5 Marketing Tips To Attract MORE Customers

In this article I'm going talk about five marketing methods that actually get customers for your business.

We have over a million customers coming through the doors of our business each and every single year. So we’ve done quite a bit of marketing. And I’m going to show you my five top tips right now.

Tip One: Text Message Marketing

Text message marketing is now easier than ever. There’s a problem when it becomes easier than ever to do, because marketers ruin everything.

Years ago we used to listen to the radio, (much before my time) advert free. Then marketeers come along and ruined it. Like they’ve done with television and like they’ve done with email. We used to get really excited about receiving emails 10-15 years ago, but now we get so many of the bloody things, we’re annoyed by them. 

But I like text messages, because I get less marketing text messages than emails. 

Here's some facts about text message marketing: At the moment text message marketing is getting an open rate of 80% and 40% click through.

When you look at email, you get about a 10% open rate with a 4% click through, so text messages are a really good way of marketing your business. And they’re cheap to do. 

Sending a text message costs 2-4 pence and you can get some really good data on open rates and see if your customers are actually doing what you want them to do. 

Tip Two: Leaflets 

I love a leaflet. We send over a million leaflets out each and every single year. And we try and send leaflets to people that are most likely to buy from us.

We own lots of leisure attractions so where do we want to get our leaflets through, ladies and gents? We want them in schools. We want children to take them home to their parents. So we distribute them for the schools and we give the schools free tickets so they promote us, then the leaflet goes out. 

Here’s some of the salient points that you need to have on leaflets: 

1. Make sure the heading takes over. It’s 80% heading, 20% content. 
2. Makes sure there’s a call to action on there – an offer and a deadline. 
3. Make sure you have included Testimonials.

So many people try and confuse leaflets with mixed messages. Therefore your consumer won’t know what to do. Send a leaflet out that has one message that you want to deliver and make sure you print both sides to really hammer home your message. 

So let’s just quickly go back over that. 

80% Headline, testimonials, call to action with an offer and not too many mixed messages.

Tip Three: Linkedin Content

Linkedin has got fantastic organic reach. What do I mean by organic reach?

This is getting stuff out on Linkedin, that you don’t have to pay for the advertising. Linkedin advertising is quite expensive, if you look at some other social platforms (Facebook being the big daddy here) you used to be able to get really good natural organic reach but now the gods of Facebook have said, ‘well if you want to reach our audience, you’ve got to pay us some money to do so’. 

We want to get to our audience for free and Linkedin is a brilliant place to be, especially if you’re in the business to business world. 

I put great good quality content on Linkedin (videos, articles, posts) and then people comment, share and then from that, doing it consistently, people ask to do business with me. It’s a really smart, fantastic thing to do. 

Tip Four, please do not forget this one, the phone. 

The phone is a great way to market your business. Most people are forgetting to use the phone. They’re using digital marketing and they’re not thinking of the good old fashioned stuff which less and less people are doing. 

If you remember at the start of this article I said, "marketers ruin everything". They’ve ruined the radio, they’ve ruined the TV and they did ruin the phone, because everyone was on the phone, cold calling you.

Less people are doing that as they’ve moved over to digital platforms. So think about how you can get on the phone and talk to customers, especially if they’re existing customers. A really smart thing to do is to call people that have already bought from you and tell them about your other products and services.

So this really is a plea to everyone – you know that picking up the phone or actually going and seeing customers will get you more customers. Less and less people are doing it. 

This is a refresh and remind for you ladies and gents to carry on using the phone. 

We’ve had spectacular results from picking up the phone and actually talking to people. 

Tip Five, the big daddy Facebook: 

We need to carry on talking about Facebook because that’s where most the eyeballs are.

But as I told you in Linkedin content tip number three, it’s getting harder and harder to get organic reach on Facebook but we have found a work around, a guerilla marketing technique.

On Facebook there’s loads and loads of Facebook community groups - you’ll have these especially in the towns that you live in. If you live in Leeds for example, there’ll be Leeds Families Facebook group. 

What we try and do is do competitions with the owners of those groups and usually they’ll say yes for free days out to come to some of our attractions. 

This has had fantastic organic reach and actually got us more leads than paying for anything on Facebook. 

So you can take that idea and actually see if it’ll work within your sector. There’ll be a fishing group on Facebook and maybe you sell fishing stuff. And then you can do a competition into the fishing group and get people to buy your fishing stuff. 

For example, look for those Facebook communities, look for the ones that getting lots of comments and engagement in and ask the owners of that group if you can just do a Facebook competition, because you’re a big fan of that group. 

If they’re not there, why don’t you try and create your own Facebook communities? 

 If you’ve liked this article, but you want some clarification on some points or you’ve got some ideas that I haven’t thought of, why don’t you leave them in the comments below this post.

To your continued success,

James Sinclair