How to Harness the Power of Existing Customers to Get New Ones

A good business person should always be looking for ways to bring in new leads. Broadly, there are two categories of building leads. There’s the interruptive method of using advertisements and popups that divert attention toward you and there’s the organic method of building a presence that naturally puts you in the way of attention. Either way, the business and the brand are speaking for themselves. However, there might be more potential in getting your customers to speak for the brand and, in turn, use them to build new leads.

Make word-of-mouth work for them

Word-of-mouth is proven to be more effective than the direct approach in marketing. You can’t build a reputation all on your own, after all, it has to have some support. But you don’t necessarily have to wait for that word-of-mouth to grow all on its own. Instead, you can reward customers for engaging in it. Some businesses do this by turning customers into partners, giving them a share of successful referrals. Others will offer discounts for social media posts publicizing the end of a transaction. A referral program doesn’t just incentivize existing customers, however. It can be a part of the branding package that gives new customers more reason to become a customer in the first place.

Get in the giving habit

There’s also the fact that people shop almost as often for other people in their life as often as they shop for themselves. If you’re unsure that your product makes a great gift, you should consider using a questionnaire post-purchase to ask customers directly. Whatever method you use to affirm that gift-giving and social buying are a big part of the business, you should capitalize on it. Tools like Adobe Spark can make it simple to start stocking gift cards and certificates within the store, after all. That way, it is a lot easier for gift-buyers to introduce friends to the store thanks to the versatility of what’s on offer.

Give more reasons to share

It’s not all about the products and the services, necessarily. You should have other means of converting visitors into customers. The best means of conversion are those that have the most sharing potential. For instance, creating content that is informative or interesting and related to the products you sell or the industry you’re in. Creating content that’s a lot easier to share is going to yield better results, too. Infographics convey the same information as written content with a lot less effort needed from the reader. Video marketing can be even more effective still at converting those who watch it. Make sure the sharing factor is always a consideration when you’re creating new branded content.

The reason you want your customers building customers is because of the power of social proof. People tend to trust their peers more than they would immediately trust a marketing message. If you can get your customers to vouch for you with any of the methods above, you could be looking at a much more effective method of conversion.