subject: How To Find Potential Customers [print this page] Figuring out how to find potential customers can often be the difference between failure and success. Here are four areas to focus on the improve results in this area:
1. Professional Networking
One of the quickest and most effective ways to find prospects is to invest time and energy in professional networking. Professional networking refers to going to events and getting out in the community to meet new people with the goal of expanding your professional network.
In just about every city, there are some sort of events every week that you can go to and get exposed to people you do not know. With each person that you meet, you have an opportunity add a new contact to your network. And the power in this is not that these contacts could be prospects, but more so that each contact could be a potential referral partner by connecting you to their network where there might be potential customers.
2. Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most power solutions for how to find potential customers. This involves making changes and manipulating your website so that search engines send targeted web traffic to your site.
The key here is that when a user puts in a keyword search into a search engine, the designers of the search engine want to send the user to websites that are the most valuable and informative on the subject that the user is searching on. As a result, you want to build and continue to manage your website so that search engines consider you to be valuable and credible on keyword phrases that can be associated with your business.
The key to getting search engines to know and remember you is to regularly produce content on your website that revolves around the key words that your target prospects would search for.
3. Pay-per-Click Advertising
The downside to search engine optimization is that is not an overnight fix as it takes time to earn that credibility with the search engines. Another option to get the same type of targeted web traffic to help with how to find potential customers is to invest in a pay-per-click campaign. This is an advertising campaign were you put ad's out on the internet that send targeted traffic to your site and you then pay a predetermined fee for each click that brings a visitor to you.
The great thing about pay-per-click campaigns is that is a marketing effort that is very measurable and controllable in terms of results and expenses. This is because you determine what you want to pay per click, you only pay when clicks occur, and you can set a cap in terms of the total amount that you want to spend.
4. Cold Calling
One of the more traditional ways for how to find potential customers is to pick up the phone and cold call a targeted list of potential prospects. Many people believe that cold calling is dead and does not work anymore. But the reality is that, if done the right way, the phone can definitely still be one sales tool to use to find new customers.
