How to Find Customers Who Don’t Even Realize They Need Your Services

How would you like to attract new customers who don’t even realize they need your services?

I’m talking about the clients that aren’t searching for what you offer, but still need it once you show it to them. This guide will teach you how to find these hidden clients and get your business off the ground, faster than ever before. If you want more information, keep reading!

Finding Clients

Old-School Lead Generation

Cold Calling – Not for the faint-hearted

Finding New Clients Online

Finding prospects has undergone a dramatic transformation now people are very comfortable with using the internet as a purchase research tool. Thinking of buying a widget? Jump onto Google and find out who’s got widgets for sale.

Prospects can readily be found using the search terms they would use to try to find your offering.

In the old school scenario, the salesperson had to sift through 100’s of prospects to find a lead. With online marketing, finding leads is as easy as your advert being seen for a particular Google Search term.

So you can find prospective clients online, but it can be really expensive because of the intense competition. What about if we could find clients without having to deal with the costs of battling against all your competitors?  

That’s where targetting hidden clients can help you.   

Using Google Advertising to find ‘Hidden Clients’

Using the ‘Display Network’ to find prospects

Our hidden clients aren’t searching for keywords that signal them as prospects, so how do we find them?

Well, Google Ads provides an amazing range of advertising options, and in this case, we’re going to use its ‘Display Network’ advertising campaigns. These campaigns place your adverts on ‘on-topic’ websites as banner ads. Generally Display campaigns are lower cost per click and have a wide reach.

Many people dismiss Display Network campaigns because its sales strategy is indirect compared to the transactional nature of Search campaigns, but I think that’s a strategic oversight.

Display Network campaigns bring brand awareness to your target market and using a more sophisticated approach can surface clients who haven’t revealed themselves through their search activity.

Our strategy starts with ‘remarketing’

In Display campaigns, we can use a ‘remarketing’ capability. This allows us to show ads to people who have recently been to your website.  We’ve all noticed those remarketing ads that follow us after we’ve been to a particular website. The marketing strategy is to remind the prospect about your products and services after they’ve been to your website.

To do this Google accumulates a portfolio of recent website visitors – a ‘remarketing list’.

Then we identify ‘similar’ people

While remarketing is an important marketing strategy in it own right, we move beyond that to utilise a feature Google calls ‘Similar Audiences’ where Google matches people based on their internet activity to your remarketing list.

Google utilises its knowledge of internet behaviour to “identify new potential customers whose search behaviour is similar to that of people in your remarketing list”

These are people who are similar to recent visitors but have never visited your website.

These people have a high probability of being ‘hidden clients’, so now we can create online marketing campaigns to target them

In essence, the approach is:

1. 1. Create a portfolio of recent website visitors (your ‘remarketing list’)
   2. Let Google spawn a related Similar Audience list
   3. Target your Similar Audience

There’s a bit of background work required to make this happen which is what we do on a day to day basis.. 

Online advertising has become expensive

The problem for business owners looking online for leads is that the online advertising model is so popular it has become fiercely competitive.

That translates directly into increased advertising costs. Google Ads are based on ‘Cost per Click’ and in a competitive marketplace, the click costs go up dramatically.

An important advantage of using the Similar Audience model is to reduce engagement costs as the cost per click is usually much lower than for Google Search campaigns.