22 Ways to Get More Customers in 2022

As every business owner knows, focusing on how to get more customers is one of the most important aspects of owning a business. Why? A steady flow of new customers is one of the most important aspects of growing a successful business.

This year, you may want to embrace a big change in the way you structure your thinking around how to get more customers and clients. For example, the old assumption of “build a good product or service and people will come” may need to be replaced with “be where your target market is and show up with value.”

The world is changing, and so is the way prospective customers and clients seek out solutions to their problems. You’ll want to be strategic about how you position yourself, your services, and the value you provide.

[pullquote]It’s more important now than ever before to be adaptable and open to change.[/pullquote] For most people, the old way of doing business simply isn’t going to work anymore as we head into 2022 and beyond.

And while being open to change is great, the real question that remains is what are the upcoming changes going to be? What is the new business climate going to look like?

But beyond that, in what specific ways can you leverage these changes and turn them into more customers in the next twelve months and beyond?

You’re not the only one asking these questions. In fact, every business, from Fortune 500’s all the way down to your local bagel shop, is asking the same questions.

In this post, we’re going to explore some answers for “how do I get new customers?” First, we’ll take a look at the most powerful techniques and strategies to start employing in this new business climate. These strategies will start reeling in new customers right away, even in this new and unknown economy.

We’ll show you 22 fresh, specific and current-world ideas that will help transform your marketing plan into one that will supercharge your bottom line in 2022. Let’s look at some ways to get new customers.

First Things First: You Need a Successful “Customer-Catching” Website

If you’ve ever been fishing, you know that the current climate you’re fishing in has a lot to do with the bait you use and the location you choose to fish. In a lot of ways, “catching” customers isn’t much different than fishing.

Your business website is your online home and should make a good impression on potential customers. If you have a poor-quality website, you’re sending the message that you don’t care about your brand.

Your website should be updated regularly with fresh content so that people know what’s going on in your company and why they should do business with you. Integrate fresh content into your site at least once a week by posting informative or educational content about your industry, or even entertaining videos or blog posts for people to enjoy.

You can also create unique content that answers questions from potential clients, or even update them on new services offered from your company. It’s important to keep this kind of content focused on what will interest your target audience and make sure to include keywords in headlines, copy, and meta data so search engines can find it too. Also use images and video to enhance the messages provided by the fresh content you add to your website.

Fundamental Marketing Strategies for How to Get New Customers

To attract more customers, you need marketing strategies that address customer needs at each stage of the buying funnel: awareness, consideration and decision making. Here are a few fundamental marketing strategies for getting new customers.

1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Spotting new industry-related keyword trends while producing powerful SEO content that reflects these trends continues to be more important with each passing year. Businesses that don’t actively stay on top of SEO trends risk falling beyond and losing serious amounts of traffic in 2022.

A successful SEO strategy can be broken down into a few key approaches:

Keyword Research

How much time do you spend doing keyword research within your industry? For many business and website owners, keyword research has been an afterthought for years. However, this is the year to take a fully qualitative approach to keyword research.

Competitor Analysis

What new trends have your competitor’s spotted that you haven’t seen or noticed yet? How closely do you follow your top five competitors’ marketing campaigns, sales, promos and new product rollouts? Fully analyzing competitors isn’t meant to turn business into a game of copycat. Rather, it triggers ideas and helps you spot trends that will keep you ahead of the competition. Make sure you’re signed up to your competition’s email lists and following their social media pages closely.

Writing SEO Content

Whenever the subject of writing SEO content comes up, audiences start to yawn and eyes begin to roll. Why? Because a lot of people simply don’t enjoy writing blog content.

However, there are few better ways to get more new customers than by producing current SEO-based content that provides them with value.

This year, set aside five hours each week to put together content on the subjects you’re most familiar with. Use your keyword research to tailor those posts in a way that will ensure the best search engine placement.

If you absolutely cannot (or don’t want to) do the writing yourself, consider hiring a professional freelance writer that will produce original, SEO-targeted content that will appeal to an entire world of new customers.

Tracking and Reporting

How closely do you study how your new content performs? When you see a spike in site traffic with one particular new piece of content, what are the reasons?

Furthermore, do those spikes in traffic directly translate to an increase in orders? Are most of those orders new customers or repeat customers?

Why did that particular article drive a 12% increase in sales when last week’s article only drove a 3% sales increase?

When we start looking closely at these questions, then finding their answers in our tracking and reporting, we unlock an ocean of potential new customers.

2. Email Marketing

Email marketing remains the best ROI of any other marketing technique. And building an email list still starts and ends from your website.

In fact, email marketing pays you back, on average, about $44 for every $1 you put into it.

Start Offering Real Incentives to Grow Your Email List

Unless a customer is absolutely in love with your product or service, they probably aren’t going to sign up for your email list without a genuine incentive.

Effective incentives should have a lot of perceived value, though not cost you much (or anything) to fulfill.

Some incentives that really help build your opt-in email marketing list are:

• Immediately-downloadable eBooks
• Downloadable checklists
• Whitepapers
• Free shipping on the first order
• Substantial one-time product discounts
• Free product support for one month

In other words, your customer gets something of value for free immediately after joining your email list.

Another option is to offer a surprise reward after a customer signs up for your list. Just make sure it’s not a surprise that disappoints.

Of course, you need to have a seamless way of capturing email signups that is 100% automated and makes it as easy as possible for your users. Spend some time exploring the WordPress plugin repository for email signup plugins.

You’re sure to find a free solution that’s easy to use.

Most email marketing services, such as Constant Contact, offer these types of integrations as well.

As for those popups we all know and love (sense the heavy sarcasm?), they really do work when you want to get serious about building your email list.

Yes, they’re annoying. But in today’s online environment, most users expect them.

Here are some of the best WordPress popup plugins to get you started.

Send Emails Designed to Convert

Once we’ve collected more emails, then what’s the plan? Like every other aspect of marketing, figuring out the right times to send out your email marketing campaigns will take experimentation and testing. This will require a data-driven email marketing approach.

Once you’ve uncovered the best times to send out emails such as welcomes, initial offers, content-only and follow-ups, set up an automated series of these emails for all new customers, based upon the segmentation of customer data you’ve compiled.

Furthermore, the content of your emails is paramount. Remember to always have a direct purpose and call-to-action on every one of your email sends.

Don’t forget, call-to-action buttons really do work.

Finally, consider leaving one email send per week (or per month, depending on your schedule) to be done manually. This can be used for things such as upcoming events or schedule-driven announcements.

3. Sale Campaigns

The current economy is a challenge for most people. This challenge, in all likelihood, includes your customers.

Because of this, sale campaigns including promotions, coupons, discounts, and freebies have become more important than in the past.

Discounts, Coupons and Freebies

Now is a great time to start re-thinking the idea of discounts, coupons and freebies.

Unfortunately, it’s no longer enough to plaster a 25% coupon code on your website and hope to draw in new customers.

In today’s competitive online retail environment, these simple coupons just don’t get the attention they used to get. There’s an overwhelming number of these offers flying around every hour of the day.

Instead, think more along the lines of freebies that customers can earn.

In other words, instead of offering a 25% off coupon and free shipping for orders over $100 (an incredibly common offer), offer free shipping on all orders that also qualify for a free product give-a-way.

Then, as your customer is shopping on your site, they know that they need to reach $100 for free shipping and a free product of high perceived value.

In reality, both of these offers have the same impact on your bottom line. But the second offer has a more powerful psychological effect because it drives the new buyer to reach a spending goal in order to receive two freebies (free shipping and a free product) instead of just one (free shipping. They were already going to get 25% off just by using the coupon code).

When running special offers like this, it’s important to set urgency by making the offer available only for a limited time. Then highlight the details of the offer on your site so that new customers won’t be able to miss it.

21 Ways to Get More Customers in 2022

Now that we’ve covered some fundamental marketing strategies, let’s look at some specific tactics for how to get more customers.

1. Focus on Building Your Email List

There’s a reason why we’re highlighting email list building twice in this article. The reason is because 2022 is the year to make it the number one weapon in your marketing arsenal.

If you haven’t noticed, it’s gotten more difficult to garner attention on the social media giants. Even if you’ve build a following of tens of thousands of social media subscribers, the platforms simply don’t allow your posts to get much traction or visibility without paying for promoted posts.

This is why direct communication with your customers is becoming more important that ever.S o if you haven’t already, seriously consider implementing a pop-up email list invite into your website. Make the popup fun and your email list worth signing up for.

Then focus on the quality of the content you’re sending out. If you don’t like writing, look into hiring a cost-effective freelance writer.

2. Write an Ebook

You don’t need to be William Shakespeare to write an ebook. In fact, a good ebook doesn’t need to be long or complicated at all.

All you really need to do is compile your expertise and knowledge on one specific, industry-related subject and create a downloadable PDF.

Then, give your ebook report away for free to every new email subscriber.

To execute this plan, use one of the best WordPress Download Manager plugins that will easily automate the process.

3. Install a Content Upgrades Plugin to Share Your eBook

Now that you have your eBook ready to roll out, install a WordPress content upgrade plugin to share the ebook with your customers.

If you haven’t heard of a content upgrade, it a unique and impactful kind of email opt-in that’s created for specific pages or posts.

When a customer provides you with their email address on a specific page, they’re offered an ebook download that’s related to the page or post.

4. Publish a Landing Page

Converting site viewers into customers requires impactful landing pages. And your landing pages are meant to drive conversions, not drive you crazy.

With a WordPress Landing Page plugin, you can quickly create landing pages that turn over more new customers and drive profits forward.

Best of all, you can focus on the content and not on any design headaches.

5. Utilize Google Ads

When’s the last time you ran a new Google Adwords campaign? Keep in mind that the campaigns that worked in 2019 and 2020 probably aren’t going to continue working in 2022.

Set aside some time to step back and re-assess your approach to Google Adwords. Then, spend a few weeks using a modest budget to run and track the results of each new campaign.

Scale up the new ideas that work. Refine or scrap the ones that don’t stick.

6. Write New Articles for SEO

Great content is only great if people actually see it. After all, if the Great American Novel never received any distribution, the content would have never been consumed by millions, no matter how good it was.

Because of this, it’s important to intentionally go after new keywords that are relevant as we head into 2022. Work to tailor your content around these new keywords in a way that fits the context of your content and business model.

What you’re really after here is getting the largest volume of new readers possible. Then, use your site’s sales funnel to convert them into new customers.

7. Create an Online Course

Almost everybody knows something that other people can benefit from.

You are no different.

Setting up an online course that features your personal expertise isn’t as difficult as you might think. It can also turn into one of your most profitable revenue sources.

Tools like the best WordPress LMS plugins can help you get started.

8. Start an Email Series

People enjoy a good series of almost anything, as long as it’s something that they can look forward to receiving.

Consider putting together a months-long email series that delivers tip, tutorials, product reviews or anything else relevant you can think of.

Then, set a schedule to deliver each new part of the series to your email subscribers every Tuesday morning at 10 am, for example.

9. Launch a Customer Referral Program

This is one of the quickest ways to get more customers in 2022.

People everywhere are looking for deals and sharing them with their friends and family. There are several different WordPress plugins you can use to launch a customer referral program and take advantage of this trend.

Just make sure that the one you choose gives you a lot of creative flexibility on the referral programs you’ll be able to run.

10. Run a Limited-Time Promotion or Coupon

Don’t be afraid to set short deadlines on your coupons and promotions. In fact, some of the most effective promotions have the shortest shelf life and deadlines.

Beyond bringing in new customers, limited-time promotions and coupons are sure to improve your cart abandonment rates as well.

11. Update Testimonials

In 2022, customers require social proof before they decide to spend their hard-earned money.

Because of this, the first place many buyers look on your website is your user testimonials.

Before we get too far into 2022, allocate several hours to update your customer testimonials to some fresh faces. Then set a reminder to do it again at the same time each month moving forward.

12. Increase Your Social Media Presence

Social media has turned into a tricky endeavor. While it’s become increasingly political, more and more people are looking for an escape from world events and politics and want fresh content on their social media pages.

This means that it’s time to increase your social media presence with a new approach that gives readers and potential customers a much-needed escape from the noise. Most of all, provide value by sharing your expertise.

In the end, this will translate to more engaged customers and increased sales.

13. Speak at Virtual Summit/Conference

Virtual conferences and summits have become the norm since 2020. And we don’t expect that to change moving forward, as virtual events make attending more accessible and affordable for attendees who normally couldn’t attend an in-person event.

Start looking into some industry-related virtual conferences that would benefit from your expertise. It’s a great way to network and get the word out about your business in our increasingly virtual world.

14. Host a Webinar

Another great way to take advantage of the virtual world is by hosting your own webinar.

You’ll want to schedule your webinar several weeks in advance. Then, send regular reminders to your email list and feature a signup form on your website.

You can change a fee for the webinar, or simply use it as a way to further build your brand.

15. Implement Live Chat on Your Website

If you think that customer service has gotten increasingly worse since the beginning of COVID-19, you’re not alone.

This is the perfect time to beef up your customer service by implementing a live chat function on your site. If you don’t have time to man the chat by yourself, you can outsource it for a very reasonable rate.

16. Publish a Video to YouTube

It’s time to get serious about video marketing in 2022. This is the type of content that people are now looking for, and it offers an entirely new source of SEO, traffic and customers to your business.

There’s no need to over-think or over-produce your first video. This is all about trial and error until you find your rhythm.

Best of all, it’s actually fun to start a YouTube channel and watch it grow.

17. Refresh Your Website

Look at your site as though you’re looking at it for the first time. Then as yourself these two questions:

• How is it helpful to potential customers?
• How does it showcase your product or service?
• How is the checkout process designed to be quick and easy?

The answers to refreshing your website are in those two questions.

18. Implement Cart Abandonment Emails

Abandoned cart emails may be a technique you’ve never tried before, but they offer astounding results. In some studies, abandoned cart emails can raise overall revenue of an ecommerce site by nearly 10%!

This is the year to take advantage of abandoned carts by implementing an abandoned cart email strategy.

There are several plugins that can help you get started. For example, check out recapture.io.

19. Add a Members-Only Component To Your Website

Members-only site areas can be accessed behind membership walls that require a login or paid membership.

For customers, this protects their content, digital downloads, and allows them to access member-only content.

For you, it can increase revenue through membership fees, increased customer engagement, and help you build your email list.

Check out Restrict Content Pro, our recommended tool for building a membership website and restricting premium content.

20. Reach Out to Previous Clients or Customers

Building a successful business is all about building long lasting relationships. It’s the reason why most corporations have “lifetime guarantees,” and always encourage return customers. If your clients are satisfied with their products or services, they will come back again and again.

The reality is that prior customers are much easier to convert into new sales than are brand new customers.

Find a list of past customers who haven’t ordered from you in awhile. Then approach them with a fresh email message and exclusive offer.

21. Provide Free Consultations

Offering a free consultation service is one of the best ways to find new customers. You can use this opportunity to learn more about your customers’ needs, concerns, and issues. This will allow you to offer them solutions and help them solve their problems. Customers love companies that understand what they want and need, so conduct thorough consultations with your clients in order to provide the services they require. Not sure where to start? Here are 65 questions to ask during your next client consultation.

22. Be Willing to Try Something New

Are you in a rut? Are you doing the same thing day after day and getting the same results or no results at all? It may be time to try something new. Get out of your comfort zone and take a risk. Trying something new will force you out of your daily routine, and it will help you be more creative.

Nobody knows your business better than you. And no time in history is changing as quickly as the world is changing today.

Try something that is completely unrelated to marketing to clients, like taking an improv class or learning a new language. You could also try things that are related to marketing but are different from what you have already been doing, such as creating a video series instead of writing blog posts or attending an industry-specific conference instead of going to chamber meetings and networking events. Or maybe there is an activity that you have always wanted to do but have never done, such as blogging about your industry for fun or volunteering for an organization whose mission resonates with you.

Wrapping Up: Provide Value and Get New Customers

If we turn on the news or look at a lot of things going on around us in the last year, it can be a little scary. And while we don’t each have a lot of individual control over the course of the economy as a whole, we do have control over the course of our own lives and businesses.

Starting with what we’ve discussed in this article, let’s each individually (and collectively) turn 2022 on its head and make it the best year yet. We can’t be the only ones who believe that the best is yet to come.