New customers are one of the biggest issues for any business and of course necessary for long term success in your chosen field.
Any business needs to have a strategy for finding new customers and doing so is instrumental to the long term viability of your business.
There are many different ways to attract new customers, and it often depends on the type of business that you run as to how you generate new footfall.
A shop may well rely on footfall in the area to provide ‘walkins’ as a source of new business, whereas many virtual businesses don’t have this opportunity.
Additionally, with the high street struggling to compete with lower cost online options, footfall is falling.
Advertising has always been a good, consistent way of finding new customers, but is expensive and competing online can soon become prohibitively expensive.
Networking is a great way to reach new customers.
The theory behind networking is that you can piggyback on the client bases of similar businesses, that don’t compete with yours.
For example, a nail bar and a hair stylists have similar clients, but are non competing, so why not recommend clients to each other?
Networking does this for you. Imaging having 20 or 30 different local businesses recommending your services to their customers. Imagine how many people these business owners know between them and how your business could benefit from introductions via their owners.
Business networking groups work by connecting your business with the owners of other likeminded businesses, so that you recommend their services and they in turn recommend yours.
One of the most successful of these groups is The ROOM in Bedford which has a track record in building the businesses of its members.