Widening Your Net: 7 Ways To Expand Your Customer Base Online

Want to attract more customers online? While honing the marketing strategies that you’re already using may help you to generate more leads, there could also be ways to widening your net to help market to a wide range of people. Here are just several strategies that could help you to expand your customer base online.

Start Trading Globally

If you’re a recent start up, it may benefit you to begin by marketing to customers in your own country. However, as you grow, you could find that there’s a huge consumer base overseas waiting to be tapped into.

In this day and age, trading globally isn’t actually that hard. The internet has made it easier to reach out to customers in other countries – you only need a website and social media pages to start reaching out to these customers. International shipping is also a lot more flexible and cheaper nowadays, making it easier to deliver products to customers in other countries.

Currency rates and currency transfer fees can be an issue to consider. It’s worth setting up a business account that allows you to hold multiple currencies, as well as setting up a payment platform on your site that allows consumers to pay in multiple currencies. It could also be worth looking into translation services to help communicate information better with customers speaking other languages. While there are now easy free translation tools out there, these aren’t always accurate and it could benefit you to hire translators to create separate versions of your site and separate versions of contracts.

Accept Multiple Forms Of Payment

If you only accept debit card online, consider whether it may benefit you to start accepting credit card. When buying large value items, many customers like the convenience of being able to use a credit card so that they can spread out payments. This does mean setting up a merchant account and paying fees on each transaction – however for many businesses, the increase in customers could be worth it.

Another option could be to enable payment plans. For those that don’t own a credit card but still want to spread out payments, it can sometimes be worth offering the option to pay in installments. This could be with interest attached or without interest attached.

You may also want to consider the currencies that you accept for online payments. On top of foreign currencies, many companies are now starting to accept cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. You could find that this opens up trade to new customers who may want to spend these cryptocurrencies.

Make Sure Your Website Is Mobile-Friendly

Over half of internet usage nowadays is on a smartphone. If your company website isn’t mobile friendly, you could be alienating a lot of online users and losing out on a lot of potential sales.

 A few mobile-friendly features could include larger text and bigger call-to-action buttons for touchscreen use. You could hire a web developer to create a separate mobile-friendly version of your site that has these features, or you could get a developer to create a responsive website that alters in layout depending on the size of the screen that the consumer is visiting the website on.

On top of this, you could also consider creating an app for mobile users. An app could allow you to optimize user experience for mobile users, plus the icon will serve as a constant reminder of your company every time they use their phone, potentially leading to returning customers.

Use A Variety Of Social Media Platforms

There are an array of different social media platforms out there including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. If you’re only marketing through one social media site, consider whether it’s worth trying other social media platforms to increase your potential customer base. Some consumers may use Twitter or Instagram more than Facebook – by only targeting Facebook, you could be missing out on these other consumers.

Most social media platforms have paid advertising options that you can use to reach out to customers. However, you may be able to simply generate more customers through organic social media posting. For best results, it’s often worth using a mix of paid and organic marketing.

Optimize Your Rankings On Multiple Search Engines

When people think of search engines, most people think of Google. While Google is the most popular search engine, it is not the only one – Bing, Yandex and Baidu are other examples.

When investing time and money into SEO, it’s worth considering these other search engines and the tactics that you may want to use. For instance, exact match keywords and a large amount of backlinks will usually help you to rank higher on Bing than they might do on Google.

You may also want to consider investing in different PPC strategies when using both platforms. For instance, you could find that your Bing ads perform better when targeting them towards exact matches than when using Google ads.

Find Ways To Combine Online & Offline Marketing

Some consumers may be more attracted by offline marketing tactics than online marketing tactics, however you may still be able to convince these consumers to visit your website.

 One way of doing this could be to print your web address and social media handles on flyers and business cards. You could even print QR codes on these flyers and business cards to make it easier for people to visit your site.

Start Selling New Products/Services

If you run a niche business and are struggling to attract customers online, it may benefit you to expand your inventory of products and services. For instance, if your website specializes in selling dog toys, you could consider branching out and selling some other pet products. Even if you’re main product is still dog toys, these other pet products could help to attract a few other consumers to your site. The key is to still keep them somewhat related to your brand so that you don’t completely lose your identity.