Customer reach refers to your brand’s visibility and reach. This encompasses a wide range of strategies and yields a domino effect in terms of sales and revenue. But how can your brand reach a huge range of prospective customers? How can you broadcast your company effectively to the general public? This is where your marketing plans for increasing reach, such as SEO and digital advertising, come in.

customer reach

6 tactics to broaden your customer reach

Branding, positioning, graphic design, advertising, social media, and other marketing strategies help expose your business to a wider market. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to marketing and promotion online any more than in offline marketing efforts. Every business must utilize various platforms and methods to improve their customer reach—and yours is no exception. This article discusses six tips to help your business broaden customer reach effectively.

Work with the experts

Are you a novice entrepreneur who’s trying to attract more customers and attain a sales goal? If yes, you need expert advice to handle various obstacles that are not easily visible—especially for someone who is still new in the industry like you.

Startup entrepreneurs should work with experts from reputable agencies to broaden customer reach to segments of their target market through cost-efficient marketing plans and solutions. Here’s how working with the experts helps you:

  • Learn the ins and outs of establishing customer trust and rapport
  • Develop the right marketing strategies to attract more customers
  • Get acquainted with modern tools and innovative solutions to meet marketing goals
  • Cost-sharing and reducing the learning curve by utilizing trained employees and distributing the cost of software and other tools across a number of businesses (see below)

in-house versus agency costsImage courtesy of Alfredo Media

Whether you need a consultant or a whole team to take care of your marketing needs, you’ll find a professional agency that meets your requirements. You can browse agency finder websites to make your search fast and easy.

Use social media influencers

It’s no secret that social media platforms are rapidly replacing offline communities today. People communicate and converge on these platforms more often than socializing outside in parks and public spaces, especially during Covid.

With that said, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t promote your business on these platforms. Since millions of people browse their social media feeds for an average of 145 minutes each day, this gives your business a chance to reach thousands or even millions of users in any given hour.

But the thing is, most social media users don’t like ads. Therefore, you must master the art of subtle marketing. This is possible if you avoid overusing paid ads or paid posts. You must create unique, valuable, and engaging content instead. You can also look for creative ways to boost your following on social media without spending a huge budget. This includes the following strategies:

  • Work with local social media influencers who have a huge following
  • Hold special promos and raffles that provide incentives to people who follow your page or like your post
  • Post diverse social media content to tell your brand story

Use a good combination of digital marketing strategies

The internet is more than just social media. Hence, your digital marketing strategy shouldn’t be limited to social. Using a good combination of platforms and digital strategies helps increase your customer reach. If you target a wide demographic, then utilizing a variety of online platforms helps you reach more people fast.

Here’s how several digital marketing strategies and platforms can broaden your customer reach:

  • Email Marketing: This is a direct form of digital marketing strategy. You can increase your revenue by generating personalized email campaigns sent to subscriber segments instead of utilizing one-size-fits-all messages on social media platforms. Email personalization nurtures customers and improves engagement by catering to each customer’s specific needs. You can also follow up leads and old customers through emails. Therefore, this strategy is not just for existing customers, but for new and old ones as well. For instance, if a visitor searches for a particular product or left one in their shopping cart, send an email with a coupon or inform subscribers when the item goes on sale.
  • Influencer Marketing: As previously mentioned, you can partner your brand with an influencer who will promote your products to their followers. These individuals have a wide reach because they have thousands of social followers who trust them. Due to this trust and respect, their followers are highly receptive to their recommendations. The endorsement by influencers is your brand’s social proof to potential customers.
  • Video Marketing: This digital marketing strategy provides easy-to-digest messages through visual content. By uploading tutorials, explainers, animation, and inspiring videos, you boost your customer reach within different age groups, cultures, interests, and races. Let your imagination run wild by creating epic video marketing campaigns on YouTube, TikTok, and other video streaming platforms.
  • Pay-Per-Click (PPC): PPC refers to an online advertising model wherein advertisers only pay once a user clicks on their ad. In other words, you are billed depending on the number of clicks that your ad generated. However, this strategy is more costly. But if your purpose is to simply increase customer reach, then this is a highly effective tactic.
  • Content Marketing: This digital marketing strategy utilizes published content on your website and blogs to encourage more consumers to engage with your business. With tons of web content pieces online, it is challenging to reach prospective customers. So, you need to create valuable and unique topics, and cross-post or guest post to different sites to reach more people by improving your rank in search. Few users explore past the first page, so improving your rank brings more visitors and improves conversion, as you see below.

organic click through ratesImage courtesy of MOZ

Implement the right SEO strategies

Search engine optimization is a game-changer for many businesses. It’s a great way to optimize brand awareness by implementing the right keywords, links, and content. SEO increases organic or unpaid traffic by making your website highly visible in search engines as shown above. When your site ranks well for certain keywords in search engines, you easily increase customer reach for the brand.

Take note of the following SEO tips to boost your brand visibility:

  • Enforce SEO web design: Design your website with SEO in mind by using keywords appropriately, using clean code, and improving load speed, all of which improve your SEO.
  • Proper keyword placement: Include relevant keywords in the headlines, image descriptions, and video descriptions of your web content. Using a plugin like Yoast for WordPress sites makes using keywords effectively much easier.
  • Create unique and informative content: Optimize customer awareness by creating relevant, helpful, and unique content. This provides great value and experience to your target customers and helps build credibility and authority that search engines usually take into consideration when ranking sites.

Boost your offline marketing strategies

Offline marketing refers to promotional or advertising practices through traditional media such as radio, television, print, billboards, and in-person events. Many businesses promote themselves through these strategies. Today, offline marketing strategies are still effective, as these can support online marketing campaigns.

You make your business more competitive by combining your digital marketing efforts with offline marketing strategies. With multichannel campaigns, your business increases customer reach and multiplies the number of touches (separate exposures) to each prospect. Experts differ, but 8 touches prior to making a sale is commonly cited.

Contrary to popular beliefs, traditional advertising is not just about expensive television, radio, and print ads. Below are some of the best and most cost-efficient offline marketing methods to broaden exposure:

  • Business cards: creating business cards is pretty cheap, just use templated business card generators and replace the details with your information. Find a local graphic designer and print shop to help you get quality printouts of your cards. Then distribute these cards during conventions, meetings, and other professional dealings. Just don’t be one of those who just use events to paper the room with cards.
  • Pamphlets and flyers: giving away printed materials, like pamphlets and flyers, is an excellent way to improve business exposure in your locality. You can give copies during public fairs and conventions. You can also give away copies to visiting customers on the company’s premises.
  • Community engagement: community engagements, such as charity events, sports, concerts, clean-up drives, feeding programs, and the like also help increase customer reach and create a positive image of your brand. You don’t have to force your employees to personally participate in these activities, the company can simply sponsor or donate to the cause. The organizers usually acknowledge these efforts and include your logo and company name in their publicity. This way, you increase customer reach within the region.

Evaluate your marketing efforts

Once you implement your marketing plans, be prepared to measure results through constantly monitoring key metrics. Use analytical tools to analyze data and determine your strong and weak points. Once you know what your strong points are, tweak your strategies to focus on the methods that yielded the best results for your business.

Here some ways to evaluate your sales and marketing efforts:

  • Split testing: Marketers usually perform split or A/B testing to determine the effectiveness of a marketing campaign. You can apply split testing in different ways. For instance, you can create two versions of subject lines for your email campaign or create two versions of an article and observe which one receives a larger number of views and customer responses.
  • Set your KPI: Your Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, play a significant role in evaluating your marketing efforts. KPIs usually include measurement for click-through rates, bounce rates, conversion rates, call back rates, and even likes, shares, and comments (engagement) on social media posts. Through KPIs, you can easily identify which marketing strategies are working well for your brand.
  • Gather consumer feedback: The best way to know whether you have an effective marketing strategy or not is to gather insights from your customers. You can gather customer feedback through surveys, questionnaires, and face-to-face interviews. Also, reviews, testimonials, ratings, social media comments, and referrals are reliable sources of customer views and insights.

Conclusion

There are several ways to increase your customer reach, but working with experts helps you develop efficient marketing strategies that truly have an impact on your target audience. Also, it’s a good idea to use social media and a variety of digital marketing strategies to engage with prospects, new customers, and loyal customers. Aside from that, combining online and offline marketing methods makes your brand more visible to a broader audience. A multi-channel approach will help you reach a wider customer base, then increase traffic and drive sales faster to greater heights.

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