Are you looking to expand your audience base?
Are you wanting to turn first time customers into repeat consumers?
Expanding and keeping your audience is a goal of all scale-ups and SMEs. A customer who makes repeat purchases creates sustainability for your company and having a loyal audience costs much less than only attracting one-time buyers.
This article will give you 3 strategic steps towards growing your audience and then keeping them.
Before embarking on these steps, it’s important to do the preparatory groundwork. For instance, you should evaluate what proportion of your customers make repeat purchases in order to inform your decision-making process and to better understand the challenge before you.
Step 1: Evaluate your Value Proposition
If you’re struggling to get new customers through the door then it may be because your value proposition isn’t as strong as it could be. If you’re not grabbing a potential customer’s attention then they’re unlikely to support your company the way you want them to.
Value proposition is a crucial element of your business. It shows a customer why your company is great, what problem it offers a solution to, and how it does so. This should all be shown in your company’s headline.
Your headline is the single sentence that clearly shows the customer what your business does and the benefits of it. If you can’t describe what your business does in a single sentence then you may have already found your problem.
Evaluating your value proposition is good practice because it strips down your business to the core of what it does and if that is unclear then you may need to rethink and re-strategise.
Value proposition and the creation of your headline falls into marketing strategy and if this isn’t a strength of your business, then you may want to seek advice from a part-time marketing director to help create your marketing strategy and reach more of the most desirable customers.
Step 2: Analyse your offer and price
The next step follows off the back of a strong value proposition which has led a customer to your service or product. Now you have their attention you need to make sure what you have directed them towards is attractive.
You need to measure up to your headline. There’s no point having a great value proposition headline only for your product or service to in actuality have not much to do with it. In fact, a headline that is not cohesive with your product is likely to have the opposite effect on customer loyalty as you will have missed the opportunity to impress your customers.
What you must do is sell a promise and then deliver on that promise. Is what you are offering as good as you say it can be?
And then comes the pricing. This is a difficult balancing game because on the one hand you want the price to be attractive to a customer and at the same time be profitable for you as a business. The bottomline is to keep a good profit margin if you want to grow as a business.
Ultimately if your product matches up with your headline, which has shown that your business gives a solution to a problem the customer needs solving, then the offer and price should match up.
Step 3: Ensure strong after-sales
The after care of a customer is perhaps the most crucial aspect of ensuring customer loyalty. What is the customer’s experience after they have paid their money?
This could cover everything from delivery time to future discounts for returning customers. It is also crucial to communicate clearly that as a business, you offer these positive after-sales aspects.
By making the customer feel satisfied with the service they have received, not just the product they have purchased, you have a greater chance of achieving customer loyalty.
It is important to remain contactable for the consumer after they have completed their transaction. For instance if something were to go wrong with their purchased product and you have a strong help or returns policy then they could still become a loyal customer because they will appreciate the personability and care about your business displays.
Final thoughts
By using these three steps as a basis you can then create an actionable strategic plan to ensure company growth and customer loyalty.
It is always crucial to evaluate your process at the end of a cycle by putting in measurements to your action plan. And then you can analyse by simply asking did we do and achieve what we planned to?
To see where you are in terms of your growth take this free Business Growth Diagnostic to receive a personalised report packed with actionable tips which you can use to begin making improvements to your business from today.
I just wanted to add, that to “show a customer why your company is great” and other aims mentioned, you can turn to active blogging and being present in a social media space. Not as a noisy and irksome pop-up ad, but as an expert and a decent source of information. It’s such a rare thing in a copypaste era.