learn how to attract new customers, there’s nothing wrong with asking readers to share your company’s content. Whether this strategy works or not depends on how you ask. Most companies ask for a reader to share content once and at the end of a post.
But begging people to share your content every other sentence won’t work well to increase your customer base. One or two genuine and nicely worded asks to share your content are plenty.
I recommend at least including one quick ask for a share in every post and piece of social media content your create.
14. Attract New Customers With First-Time Shopper Discounts
Another proven way to attract new customers is with discounts. However, the discounts I’m talking about are only for new customers. Of course, you don’t want to completely eliminate discounts for current customers. However, this online marketing method is a great way to attract new customers.
First, you’ll need to think of how you’ll attract new customers. Most companies attract new customers with a discount or free product. If you offer software or another type of digital product, a free trial or a few free tools might entice customers.
It’s a good idea to consider advertising that you offer discounts to first-time customers on every possible online channel. That means reaching out to social media followers, creating paid ads, and anywhere else you’re reaching customers.
15. Reach Out to Complementary Businesses
Another great way to learn how to attract new customers you is by partnering with complementary businesses. These companies aren’t directly competitive with your business.
For instance, let’s say you own a local business that sells air fresheners and wants to partner with other businesses. You wouldn’t want to partner with Charlie’s Air Fresheners down the street, that’s direct competition. Plus, most competitors aren’t looking to partner up with each other.
So, what other national or local businesses could your air freshener company partner with? A few that come to mind are car dealerships and cleaning companies. These partnerships can vastly increase new business because your company gets in front of new audiences.
16. Attend Local Events
These days, many companies focus on ways to increase sales online. However, you can also attract new customers by thinking locally. Chances are, there are community events happening in your area. Most of these events need participants, sponsors, or both.
So, consider taking a break from the laptop and attend events in your area. Whether it’s a local sports game, business development meeting, or something else, these events are great ways to get involved in your community.
17. Get Behind a Cause
Whether you own a small business or a large corporation, getting behind the right cause is never a bad thing. Customers spend a lot of their time getting behind causes that appeal to them. When your business also supports causes, it helps these small businesses or massive companies form a personal connection with different customers.
With that said, getting behind a cause should mean much more than a compelling story. It’s also important to donate to these charities, offer a way for customers to donate, or otherwise contribute to the charities of your choosing. Some organization even hold charity events that your company can attend or sponsor.
As you can see, content marketing can be a major help when it comes to how to attract new customers. Whether you work for a small business or a Fortune 500 company, you can attract more customers with an effective content marketing strategy.
Alex Eagleton is a copywriter and digital marketer passionate about helping companies connect with customers. Throughout the past decade, he’s worked with companies including Referral Rock, Connecteam, and Ramsey Solutions. He’s a versatile writer who understands how to align with companies, truly matching their voices and tones.
When he’s not writing, he enjoys spending time with his dogs, reading, and playing guitar.
You can reach him by emailing alex@contentmarketinglife.com.