When you’re launching a product, you have to make sure its features are aligned with your users’ needs. Therefore, it’s essential to think about your first customers as the ones who will give you the first honest feedback that can make your business thrive.
Today, we’ll show you how to find your potential consumers online through five proven strategies. Also, we’ll explore niche communities to connect with users and build an engaged audience from the ground.
Related ???? 25 Low-Cost Business Ideas With High Profit
Identify Who Your Potential Customer Is
One of the keys to building a successful product or brand is having an audience to communicate with. That is, imagine that you have a great tech startup idea for a product or service. For it to become successful, you’ll need to have a user base willing to consume it.
However, the first step to finding your potential customer is to target the audience of your product or service. And when doing so, be specific. Think about where your customers like to hang out, both online and offline. And think about how you can approach them in a way that focuses on adding value to their lives.
Who do you want to reach? What does this potential customer look like? What are their interests Where are they? Online or offline?
To achieve that, you have to understand what their pain points are. These are some great ways to find out which are your target audience’s pain points ????
???? Research their social media accounts.
???? Find early adopters.
???? Search, connect & engage with potential users online.
5 Proven Strategies to Reach Potential Customers
Once you have the product or service you’ll offer and defined who your target customer is, it’s time to think about how you’ll reach your consumers. That is to say, how you’ll sell the product/service (conversion) and reach the advocacy stage, which translates into the consumer’s post-purchase experience.
A great way of answering this question is by working on a consumer journey map. This includes five stages: awareness (how to make the potential consumer interested in your project), findability (how can your consumer find your brand), reputation, conversion, and advocacy.
Here are five proven strategies that you can use during the first consumer journey stage to reach your potential customers:
- Become part of communities
- Be present on social media
- Talk to people
- Find early adopters
- Warm-up strategy
???? Become Part of Communities
When looking for potential customers, a good idea is to join niche communities built around products or brands similar to yours. As a result, you will find consumer insights and collect usable data from conversations between members. These will help you learn more about their interests, and where they like to hang out. Also, you can use these online spaces to detect problems and build solutions.
All these will give you information that will help you find a way to make them buy or consume your product or service.
Also, when joining marketing or product management communities, you will have the chance to ask fellow entrepreneurs and founders for feedback. You will also meet like-minded people who are building similar products and ask them how they achieved turning their audience from potential consumers to their brand’s customers.
???? Be Present on Social Media
While there are plenty and varied platforms for one to be present in the digital world, it is important to focus on those where the product will stand out and reach the right people. If used correctly, social media will enhance the reach of your content, and connect with your potential customers.
Something fundamental when creating content for social media is developing your distinct voice. Social media is a sea of opinions and voices. That’s why your brand must have something unique to say.
You can achieve this by focusing on one or two topics and talking about them straightforwardly and simply. This will build trust since your audience will perceive that they speak the brand’s same language.
????️ Talk to People
Another essential tool to connect with users on social media is interaction. Answer their questions and read their reviews. And engage in conversations with your followers. As a result, they will interact with your content too.
Also, once your potential customer talks to you, try to answer as quickly as possible! Some studies prove that the percentage of a sale increases if we respond within a few minutes after they write to us.
If we don’t answer in time, our potential customer’s desire to solve that need might be diluted. Or even worse, someone else gets there before us!
Apart from online interaction, in-person networking events are great places to meet potential customers.
Related ???? How to Avoid Entrepreneurial Burnout
???? Find Early Adopters
A great strategy to reach potential customers is prospecting by prioritizing early adopters. This will help you avoid wasting time. How? Simply by avoiding conversations with people or users who were never going to be interested in what you have to offer in the first place.
Early adopters are the users who are conscious of their pain points and are actively seeking a solution. Therefore, you can contact them, ask them what they think of the product, and give you detailed and sincere feedback.
A good way of contacting early adopters, by Regrow Academy:
1️⃣ Select around ten direct competitors with the best presence on LinkedIn. Look for posts they’ve written that speak to your target audience.
2️⃣ Enter the profile of all the people who have commented or liked those posts. Add those who you think may be potential customers!
???? Contact Users Directly
Before contacting your potential customers directly via email or LinkedIn, it’s important to think about how you can approach them in a way that focuses on adding value rather than with a cold email or message.
A good strategy to reach potential consumers, get responses, set up meetings, and build trusting relationships is the warm-up strategy. It consists of a series of actions that as founders, entrepreneurs, marketers, or product managers, you can carry out in order to break the barrier with people you don’t know and make them be interested in what you have to offer.
???? These are the five steps that can’t be missing in this strategy, which concludes with contacting users directly.
1️⃣ Learn about the content they’re interested in and create content that’s valuable for them.
2️⃣ Interact with their posts.
3️⃣ Engage in the public conversations your prospect has participated in.
4️⃣ Make recommendations to them and send them information that could be of interest to them.
5️⃣ Send them a personalized message or video with your product or service offer.
Your potential customers have problems to solve, feedback to give, and are seeking to find a product or service that can satisfy them. But above all, they want to choose freely! So when trying to reach your potential consumers, it’s essential to avoid pressure, excessive insistence, promises that you can’t keep, and dubious discounts.
Your approach should always be respectful and with the goal of creating a trustworthy relationship with your potential customers!
