3 places to find customers for your business

Ah, customers. They’re the lifeblood of your business. They want you to solve their biggest business pain, and if you really listen, they’ll tell you exactly what that pain is. As a business, solving that unbearable pain is your guiding north star, aboard the USS Pain-killer.

Whatever your vessel size, you need your customers to guide you to land, where profitability is possible. But, where to find customers? An excellent question.

Be where your customers complain

We’re all humans here. As much as we roll with the punches of starting our own business, that can be hard on us and we may rant about it. Sometimes, we’ll want to rant about what causes some of that pain publicly. My friend, that is where you want to be.

Enter Twitter and your dial tone. If you serve other businesses, this can be invaluable word-of-mouth feedback to point you in the revenue direction. Listen to their pain, and let them know you’re their Pain-killer.

Be it on Twitter or on a call, reach out to potential customers and aim to understand the restraints causing their complaints. As humans, we often feel relieved just to have someone lend us their ear. This can be a fantastic way for you to develop new customer relationships and nurture existing ones.

Customer word-of-mouth can promote you, too. When you eliminate their pain points with your can’t-live-without solution, invite them to share their positive experience with their colleagues online. Give them an easy way for them to share your business name to their own audience, you @PainKiller, you!

Create charming, shareable content

Customers appreciate content that provides value to them or their industry circles. High-quality, high SEO-ranking content can serve as an uber practical referral for your business, and continue to serve potential customers for months.

Here we see a recurring theme with establishing, developing, and nurturing business relationships. As a business founder, you want to not only nurture relationships with the businesses you serve, but make it easy for them to nurture their own relationships.

Let’s say your potential customer serves founders (hey, we do that too). When you provide them content they can share with their own customers, like what to expect when building a remote team, or how to wrap their heads around the daily chaos of running a startup, you’re absolutely making their lives easier, and they’ll take notice.

Content can also be geared for every stage in the buyer persona, and even before a future customer is anywhere near your funnel. For one example, industry-specific beginner guides are highly useful for business leaders mentoring a young professional just getting their start. For the more experienced pros out there, content can also serve as a way to stay top-of-mind in their circles.

Imagine the amount of eyes on your content. Can you picture it? Yeah. Me too.

Warm up to your integration partners

Let’s not forget, customers are more likely to commit to a solution when it integrates with other highly useful solutions. Here’s where you take advantage of a situation where you and another business share a good amount of customers.

How do you know if their customers are necessarily your customers, too? Research and find out how much, if any, your two solutions overlap, and where there’s space for co-promoting. Choose integration partners whose customer base fits the buyer persona you’re aiming to target.

When another business product integrates with your product, their customers may find a happy hybrid solution using both services in a way they’ve wanted – or seriously needed. A happy customer is more likely to promote your product when it plays nice with the service they’ve committed to using.

Choosing an integration option can also be a customer’s first time hearing about your solution. Often times, you’re permitted a small real estate space to provide a logo and brief blurb about what your solution does best. Spend some time boiling down your biggest pain-killer into a pill-sized description a partner business could easily display within their product’s options.

If it’s a good integration fit for both products, it adds value to both your integration partner and to their customers. A win for everyone.