4 Proven Ways to Get New Customers for Your Startup.
If you’re an entrepreneur and your company is just starting out, how do you find customers? This is the question that many aspiring founders ask themselves. The answer to this question involves lots of different options which depend on your industry and the type of product or service that you offer. However, there are a few strategies for finding potential customers for your startup.
In this article, I will share some of the tips that I have learned while building my own startups.
1. Twitter.
Twitter is one of the best places to find your early customers. Lots of founders find their early customers on Twitter. I personally love how @levelsio uses Twitter to acquire customers for his startups. (Highly recommend you go check out his tweeting styles and how he engages with his followers).
But you may be thinking “Hey, this sounds great but I only have 0 followers, to begin with. How do I get customers?”. Great question.
Go to google.com and search “Twitter Advanced Search”. Once you open the page type a keyword related to your startup. For example, if you are building a service that offers SEO services, type something like “any SEO ideas? content marketing ideas? etc.”. Once you get results, dm the people with a special offer. It could be as simple as “Hello — saw your tweet about XYZ. I am the founder of ABC and we help with XYZ. Do you have 5 minutes for a quick demo?”
Pro tip: Most people are desperate to sell right away if they have 0 sales but please be patient and try not to sell immediately. On average you need at least 4–5 interactions to build trust and convert your prospects into customers.
2. Cold Calling.
Cold calling is one of the fastest ways to get into live conversations with your prospective customers. To make it work you need 4 things.
- List. You need to build a great list of ICP contacts with phone numbers enriched. You can use tools like Apollo, ZoomInfo or Lusha to find and enrich contacts.
- Messaging. You need a proper messaging that resonates with you. See this article to learn how to make a cold call.
- SDR. This stands for sales development rep, a person who makes the cold calls. It’s either you or someone you hire.
- Tech. Cold calling is highly effective but is too time consuming. You need a proper sales dialer or a parallel dialer like Salesfinity to avoid automated machines and speak with humans only. Salesfinity is the best parallel dialer for apollo.io because it integrates with it end to end syncing data both ways.
3. Facebook/Instagram Ads.
If you have a little bit of a budget, FB ads is a great way to get early customers for your product. To make this happen you need 3 things in place: great targeting, great ad copy, and a great offer. If one is missing, it’s very easy to waste your money and not get any return on ad spent.
Let’s break this down.
Targeting.
When you are setting up your ad campaigns, set up multiple ad groups with only 1 interest per ad group. If you are selling an SEO services product, you can select marketing specialists for 1 ad group, SEO agencies for another one, also try related products as SEMRush or Moz for another one, and so on. Turn on CBO and monitor the results.
(Here’s a thread that I found on Twitter that talks a lot more in detail on setting up your FB ads).
Ad Creative + Copy.
First you need an eye-catching ad creative. The only job of the creative is to stop the person from scrolling social media feed to paying attention to what you have to say. That’s it. It can either be a video or an image which you can quickly do by yourself on Canva.com.
Next, you need an ad copy. When writing your ad copy try not to use difficult words, make it easy to read, and most importantly exciting enough for people to click the link and learn more about your service. If you don’t have experience writing ad copies, then you’ll find Research AI really useful. It’s a content marketing software and helps you write all your marketing copies including Facebook ad copy.
Your Offer.
Once you found your potential customers and drove them to your landing page, it’s important that you have a great offer so they actually sign up and try your product. It could be a free x day trial, special discounted offer, and so on.
Plus, don’t just drive the ad traffic to your home page. Create a special offer landing page tailored for incoming prospects with benefits, a solution to their problems, enough social proof, and a special one-time offer, etc. This is a huge topic on its own so let me know in the comments section if you want me to write a separate article on this topic.
4. Cold emails.
This is the most traditional and the most straightforward way of getting customers. But unfortunately, many founders don’t know how to leverage emails.
I usually read all the cold emails sent to my email and try to learn from them. Typically, new founders send 1 email and stop there. Well, in fact, you need around 14 email sequences to get a meeting booked.
A friend of mine who works as an SDR at a SaaS company (he does over 6 figures in ARR every quarter), told me that they have a 28-day email sequence for each account (account meaning a prospective customer). Once they research and find prospects who may use their services, they put the prospects into email sequences and keep following up for 28 days or until they get a response. You can use services like Outreach, Apollo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find leads and build your email sequences.
So, if you sent just one email and got no response back, try not to conclude that emails don’t work. Be persistent and keep emailing.
There are other methods of getting customers and TikTok becoming very popular. Unfortunately, I don’t have much experience with TikTok so can’t write anything on it. But if you have had some success to grow your startup using TikTok, would love to hear your thoughts in the comments section.
Lastly, don’t forget about content marketing. It’s a powerful and organic way of acquiring new customers. The results may not be immediate, but in long run, it’s super profitable.
Final thoughts.
In conclusion, whatever method you decide to choose to acquire customers, try to stick to it. Early on you have only so much time and jumping around trying different methods may not be a great idea. So pick a method, master it, implement it and measure the results.
Good luck and keep growing.
(I love learning and if you have experience of using different methods to grow your startup, would love to hear from you. Share them in the comments.)