Business Tips 101: Know How Did Customers Find You

Business owners and marketers are usually busy looking for more customers to increase their sales. They are spending time, money, and effort exploring every path where they can find and reach more clients or customers who will buy their products.

But what many businesses don’t realize is that customers are also actually looking for them to find the products or services they need or want. Consumers are also exploring every way or channel where they can find those businesses that could satisfy their needs.

It is important to create more business doors and increase your business presence in the market so that more customers could find you better. However, it is also vital to recognize those secret doors where your customers are finding and reaching you. This is because recognizing these doors and optimizing them can also help you earn more customers.

There are many ways to track your customers and know how they have discovered your business. Did your customers find your business through the use of the Internet or through traditional word-of-mouth marketing? If they have found you online, did they find you through search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing or through social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn?

It is significant to learn how your customers have arrived to your business because you can actually leverage the channels they have used to reach you to discover more potential customers. You can develop those customers’ pathways to encourage more customers to find your business through those pathways.

For example, there are still many small and local business owners who don’t know how to use Foursquare – a location-based social networking website that uses application for mobile devices. These business owners don’t know that there are customers who are discovering their business establishments using Foursquare.

Foursquare gives recommendations of the business venues that are located nearby to its users based on their current locations using Global Positioning System (GPS) technology. These recommendations, tips, and other information are inputted by every foursquare user who have already visited and experienced a particular business venue, such as restaurants, coffee shops, hotels, and malls.

If you own a business with physical location, you may miss a big opportunity to reach more customers if you don’t know how to interact with them using Foursquare. It is a great mobile technology that users utilize to find businesses and places they may be interested in. To learn more about it, you may read our article on how to promote your business using Foursquare.

There are many other ways to discover the pathways your customers are using to reach you. Here are some of them:

1. If you have a company website, you could use a traffic tracking tool to determine and analyze your visitors. For example Google Analytics can tell you where your visitors are coming from and what particular websites are referring them to your site.

2. If you have a Facebook Business Page, you can use Facebook Insights to track where your likes are coming from. For examples are if they are coming from the Like Box and Button you’ve placed on your website, from your Facebook Page, from your Timeline, through third-party apps, from mobile phone access, or from the search results.

3. If you have a Twitter profile for your business or brand, you can track who retweeted your tweets by using social insights like Topsy. Here, you can also determine who are the influential Twitter users who have retweeted your tweets that caused your tweets to be viral.

4. For offline tracking, you can simply use tools like a simple customers’ questionnaire to know how they’ve found your business, product or place. A simple question like “how did you find us?” shall serve its purpose.

Your customers are the lifeblood of your business. That is why it is important to know where they are flowing. You have to recognize both the pathways you have created to reach them and the pathways they have created to reach you.

This is only one of our 101 business tips that we will be published here. Please stay tuned for more business tips and stories in our upcoming posts.