Let's start with a question: what is the most important thing in business? Of course, it's customers and the flow of customers. All businesses close for only one reason - either a lack of orders or an insufficient quantity of them.
Someone may disagree, saying that their business closed because there was a very low margin, small markups, and it simply became unprofitable. But wasn't the low margin a result of a lack of orders or an insufficient quantity, which eventually forced a price reduction and led to unprofitability? Of course, there are many other problems in business that cause us trouble. But they don't lead to the closure of the company. You need to realize what your #1 task is and focus on solving it, everything else is peripheral.
The 11 Most Effective Sources for Acquiring Customers for a Service Center
- SEO Promotion. This involves creating a structure that captures all the traffic, building the right semantic core, creating the right page structure with answers to customer questions, H2 headings, photos, videos, and price tables.
- Contextual Advertising. This is about the structure of an advertising campaign that allows you to maximize the reach of the service center's target audience.
- Repeat Customers. This is also an advertising channel that requires financial investment. Maintaining a high level of service in a service center requires financial resources, sometimes quite significant ones.
- Offline traffic in shopping centers and more. A retail location in a good spot can generate a huge flow of customers without any additional advertising expenses. When looking for a location, several factors should be considered: foot traffic, customer solvency, competition, and rent rates.
- Outdoor Advertising. Working with outdoor advertising has its own specifics that you need to know.
- Advertising on Social Networks. Targeting on platforms like Vkontakte, Facebook, and Instagram can yield excellent results when properly configured.
- Banner Advertising. Banner advertising can quickly deplete your budget, but it's possible to calculate its effectiveness and profitability quite easily. The average CTR for banner advertising is 0.02%, with an average website conversion rate of 2%. As a result, you can calculate how many impressions you need to buy to acquire a customer. Banner ads can be easily customized by interests, geolocation, and targeting people who have visited your site but did not complete an order, allowing you to re-engage them with banner ads.
- Traffic Acquisition and Arbitrage. Some companies specialize in buying and reselling traffic. These companies have their own network of websites that generate a good flow of traffic, and they use schemes for acquiring traffic through teaser ads and spoilers. Such companies offer to buy targeted traffic with payment for each click or for each unique visitor. A unique visitor is defined as a person who has visited your website and stayed there for at least 15 seconds.
- Aggregator Websites. There are websites that gather information about service centers and the services they offer. These websites rank well in search results and generate a decent flow of customers.
- PR Campaigns and SMM. These can include viral social media posts, collaborations with other companies, interesting installations, discounts for likes and shares.
- Affiliate Programs. You can create partner access in your accounting system where partners can see the number of referral customers they have brought in. You can pay partners, for example, $5 for each referred customer. The payout amount is set individually, depending on the average cost of acquiring a customer from other advertising sources. Partners can include electronics stores in your area, shops selling phone cases and SIM cards, and other service centers with a different profile. You need to print leaflets with a commercial offer and prepare the actual cards that your partners will distribute to customers.