Six Steps To Find New Customers

Step 1 – Clearly define your benefits statements

Potential customers want to hear about how your offering will help them. Typically they will want to move away from an undesirable situation, or move towards something they want. If your offering can help them do either of these, then they are potentially a customer. It is crucial that you talk about your offering in these terms – i.e. what it will do for your customer, rather than just what it is.

Step 2 – Make sure you know who you are trying to reach

With around 4 million companies in the UK, and over 50 million consumers, you need to work out who is most likely to need what you offer. This process is known as ‘targeting’, and is the next step to finding new customers for your business.

Companies can be targeted using a number of factors such as location, industry sector, and company size. As well as the type of company you want to sell to, you also need to be clear on which department or particular job titles within the company are of most interest to you.

On the consumer side, you will again need to think carefully about what types of people are most likely to benefit from your product or service. Marketers typically make use of demographic profiles as a way of describing a particular section of the consumer market. For example, you might want to target the single, female, middle-class, age 18-24, college educated demographic.

Step 3 – Decide on your ‘marketing mix’

Many people view marketing as a very narrow range of activities centred around advertising (trade press, local newspapers, radio). In fact successful marketing to find new customers is a combination of different activities. As well as advertising, you can include trade shows, email marketing, direct mail, on line marketing, telemarketing, and others.

Step 4 – Put together your activity plan

Success at finding new customers is like playing the ‘long game’. In other words, you will become more successful as you establish and continue your marketing activity. This means having a plan of what you are going to do each week to attract new customers. It is easy to allow your marketing work to slide towards the bottom of your priority list – resist that temptation!

Step 5 – Make sure you can measure your results

Finding the best ways to attract new customers is always to some extent a case of trial and error. There is no harm in this, as long as you are able easily to see which of your activities have worked well and which have not. In other words, you must be able to measure the results of your efforts. Many companies do this by, for example, asking on their website enquiry form where the customer heard about their company. This is invaluable information that you can use in Step 6.

Step 6 – Do more of what works, and stop doing what doesn’t work

This seems very obvious. However, our experience clearly shows that there are many companies out there who are continuing with the marketing they have always done – without knowing whether or not they are being successful at attracting new customers. So you need to review your results regularly, and do more of what works.

Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com

Small Biz Chooses Search over Social Networks

clipped from www.marketingcharts.com More than three-fourths (76%) of small-business owners have not found social networking sites to be helpful in generating business leads or for expanding their business during the last year, and 86% say they have not used social networking sites to get business advice or information, according to a new Citibank/GfK Roper survey. The survey of 500 small business executives across the US revealed that despite widespread consumer use and increasing marketing efforts on social-media sites - such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn - among larger organizations, managers in smaller businesses apparently are not jumping on the bandwagon.

Prepare to Impress Prospects in 10 Seconds

Source: eGrabber Newsletters

In sales, you usually have the first 30 seconds to get your prospect's attention. Many successful sales people will say that it’s not true - you have only 10 seconds. Given this, it is critical that you find a way to engage your prospect as quickly as possible. In the first 3 seconds, you would say your name and where you are calling from. What is important is the next 7-8 seconds; it should focus on why the prospect has to listen to your call. You can use this to

- ask a pertinent question
- place an elevator pitch
- provide a startling/ interesting statistic relevant to the prospect's industry/ business

or basically say anything that would engage your prospect’s interest.

Remember, this tip can only improve your success rate in the opening round. Ultimately, your selling success will depend on the number of qualified calls you make - the more calls you make the more you close.

Online Lead Generation Report (B2C) 2009 - Highlights

Source: econsultancy.com

Two thirds of company respondents (65%) say that their use of online lead generation has increased in the last year, compared to only 11% who say that it has decreased.

The majority of client-side respondents see cost effectiveness (72%) and the ability to target (60%) as benefits of online generation.

Despite the recession, there are still more companies (53%) who, in the last year, have increased their overall marketing budget rather than decreased it.

There is a continued trend towards decreased use of offline channels for generating consumer leads.

A Proven Tip to Generate Leads using Twitter

Source: eGrabber Newsletter

Did you know that you can use Twitter to generate sales leads in real time for you? You can register for Twitter's notification service that will let you know if someone adds a post that includes your search terms.

For example, if you are a florist, you can set the service to notify you for phrases such as "anniversary", "celebration", "special event", etc. With this, you will get notifications (through text or email messages) when people tweet with your search terms. These are people likely to be interested in your services. You have to then follow that person, reply to their tweet and offer your services.

A marketing services provider might register for phrases such as "lead generation", "campaigns" etc. Remember, the key here is to choose right phrases that are unique to your target market.

How to find Business Email Addresses using LeadResearcher

LeadResearcher enables you to:

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LeadResearcher helps you to find all the possible email addresses of employees working in a given company. Input a Company's Name and click on "Find E-mail Ids of a company" button. LeadResearcher will list all the E-mail addresses of employees in that Company that are available across the Internet.

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Media Planning - Buying List 2010

clipped from www.marketingcharts.com