Customer reach is the potential number of customers your business can reach through any marketing channel or campaign.
For instance, when you’re using a TV commercial to market your business, your marketing reach is the number of people who will see the advert. For optimum growth of your customer base, you need to keep increasing your customer reach.
According to a CBInsights, poor marketing causes the death of 14% of startups. Having a poor customer reach is a key characteristic of poor marketing and could lead to losses and the eventual failure of your business.
Here are 7 ways you can increase the results of your marketing efforts, and increase brand awareness and profits in the process.
1. Increase your network and partnerships
When you’re running an online business, it’s important to understand that your customers and potential customers already have relationships with other businesses.
Every time you partner with other businesses that offer complementary products or services, you’re putting yourself in a position to reach a new audience and potentially increase your customer base.
If you’re wondering how you can create profitable business relationships, I’ve got you covered. Let’s say you have 1000 subscribers on your email list, and you’re running a webinar or another online event. If you partner with a bigger business that targets the same market and has 10000 subscribers, you’re exposing your brand to a wider audience than you already have.
If only 40 % of the new prospects visit your website, you just increased your customer reach by 4 times your current email subscribers, and you may even get more email subscribers and make lots of sales from a single partnership.
2. Offer a newsletter
When trying to improve your overall customer reach, it is important to increase the efficiency of individual marketing channels to determine which efforts will give you a higher ROI.
Compared to all other marketing channels, email marketing delivers the highest ROI, with every $1 spent giving a return or $38.
When trying to increase your market reach and increase sales, email marketing should be one of your first priorities. When people are on your newsletter list, they’re always on the lookout for your email updates. With just a simple email, you already have a number of people seeing your offer even before you spend time and resources trying to get new visitors to your website.
When you’re trying to improve the customer reach of a specific campaign, your email should be the first place to focus on. Most of your subscribers will click through to your offer, and some of them may even make a purchase.
3. Use social media
Very many businesses use social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to generate new leads and to engage their customers.
On social media, an increase in customer reach can be measured by your increase in content views and the number of fans you have on each platform.
When your goal is to increase brand awareness and customer reach, the content you share on these platforms is paramount to the results you’ll get. As a rule of thumb, the amount of content you share on social media is directly proportional to the increase in customer reach that you experience.
There are 3 key steps to improving customer reach through social media;
- Share a variety of useful content. The more content you share, the higher your chances of getting seen.
- Promote your social pages on your website. Start by adding social follow buttons to your site and ask your customers and visitors to follow you on social media. Secondly, add social sharing buttons to all your blog posts. Each share is a chance to get seen by new potential customers.
- Connect and engage with your fans and new followers. 71% of consumers who have had a good social experience with a brand is likely to recommend it to others.
4. Master referral marketing
Referral marketing is the spreading of the word about your brand, your products, and services through past and existing customers.
Research done on consumer trust has shown that 84% of consumers either somewhat or completely trust recommendations from friends, colleagues, and family about products and services.
There is a lot of profit to make from selling your services and products to your customers, but there is much more than you can earn from them through referrals.
Every time your customers are happy with your brand or its products, they are likely to recommend you to other people close to them. This means that you will be gaining more customers with very little input from you.
If you want to take advantage of referrals, there are two things you need to do;
- Give your customers the best customer experience. No one will recommend you if your customer service sucks or when your products don’t meet their expectations.
- Ask for referrals. When you’re not receiving a number of referrals you want, a simple request maybe the simple nudge your customers need to refer you to their friends.
5. Target multiple audiences
When starting a business, many business owners have a hard time narrowing down their target market. There is too little data to go on, and lots of other ‘more important’ decisions to make.
This often leads many small businesses to target more than one audience, and then improve their targets as they grow. And there is no problem having more than one target audience; it’s actually good to have more than one target customer in mind.
It increases your customer reach since there are more potential customers, and also acts as a safeguard against loses when one of the markets decreases in profitability.
While having multiple audiences for your businesses is very profitable and efficient, you can have a very hard time nurturing relationships with both audiences on the same platform.
There are two solutions to this issue;
- Blogging. You can write blog posts for each target market and then segment your readers according to their interests. Hubspot does this easily by having three blogging segments; marketing, sales and customer success blogs. Using blog segmentation, they’re able to engage multiple types of audiences by creating personalized content for each segment.
- Paid advertising. In a nutshell, any form of advertising allows you to reach a wider audience and increase your market reach. When you intend to reach multiple audiences, paid advertising allows you to create custom messages that are unique to each of your target markets. It allows you to increase your market reach in a more targeted and more efficient way.
6. Incorporate visual marketing into your marketing strategy
Visual marketing is the use of visuals such as images, videos, and infographics in your marketing efforts.
A study by Skyword revealed that article views increased by 94% when the articles contained relevant images or infographics when compared to other similar articles.
When trying to improve your marketing reach, the higher the number of people that see your marketing material, the better.
Visual marketing works for both online and offline marketing tactics. For example, digital wrapping on vehicles, a visual marketing technique, has been found to create outstanding effects on customer minds by grabbing their attention quickly. When compared with other marketing tactics, one of the reasons that car wrapping is a better marketing tool is because it has been found to increase customer reach.
Regardless of the type, size and location of your business, visual marketing is a powerful tool to help you reach your marketing goals this year.
7. Give free trials
Everybody loves free giveaways. These include free trials, free gifts, discounts and promotional sales.
While offering free stuff to your customers is great for nurturing relationships and turning them into brand loyalists, it also gives you a chance to improve your marketing reach.
Instead of giving freebies to all customers, you can create a condition where to receive the giveaway, each customer or visitor must spread the news on one or more social channels.
For every customer that takes your offer, you’re sure that their followers and friends are getting to know your brand. And if their interests are similar to your customer’s, it’s a guarantee that you’ll get new customers for your business.
Alternatively, you can give free giveaways to bloggers, podcasters and other individuals with big social followings. In return, they can promote your business to their followers or invite you as a guest on their show (for podcasters).
With promotional products drawing as many as 500% more referrals from satisfied customers than an appeal letter alone, offering your current customers a promotional product might be all you need to double, triple or even quadruple your current customer reach.
Take control of your customer reach
You want to make more profits from your business, right?
While reading multiple posts on increasing customer reach might give you lots of insights into the topic, nothing produces more results than action.
If you want to get the maximum benefit from these seven marketing hacks, take the first step towards more customer reach by choosing one of the techniques and implementing it in your business today.
There is no one-size-fits-all technique. You have to be willing to examine your business and do lots of testing to find out what gives you the highest ROI.
After determining what works for you, ditch what doesn’t work, and practice more of what gives you more customer reach, brand awareness and attracts more potential customers to your business.
Useful suggestions, Hassan…
Small and medium scale businesses should be aware of the basic tricks of online promotions which might helps them to generate productive leads.
It has been found that online promotional efforts are more effective and cheaper way of promotion as compared to conventional mode of promotion.