What are the Potential Clients?

For-profit companies grow and sustain themselves financially thanks to the economic income that comes from their customers. These can be users (of a service), buyers (of a product) or consumers (they purchase a product or service).

What determines that a subject becomes client is that to obtain a product or service you must make a monetary transaction, that is, you must pay for it.

Customer types

Customers can be profiled in different ways or it can be said that there is more than one type of customer, which will depend on their consumer behavior. For example, those people who try a product or service for the first time are new clients, have not had previous contact with the offers of a company. Regardless of whether these subjects have been consumers of other brands, when they try a specific one for the first time, they become new customers of it.

These customers can withdraw from consumption at any time or the company can achieve loyalty, which would become regular or recurring customers. This means that the products or services of the business have penetrated the interests and satisfaction standards of these subjects and, either by their own decision or encouraged by the commercial strategies devised by the company to retain them, they continue to consume with regularity.

This can be reflected in any item, for example, those who maintain a cable television plan for months, those who go to eat frequently in the same restaurant, those who buy the same brand of detergent, etc.

On the other hand, there are clients who have not yet become consumers, but could do so at any time, and these are the potential customers. As the name implies, they are those who are potentially going to become new customers and, in the long run, repeat customers.

This can be determined through various studies that diagnose and evaluate your interests in a certain product or service. Many companies even get potential customers thanks to the dissatisfied customers of companies with which they compete directly or indirectly.

How do I know who my potential customers are and how can I locate them?

Companies use different strategies or methods by which they can get customers with potential to consume their products and / or services. Some of them are:

1.- Market studies

When we detect the consumer behavior of a subject, it is much easier to get him to complete a purchase. Remember that not all people have the same interests, needs and purchasing power, so that the way and the periodicity with which they carry out a transaction will be different in each case.

With a market study, it is possible to know your target or target audiences, since it is segmented according to the criteria that you need to evaluate (demographic, geographic, psychographic, socioeconomic, behavioral, among others) and helps you determine who and how you should target your campaigns.

2.- Inbound marketing

This marketing strategy consists of offering relevant and useful information to people who have already shown an initial interest in a certain product or service. It is based on making the potential client feel accompanied throughout the process that leads to the purchase and after it, so that satisfaction is achieved that ends in loyalty with the brand.

This technique, recently popularized, makes use of very current tools, such as blogs and social networks, since they are at the hand of anyone with Internet access. To achieve a strategy of inbound marketing effective, you need to do a keyword study and include long tail keywords in the content so that, in addition to attracting a good amount of traffic to the websites, it is what really interests a brand, that is, potential customers.

3.- Reward-based techniques

If a person detects a more convenient benefit between two options, they will be more tempted and probably more likely to make a purchase than if they feel that it does not matter which one they choose. Therefore, it is important to make use of offers, promotions, discounts, extra services, free benefits, benefits accumulative, among others, so that potential clients feel more attracted by the commercial proposal of a certain brand.

For example, cell phone plans contain almost the same benefits between one company and another, in addition to having quite competitive prices with each other. If any of the companies offered a free device (even though it is not the most advanced in the catalog) with the purchase of a postpaid telephone plan with a twelve-month contract, it would be ensuring a monthly transfer for a year and the client would take home both the plan and the phone even if he does not need them, just for the fact of believing that the equipment did not cost him a penny.

There are many ways to reach potential customers and get them to make occasional or regular purchases. The important thing when looking for them is not to launch the network to the largest number of people, but to the right ones. That is why it is important to make segmentations and delimit resources, focusing on those who already have a previous purchase intention.