Looking to grow your business? You’ve come to the right place. Finding new customers can be challenging, but if you plan ahead and stay consistent you can make it easier to welcome new clients. Let’s take a look at a number of ways you can keep your brand in front of prospects and remind existing customers to keep coming back for more promo.

Reach Out to Clients on a Regular Basis

It’s not just about following up after an order, but look for reasons to reach out to a client and check in. This is one of the best ways to uncover their needs. If you can find out their birthday or work anniversary, that’s a great time to say, “Hi.” But you can go beyond that and reach out to them based on their industry and busy times. For example, a moving company will be busy in the late spring and summer. While it’s important to reach out to schools a few months before the new school year, keep in mind there are year-round events. Ask your education clients for access to their event calendar so you can plan when to reach out for Homecoming or Prom.

Ask for Referrals

Make sure to ask customers for referrals. It’s such an easy form of lead generation, and many distributors forget to do it. You can add a line to your email signature on POs or invoices asking for a referral. Sometimes it can help to offer a discount or free gift as a sign of thanks. Another perfect time to ask is when you follow up after an order is received. If the customer is happy, ask if there’s anyone they think could benefit from promo whom you could reach out to. If they say, “No,” then just ask them to recommend you directly if the topic arises with anyone they know.

Stay Active on Social Media

First things first, make sure your social media handles are in your email signature, on business cards, on your website, on invoices and on all ads. It’s crucial that prospects and customers can find you!

One of the biggest mistakes distributors make on social media is thinking it’s a one-way conversation. Social media is best used when you adopt a community mentality, which means tagging others, commenting on others’ posts, sharing posts and asking your audience for their opinion and thoughts. You can run contests and take polls too. Don’t forget to add hashtags so others can find you (and if you don’t know what hashtags to use, a quick Google search can help).

Ask your customers to take pictures or videos (most social media prefer videos) of their promo in action, post it and tag you. If they can’t or don’t want to, simply ask them to send pics and videos to you so you can post. Create fun Stories, Reels or TikTok videos and post promo with trending songs and audio as well as fun stickers.

Respond to every comment or message you get. Even if someone just replied with an emoji, say something back (you can reply with just an emoji). The more you engage with your audience, the better. Try to stay positive and avoid heated topics so your business can stay in good standing on all platforms and in front of all different types of prospects.

One great thing to capitalize on is social media holidays. These are days like Love Your Pet Day where people are encouraged to post pics and videos for that day. Take a look at a social media holiday calendar here and plan out which days would be good to post. Remember, you’ll want to post promos that relate to the holiday – for a pet-related holiday, you could post your pet wearing a branded bandana.

Send Catalogs to Prospects

What’s the first thing you do when you receive a catalog? You probably look at it. Your prospects and customers are no different. Send them catalogs full of promo and you can at least reach out and ask if they received it. Viewing products may drive some to go to your website and place orders directly, or possibly open the door for a discussion. Just make sure that any catalog you send has your contact information on it, including your name, logo, phone, email and website (and social media handles if you can).

Use Content Marketing

Content marketing is a fantastic way to build credibility and position yourself as an expert. How does it work exactly? Most content marketing comes in the form of articles or listicles that educate the reader on a specific topic. For example, you could write something like Top 5 Promo Products for Open Houses and send it to your real estate clients and prospects. Content marketing is so effective because it educates first and sells second. So, using our example, the actual article would include products needed for open houses, but the call to action would be to reach out to you for more ideas.

Content marketing can be distributed digitally, like on a blog, or even in a direct mail format. We recommend making it a section on your website and promoting it on social media or through email marketing. You can write an email simply checking in and include a link to the article.

We suggest putting together a schedule and shooting for a minimum of one content marketing piece a quarter. When choosing topics and creating content, it doesn’t need to be overly complicated. Just a few sentences or bullets in each section allows for a quick read your audience will appreciate.

If you want to add another touchpoint, you can follow up after you send out or post the link to ask what your prospects thought of it and what else they’d like to learn about.

Sponsor Charity Events

Nonprofits often have fundraisers, bingo nights, races, fashion shows and other events to generate funds for a cause. Sponsoring these events not only gets your business’s name out there, but it also garners goodwill with the charity’s supporters. If you don’t have the funds to be a sponsor, you can always volunteer at these events.

When deciding what charitable or awareness group you want to align with, we recommend selecting one that is either near and dear to your heart or an important one in your local community.

Attend Events

Of course, events built for networking can be great, but sometimes it turns into everyone trying to sell each other. Your time will be better spent if you attend an event where networking is a part of it, but not the entire purpose. These could be marketing seminars or trade shows where you can also discover new products. If any event you attend has a networking happy hour or dinner, make sure to attend so you can connect with more people. Then you’ll walk away with sales leads, knowledge you can apply or new product ideas to pitch to your clients.

What are some insights you can share about gaining new customers? Share them on our Facebook page.