How to use this Ebook - Beeketing · 2018-02-02 · Retweet you. As you develop your idea, you may...
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Transcript of How to use this Ebook - Beeketing · 2018-02-02 · Retweet you. As you develop your idea, you may...
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How to use this Ebook
Beeketing knows how hard it is to get your business up and running, to get everything in the right place. We used to spend thousands of hours getting our business in shape, and we know that many people, many business out there are also struggling with this. Therefore, we want to use our experience to help your online store.
Sharing this ebook, Beeketing hopes that you can find your first customers in different ways that you don’t know or have forgotten. Your challenge is to have more sales every single day and our challenge is to help you do it, and do it great.
Before we get into the massive list of tactics below, Beeketing wants to be clear on what to do with this list and what to expect when you find a few tactics you want to follow:
1. Your initial goal should be learning.
In the immortal words of Lean Godfather, Steve Blank, “No Plan Survives First Contact with Customers.” With that in mind, the last thing you want to do is be hard selling your products to them. Instead, you want to interview your customers to understand their problems.
2. Understand you’re going to have a low sales rate.
There is no silver bullet for finding customers for the first time, just tactics like the ones below that work to varying degrees depending on your products and market. Even for good channels, a 10-20% response rate is normal, so don’t get discouraged.
3. Remember your manners and personalization.
Be respectful in communicating with customers. Also realize that no one likes a form note, so the more you personalize it and make it feel like they’re special, the better chance you have of a response.
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40+ Ways to Find Your First Customers for Development and Sales
Facebook:
1. Look up your friends:
For online sellers, friends are the most potential customers. Besides, they have already known you and trust you, it’s easier to sell to them than others. Online sellers’ closest people in life now and in the past are on Facebook. If you have or haven’t thought about it yet, definitely look to see if any of your friends are in the market. You can do it by updating a status, posting new pictures… or just simply message them.
2. Ask your friends:
There’s also a lot of random people you met in college and other times. You never know who knows who so you’d better ask and introduce yourself and your products. You may find it hard at the beginning but eventually you will get used to it.
3. Look for Fan Pages:
There’re fan pages for just about anything you can think of. People that like those pages in your market are great people to talk to, they’re your potential customers as well. Let’s ask the page admins to see if they’ll post something on your behalf on their pages. Online sellers who have leveraged this have found it cheaper than Facebook ads, even when they pay the Fan Page owner. Just click the “message” button on the fan page.
4. Run Targeted Facebook Ads:
If you think you really know your audience demographics, then running a small set of Facebook ads to a landing page, can be a great way to gather interest. If you don’t know how, then take a look at this “How to advertise your online sales on Facebook Ads”
5. Try the new Graph Search:
It’s worth searching for things related to your market to see if anything else turns up, especially now that you can message people you aren’t friends with. In particular, Facebook has a great geographic filtering ability you won’t find on Twitter or elsewhere.
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Twitter:
6. Ask your followers:
If you have any kind of follower base at all, you should definitely tweet about your products. If you don’t have a big follower base, ask the people with bigger followings you’re friends with to Retweet you. As you develop your idea, you may want to tweet different requests, which may be seen by different people since no one sees every tweet of their followers.
7. Ask your followers for referrals:
It’s not just about who you know. The bigger benefit is who your network knows so be sure to not just ask people you follow or follow you. You can ask for your followers’ referrals about your products or services. Maybe some of their followers will be your potential customers.
8. Run Twitter Ads:
Twitter ads can be a cheap way to have more followers as well as customers. You can learn to start your first Twitter Ads here
9. Ask Twitter Accounts to tweet on your behalf:
Just like you can ask Fan Pages on Facebook to talk about you, you can reach out to Twitter accounts in your target market to see if they’ll tweet something for you or Retweet you.
10. Search for relevant Hashtags:
Hashtags are a big part of Twitter for many markets. Finding accounts using the hashtag and reach out to them and join the conversations happening is a great way to get started. You can find relevant hashtags by asking others or checking out sites like Hashtags.org
11. Join a Twitter Chat:
Many groups have regular chats that can be found based on the group’s hashtag they use. This is a great way to ask questions and engage your target audience if they’re holding Twitter chats.
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Email:
12. Email relevant friends/contacts:
There’s a right way and wrong way to do this. Yes, you can send emails to all your contacts in one big dump advertising your products. What will yield a better result is if you invest the time to be more targeted in who you reach out to. Close friends and family won’t mind, especially those actually related to your target industry.
13. Make your Google Chat status a call for help/intros:
This may seem simple and passive, but you’d be surprised who reads your Google Chat statuses. Adding a note of what you’re looking for and leave it up for a few days and you might just get a few people to reach to you. This works for other chat tools as well, of course.
14. Make your signature a call for help/intros:
Just like your Google Chat, status is a long tail way to get people’s attention, you can use your email signature the same way. Below your name in your signature is the perfect place to let people know. Don’t forget to update your mobile app’s signature as well as your computer’s.
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Meetup.com:
15. Join & Attend Meetups in your category:
Meetup has become an amazing hub of groups around just about any topic you can think of. Through offline meetups, you can meet your potential customers, it’s also a good chance for you to know more about their buying behaviors, their interests, their habits and especially you can introduce your products to those who really care.
16. Ask organizers to message the group:
Organizers have unique privileges to send messages to their groups. You don’t get what you don’t ask for, so don’t be afraid to reach out to group organizers to talk to them (they may be a great target user) and see if they’ll message the group. They often make no money in running their groups, so you can think of them like the Facebook Fan Page owners previously mentioned.
17. Ask the organizer to allow you to address the audience at a Meetup:
Potentially even better than getting into everyone’s cluttered inbox is the opportunity to address the whole group at one of their events. This allows people most interested to immediately approach you.
18. Mention in your Meetup profile what you’re looking for:
Like the Google Chat status, this is a passive move that alone won’t get you everyone to talk to, but you’d be surprised how often people read the profiles of other new members in a group. Be sure to include your desired contact method if you want Meetup members to reach out to you.
19. Message customers on Meetup.com:
Not every member of a Meetup group attends every event and if there’s no upcoming meetups or it’s a group outside your area, you can still reach customers by sending them individual messages. Meetup has a limit of 12 messages per day, which is still enough to get some quality responses.
20. Create a Meetup group:
Just because a group doesn’t exist, does not mean there would not be interest. Countless people have launched successful businesses based on the idea of organizing a high value group. Just remember that if you do this, not only will you build trust and relationships with all the attendees, you’ll be the organizer who can send all those messages, decide who addresses the audience, etc.
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Your Blog:
21. Write a blog post about your products/services:
You can always write about your products/ services or share tips to your customers, it’s also a good way to express your store ideal. For example, if you sell cosmetic products, you can write a blog post to introduce a new makeup collection or share some makeup tutorials. If it resonates with customers, they will share, up-vote, tweet, etc. Some will even visit your store as long as you remember to have a call to action to encourage them at the end.
22. Post your blog to discussion sites in appropriate categories:
Before posting, make sure you actually post it somewhere it’s welcomed. By posting it to these sites you’ll significantly get some interesting comments there you can reach out to.
23. Update your About Page for what you’re looking for:
It is always beneficial to list what you’re looking for on your “About page”. The most engaged people on your blog are likely to click to your “About page” to see who you are and what you sell.
24. Make a page on your blog just about your market:
Depending on your blogging platform, this could be easy or hard, but it can never hurt to organize your information in a way that people can easily navigate it. If you’re writing a whole series of items or have already created a lot of related content, this can be a great way to assert your expertise and act as a honeypot to draw in interested potential customers.
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IRL (In Real Life)
25. Approach people in native environments:
Would your target customers be found in a coffee shop, grocery store or mall? Then go there and try talking to people. Like anything this is a skill. This can come off as harassing or creepy (and the store may ask you to leave) or it can work great.
26. Look for unhappy people with a service/product:
You can always have new customers by looking for unsatisfied ones on your competitors’ online stores. You cannot make all your customers happy, neither can your competitors. The easiest way is to search for customers’ complains, bad reviews...and talk to them, trying your best to turn them into your customers.
27. Go to Garage Sales for your target audience:
You should be there as you’ll never find such a concentrated people in your market.
28. Go to places you know they’ll congregate:
Have an idea for people that own boats? Then going to your local marina is a *great* place to find boaters to talk to. Golfers might just be at the golf course or driving range, frequent fliers at an airport and teachers at a school. Timing is obviously everything, so be cognizant of when someone looks like they’re approachable and have time to kill versus trying to hurry somewhere else.
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Your existing customers base (even if small)
29. Offer a customers’ Referral Program:
You need a great product before you should be trying to aggressively hack your growth, but that shouldn’t stop you from offering an incentive to your existing customers to help you get more visitors. They likely know where to find more of them (their social graph, emailing friends, etc.) so a little incentive will get them to help you out. Checkout Boost app will help you do this tactic easily, which allows you to set free gifts, free shipping or discount (of your choice) to customers if they share their cart on Facebook, Twitter,... It not only encourages them to finish their cart to catch your offer, but it will also help you reach more new customers on social networks.
30. Ask your customers via email:
Especially in the early days, you should regularly talk to your customers and be updating your whole user base regularly. As part of those updates for new features, don’t be afraid to ask them for referrals to more visitors or people to talk to.
31. Always ask your customers when you talk:
Whether you’re doing a customer development interview or just talking to a customer for referrals... remember you won’t get what you don’t ask for. Ask them both if they know anyone specific who might also be interested in your products, as well as places they generally find other people. The latter may turn out to be a meetup, a Twitter chat or something else that is very target rich for you, but you would never have known.
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Forums, Micro Networks & Communities on the web
32. Join the conversations on the sites:
Just about any community exists on the web today. Many of them are in places you would have no idea exists until you dig in. If you can’t find them initially, ask some of the early customers you meet using some of the other tactics listed in this post. Once there, look around for people already talking about products/services you’re selling and join that conversation to learn more. You can also post new discussions specifically on your target subject to see who is interested.
33. Reach out to moderators:
If this is truly a community site (and not another company’s forums) then the moderators are often the most passionate people of all. Reach out to them as great people to talk to and learn from. As a moderator, they’ll be spending as much time as anyone following all the conversations there so they could provide valuable insight beyond their own experiences. If it is a company’s forum, then treat it a bit more carefully depending on whether your idea is competitive or complementary.
34. Ask Moderators to post on your behalf or run an ad:
Many forums on the web are run with very little revenue and more as a passion project. Therefore, much like some of the previously mentioned Fan Pages, etc., they may be open to posting on your behalf or running an ad for a very small fee. They’ll know the ins and outs of the site, which will give you a better chance of reaching the maximum audience.
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Google AdWords & other ad networks
35. Run AdWords with a landing page:
An efficient way (though at times costly) to build an early user list is to run a quick, targeted AdWords campaign linking to a sign up landing page. You can learn how to set it up here. There’s also good advice on evaluating the success or failure of such a campaign here. Remember that paying to get a bunch of people on a list doesn’t validate much on its own. It’s then using that list to reach out to customers and talk to them and ask them to pay for something that does.
36. Run ads on lesser known networks:
Google may have the largest audience, but not the cheapest or best targeted. Consider your market and think about if other ad networks would work better. There’s everything to consider from Yahoo and Bing to mobile ad networks or blogger ad networks.
37. Have your SEO basics in order:
What’s better than the perfect AdWords campaign? Showing up organically for searches on your target keywords. Great SEO takes time, but you can make sure to have the basics right from day 1 so that you can at least get a trickle of interested customers to your blog or site.
Newsletters
38. Ask for mentions in a newsletter:
In addition to talking to newsletter owners as potential early adopters, you can also ask them for exposure. Many newsletters have no formal advertising system, so often you can just go direct to them to ask for a mention for little or no cost. The more excited they are for what you’re doing, the less likely it will cost you anything.
39. Start your own newsletter:
If you don’t find any newsletters in your category or are think there’s room for another one, then don’t be afraid to start your own. It will take time to build up an audience, but it’s a great way to put to work all those signups you’ve been driving to your landing page. Often times, it’s easier to first get people on a newsletter and then later convert them to a paying customer.
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Your Competition
40. Watch what they do:
As the saying goes, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Chances are your competition has figured out at least a couple of spots where your customers exist and you can enter the conversation there as well. In more modern terms, if something they do works, then consider Job’s favorite quote, “Great artists steal.” Like their Facebook page, and follow the company and key employees on Twitter for some inspiration based on what they link to.
41. Use research tools:
Tools like MixRank, which shows the ads a site has been running, and Spyfu, which shows you the expected ad spend and keywords purchased for competition. If you’re looking for inspiration on the kinds of ads to try, those tools will help you get there.
Leveraging the Physical World
42. Post an offer in public places:
Bulletin boards still physically exist in many places and people still put up physical signs for all kinds of things. The stereotype are things like meetings and guitar lessons, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get attention being creative. If you know there are places your target audience will go to or pass by, consider posting something to get their attentions.
43. Use handouts, fliers or mailers:
If hanging something up and hoping people will read it and respond doesn’t work for you, consider a more 1 to 1 communication through handouts you can give out or mail.
44. Buy someone’s service:
So you want to start an online store? Try buying products from your competitors or from other online stores; learning some tricks from them and also avoiding their mistakes to upgrade yours. By doing that, you will understand their customers service, shipping policy, return and refund policy... and then have a good operation plan for your own stores.
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YouTube
45. Talk to YouTube Channel owners:
YouTube is filled with creators making content on all kinds of markets. If you go to Youtube’s channel search, you can search for your category and see who has channels and how many subscribers they reach. Just like you can talk to bloggers as experts in a market, you can learn a lot by interviewing channel owners.
46. Ask channel owners for promotion:
If your idea resonates with the channel owner, there’s a good chance you can get them to talk about you on one of their episodes or maybe even have you as a guest. They may charge you a fee, but if it’s your exact target audience, it might just be worth it.
47. Start your own channel:
If you think video is a great medium to communicate with your audience then creating a channel to connect with them may be a great option. Just like starting your own Meetup group, it can initially be hard, but once you’ve built an audience it will have a great, long-term payoff. Michelle Phan is a great example, as she has her own channel with over 7 million subscribers. She also owns a personal blog in which she discusses different makeup tutorials and receives request for further instruction. Until now, she has successfully built her own cosmetic line called “em” and become one of the most famous YouTube stars.
48. Run ads on YouTube:
YouTube leverages Google’s ad powers to run targeted ads. You only pay for the ads people fully watch (not skip) so if video seems a powerful way to communicate with your audience, it’s worth experimenting.
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Thank you for making it to the end.
We hope a few of these tips have inspired you and point you in the right direction finding those difficult first few customers. While some of them are paid options, I hope you see how many alternatives there are to paid acquisition on Day 1.
There are many, many more ways to find your first customers, so let your creativity run wild.
So, share with us, what are the cleverest ways you’ve heard to find your first customers?
After you manage to get your first sales, what will you do to keep in touch with your customers and make them come back? To have new customers is hard but to hold them is harder. Don’t worry, we have just what you need to handle this problem.
Beeketing is a marketing app platform that helps to turn every visitor on your store into life-long customer, which enables you to:
Track your customers’ behaviors and learn their interest on your stores;
Hand-pick products to suggest to the right customers via website predictive recommendation (just like Amazon);
Automatically create and send personalized emails to follow up customers based on their behaviors.
Do you want to bring back the lost sales and increase your conversion rate by 20%+?
Get started now
