It’s refreshing to see brands utilizing alternative channels for growth. Well! there are many ways to get your first customers, particularly your first 10. But you’re going to want to focus on only 1 or 2 ways, simply because you won’t have the time or energy to do more than that well (at first).
A few ideas to help you get your first customers. Though I would advise to pick one or two and focus:
1. Quick win list – Quick wins are great to boost morale but they can be a hindrance to your business growth. Quick wins don’t replace your marketing strategy, and although they are quick, they need to be seen as a part of the long-term plan for success and to focus on gathering leads for the sales team.
2. Cold emailing – “old school”, but it works. Won’t go too much into it because it’s covered well in other answers and around the web. One of the best strategies for generating new leads and landing more sales is cold emailing. Many people underestimate how powerful a strategy cold emailing can be—at least at its full potential.
3. Growth hacks – Admittedly a pretty vague thing to add to the list. But Some the most popular startups used growth hacks to grow. Growth hacking is lean, efficient marketing based on testing and experimentation. It’s about coming up with innovative ideas and comparing them to see what works best, then repeating this process over and over to drive growth.
4. Referral programs – Once you get your first 3-5 customers, see how quickly you can get a referral program up to encourage those customers to invite 3-5 more just like them. Just don’t spend much time building your first iteration of a referral program, because it’ll “never be right”.
5. Advertising – Don’t know your budget, but this is almost a requirement today, sadly. There’s a lot of noise out there and to get through the clutter, sometimes you have to pay. Google Ads, Facebook, Twitter, and anything else can help. Just make sure you measure everything and start off small. You can lose a lot of money in a short amount of time.
6. Create a feedback loop – Once you get those first few customers, make sure you get feedback. Don’t rely just on analytics + watching user videos (even though you should do that) make sure you ask questions either by email or survey. You can run exit intent surveys or add surveys in your email.
These are the only ideas I’d recommend to someone starting out. They are the few that can bring the most results in the least amount of time. Content marketing (like with articles, eBooks, webinars, and SEO are my least favorites for beginners, especially for someone looking for CUSTOMERS. They just take too much time and trial and error to be effective quickly.
Referral Program is something I prefer to adopt in marketing.
