How To Build Your Client List In 2021

Client acquisition is not just the core task of salespeople. It’s also how most marketers are assessed.

If your marketing strategies don’t appeal to the target audience, then they’re not working out for the business, and nor are you!

Did you know new customer acquisition costs five times more than customer retention?

You may be doing really well with your marketing to keep customers buying, but there is such a thing as churn rate or attrition rate where a percentage of customers choose to no longer buy from a company. This is why customer acquisition is essential to all businesses.

New customers need first to replace those who have taken their business elsewhere and take the business to greater heights, i.e. more revenue and market share.

So how do sales and marketing teams convince prospective customers to trust products and the brand?

Marketers have a system that works hard to achieve high customer retention rates and attract new customers.

The secret to building a robust client base is developing a framework to create a loyal audience for your brand and product. You will need:

Product-market fit

When you reach a point where your product or service demand is more than you can supply, you know that you have just got the product-market fit.

Loyal fanbase

No matter which industry your business operates in, market saturation is imminent. If your company has to have any chance to stand out in the long-term, you need more than customers. It would help if you had a loyal fanbase.

Your first few customers do a lot more than add first sales to your business. They turn into your loyal fans, acting as your brand evangelists. To supercharge this strategy, we have a few recommendations.

Giveaway campaigns

If you are starting your brand with a handful of customers, building trust in your audience is complex, especially if you compete in an overcrowded market.

The solution? Start building trust. Give something valuable for free. But remember to get creative here. When you are experimenting with gorilla marketing techniques, you need to get something in return for your products.

Referral programs

Your customers tend to trust brands that their friends and families use, therefore incentivizing your first chain of customers can work wonders in creating the second and consecutive waves of new customers. But remember, one key aspect of a successful referral program is audience motivation.

Turn your existing customer into brand ambassadors.   You will need to give them a reason to take action and communicate with their networks of family, friends and so on, spreading the word of how great a product is or your business generally.

Contest campaigns

Contests can gain both new eyeballs and engage old ones with your brand simultaneously. Increasing participation of a targeted audience with a promise of an incentive ensures you get hold of a fresh audience to track, engage and finally convert into customers in the long term.

Brand management

No amount of branding will profit your business if you do not measure working for you and what is not. Using brand management software is highly beneficial in this process.

Following are some of the top branding strategies that you can use to develop your brand.

Social media

Use social media’s power to continuously stay at the top of your target audience’s minds. It is critical to keep your brand message clear and consistent whenever you communicate with your audience.

Product placement

If you need to get new customers who care about your product, you need to trigger inspiration in them. Remember, people do not buy the what; they buy the why? Investing in buying spots for your products in films and digital entertainment can gain you a lot of traction.

Word of mouth

Did you know word-of-mouth is one of the most sustainable and effective organic marketing strategies, driving 5x more sales than paid marketing?  Your marketing strategies need to satisfy two metrics: cost efficiency and impact. Word of mouth essentially meets both.

Contextual Marketing

Modern marketing is all about time. If you can’t reach your customers when they are thinking about your product, your competitors will.

Contextual marketing is advertising that leverages the content on the page, so how do you do it? Use customer data to drive what, how, when, and where you present content to your audience. It will skyrocket your overall user experience by leaps and bounds.

Interactive Marketing

In this attention economy, if you have to give your audience the ‘wow effect’ consistently, you need more than just a good product. Significant customer product interactions always lead to sustainable brand-customer relationships; therefore, interactive marketing can be your new growth strategy.

Interactive storytelling

Using dynamic content that lets your user choose a path they want to take is the future of content marketing.

Dynamic infographics

There’s a reason why gifs are so popular. 🙂

Interactive video

Videos are an excellent medium of marketing. But with more and more businesses adapting to this form of marketing, your competition is growing stiff. It would help if you thought out of the box. Interactive videos are a great way of achieving this. Give your audience a choice of what they want to consume, and this will increase engagement automatically.

Quiz

Quizzes are already a big hit in the new client generation. But to optimize your campaign, tie your quiz with a reward.

Email Marketing

A personalised email so each recipient understands the content is relevant to them is email marketing at its best.

No wonder emails drive a £42 ROI on every GDP spend. Your audience is much more responsive in such a private landscape. But, to make the most of this channel, here are a few strategies that you can apply.

Interactive emails are the best way to increase engagement with higher conversion rates.

Cold emails are still the most effective way of getting new clients if done in the proper context. Remember, the key to a successful email marketing campaign lies in contextual value-added conversations.

Blogging

If there is one classic example of content marketing that will not die any day soon, blogging. It is your all-in-one tool to gain authority, brand equity, and a loyal customer base. But the future of blogging does look somewhat different.

Following are a few ways in which you can stay one step ahead of your competitors.

Microblogging

What is microblogging?   HubSpot explains it well when they say most audiences want blog posts of less than 1000 words.

The attention span of your online audience is lower than the goldfish. Therefore, you will get a lower bounce rate when you use less content to satisfy your audience’s need to read, grab and go.

Use the KISS rule to create short, to-the-point sharable, and valuable content your audiences will love.

Microblogging is also an exceptional opportunity to create a pre-launch hype about your products in your audience. You can run campaigns where you indulge in microblogging in partnership with micro-influencers.

PR

When you are starting new, digital PR can work wonders for your business. You can always opt for the sponsored post in a well-known e-magazine like Forbes or choose to guest post on someone else’s blog. This allows you to interact and attract an entirely new set of audiences. If you have a budget for a little more, opt for one or two press releases. Your press coverage needs to be aligned with your sales strategy to get added traction in the initial product sales.

User-Generated Content

One of the most significant benefits of using user-generated content is your audience engages with your brand and gets actively involved in the marketing of your products and services. In a way, they are your extended marketing team. But if that is not a big reason for you to invest in UGC model marketing, the sales potential indeed is.

According to the Nielsen Norman Group, a whopping 92% of modern buyers trust organic content over traditional advertising. You can indulge in a variety of user-generated content. From custom reviews to hashtag campaigns to video content and gamification, you can experiment with many content formats here.

Parting Advice

Marketing is an ever-evolving world. What works today might not work out tomorrow. This means to create a sustainable marketing plan truly, you need to get your fundamentals right.

Your audience and their respective behavior towards your brand will guide you on which strategy has the potency to be the next big trend.

The core of building a rock-solid client list is having meaningful conversations frequently with your audience.

The better you get at creating impactful brand-customer encounters, the better your client list goes.