Marketing Techniques

Growing your business in today’s increasingly competitive market can seem a little daunting, if not terrifying for some of us. The FSB team has put together 5 handy tips that could help you and your business succeed.

1. Capture Leads

It is vitally important to capture details on any prospective leads – whether this is online via your website or email campaign or offline via your place of business; at an exhibition; or a networking event. A lead is someone who shows an interest in buying your product and service and is therefore ‘warm’ to your business. It is much easier to sell to warm customers as opposed to ‘cold’ customers who may never have heard of your company. Make a database of all your leads and then you can look to nurture them.

2. Nurture Prospects

Once you have your list of prospective customers, you then need to nurture them and engage with them. If you do not communicate with them in a suitably quick time frame, many warm leads can turn stone cold. For example, if you get some positive leads from an exhibition, you do not want to leave it months until you then speak with them again. In that time, other businesses will have approached them and your company will be long forgotten. You need to keep your business fresh in their minds so send out emails, engage with them via social media or even pick up the phone.

3. Convert Sales

Good communication will help you build up a relationship with your prospects and form a clear picture as to what they want and need from a product / service. If you listen carefully to them and take on board everything they say, it will enable you to successfully deliver a service that the customer requires. It needs to be your company’s aim to tick every box for the prospect.

4. Make Payment Easy

Once you have converted your prospect, you then need to ensure that processing payments is simple for the customer, whether it’s by phone, face-to-face or online. If you take payments over the counter, you need to think about the speed of payments to avoid queues forming. Mobile terminals are great for this.

Mobile card payment terminals allow you to accept payments anywhere there is network coverage and a mobile payment terminal can utilise contact-less technology which serves customers in seconds. If you are taking payments online, it is worth bearing in mind the popularity of PayPal.

5. Get Referrals

Now that you have a happy and satisfied customer, you need to make sure they tell everyone they know about your great service. Word of mouth marketing is one of the most effective ways of increasing sales but it is often overlooked by businesses.

Some people will just naturally tell their friends and family about a great experience with a company but some will require an incentive to make a recommendation. This could be in the form of shopping vouchers, a free gift or even money off another one of your products or services. This option is great for businesses as it means you’re directing the original customer back to your company as well as their recommended friend, family member or business contact.

At FSB we can make thinks a little easier for you, our FSB Business Leads service can provide you with lots of valuable information.

If you want to find new customers, deliver high quality marketing campaigns and build your business profile, our business data services can help you achieve those objectives. Find the service here.