How to increase your customers by driving more traffic
New customers are the lifeblood of every business. In fact, they’re a necessity. Without them you don’t really have a business.
Everything we’ve covered in this series thus far has been internal to your business. We’ve looked at changes to your offering, sales process and customer touch points. Why? Because we want to get your customers buying more stuff from you at better margins. We’ve laid the groundwork to start looking now at driving more visitors to your gallery.
Why haven’t we done this before now? It’s very simple: there’s little benefit in investing time and effort in driving more traffic to your gallery if it doesn’t convert. It’s won’t create customers, maximise your sales opportunity or make you any money. All the effort you’ve put in to getting visitors will be wasted.
If you’ve been working on the first 3 strategies and have started to see improvements, you’re now ready to proceed to…
Strategy 4: Creating customers by increasing your visitors
Before we begin there’s one thing I need to get off my chest:
It’s your responsibility to get your gallery in front of your customers!!!
Nobody else’s is going to do it for you despite what a 3rd party gallery’s sales blurb might say. As long as they get the sale they don’t really care if the customer buys from you or someone else who hosts images with them. They’ve made their money and that’s all that matters to them.
How are you going to drive more traffic?
Just blindly tweeting you have a new image for sale isn’t going to work. You may get a bite from time to time but if most of your followers are other photographers they’re probably not going to buy from you. They may stroke your ego with lots of likes and comments but buying isn’t going to be on their agenda.
Your goal with this exercise is to build a complete profile of who your customer really is
Instead, you need to identify who your customer is and start thinking like them, not a photographer.
For example…
Who is she?
What does she do? Where does she work?
Where does she live?
What type of pictures does she have on her walls?
What books/magazines does she read?
Where does she go to relax and meet friends?
What type of house does she live in?
Why is she buying from you? For herself? As a gift for someone?
What is she buying from you?
How much is she prepared to spend?
Would she buy anything to go with it?
et al
They’re not easy questions to answer. They’re harder still if you don’t use generic words like ‘anyone’ or ‘everyone’.
Your goal with this exercise is to build a complete profile of who your customer really is, not who you think she is. Don’t just go by gut instinct or intuition. It’s a great place to start but you’re ultimately going to have to do some research to complete the picture.
When you’re done you should know where to find her (if not, look back over your notes to see what else you need to ask, add or answer better). Now it’s just a case of getting your images in front of her and enticing her to visit your image gallery.
Conclusion
Your level of success will depend on how well you’ve constructed your customer profile, how easy it is to find her and how effective you are at getting her to click onto your gallery.
Remember, you’re not trying to sell at this point, you’re encouraging her to visit your gallery. The gallery will take care of converting her to a customer if you’ve done the conversion rate work from strategy 3.
In our next article in this series we’ll put all these strategies together and look at implementation and execution.
In the meantime if you’ve found this article helpful please leave a comment and let me know or share it with your friends on your favourite social media network.
