How to Attract New Customers to Your Small Business

As a small business, growing your audience and attracting new customers is the ultimate goal. When working to attract new customers, your goals, focus, messaging, channels, and content will all be different than if you were trying to attract repeat customers.

Goals

When you are trying to attract customers who have never heard of your small business, your main focus should be awareness. They know nothing about your business, and are likely unsure if you are a reputable brand. The more aware of your business they become, the more likely they are to build trust with you as well. A very popular marketing statistic states that it takes 7 to 8 touchpoints before someone is willing to make a purchase with a brand/business. Those touchpoints need to build awareness and share useful information on the small business.

Focus

As a small business, your focus changes when attracting new customers. Now that we have established our goals of building awareness and trust, we have to focus that energy. Focusing on visibility, first impressions, education, and creating a low-barrier of entry.

Visibility: You want to get your small business in front of fresh eyes. This might include using sponsorships, social media, or SEO.

First impressions: For a potential customer to be willing to make a purchase with you, they first need to feel confident about who you are as a business. Your brand presentation needs to be consistent and stellar. Your messaging and offers need to hook someone in quickly. The human attention span is believed to be between 6-8 seconds – with that number being even lower when it comes to ads and social media content.

Education: Who are you as a small business? What do you have to offer potential customers, and how are you different from your competitors? The only way potential customers will learn this about you is if you give me places in their customer journey to learn that information. 

Creating a low-barrier of entry: Make it easy for potential customers to take a chance on your small business. This includes free trials, discounts, lead magnets (think a quiz or a guide), or easy-to-understand service packages. 

Messaging

When trying to attract new customers, your messaging has a huge impact. Make sure you are informing your target audience who you are and why they should be considering your small business.

Not sure who your target audience is? Here is an article on how to create a customer avatar. We also have YouTube videos on the subject here.

Channels

The types of marketing channels you use should reflect your goals and focus. When trying to attract new customers you want to use marketing channels that can help you build brand awareness, increase visibility and first impressions, allow you to educate your audience, and allow you to provide a low-barrier of entry. Examples of marketing channels include:

• Paid ads (Google, Meta, YouTube)
• Social media content targeting broader audiences
• Collaborations, sponsorships, or events
• Optimized website + landing pages
• Lead generation (email opt-ins, freebies)

Content

When creating content designed to attract new customers, your focus should be on introducing potential customers to your small business, and providing them with educational information on your business. This should also be very benefits-based. You want to introduce potential customers to your business and show them why they should be interested in what you have to offer.

When looking to attract new customers to your small business, it is important to remember your goals, focus, messaging, channels to use, and what type of content will work best.