How to Get your First Customers in the UAE?

Today we will talk about your first customers and, to be more precise, how to ATTRACT AND GET first customers to your business. It is essential and critically important to get your first customers within maximum a week, as if you cannot attract a single customer during a week, nothing will change after a month. If after one week you still have 0 requests and sales on your product or service you need to answer 2 important questions: is it ME who cannot attract customers or the BUSINESS IDEA is not working and I need to change the niche?

Ok, so where your customers come from? Today, in the digital era of mobile and Internet technologies most customers are all coming from the Internet. Do you know that 70-80% of all advertising shifted to online and the volume of online advertising is increasing annually? I personally tried doing 7 different businesses and in all of them – in ALL of them - all the customers were coming from the Internet. But what sometimes made me fail is the absence of some particular KNOWLEDGE of how to ATTRACT new customers, keep the existing one and make them come and buy your services and your products again and again. Now I have this knowledge and you can save seven years of your life.

The first important thing is that you no longer need to have a complicated website to start and sell. Today you can have a Facebook page, an Instagram account or just one landing page to start and test your sales. When you just start, you don’t need to think of spending your money on doing a big fancy website in form of a portal with lots of pages and sections, or think about SEO and how to get to the first page of google search ranking – this is important at a later stage, it’s too early to think about it. You can burn your money on good-looking website, start doing SEO, spend hundreds and thousands on branding and beautiful design of your logo and at the very moment of truth – when you need to offer your product or service to the market - don’t get any sales as your product or service is not in demand. What could be worse?

The common mistake of all starting entrepreneurs is that they do not check the demand prior to investing money into website, SEO, company registration and office. Don’t waste your money – check first, assess the demand, and only then proceed to the website development, SEO, company registration and office lease.  So, the first thing you need to drill into your mind is the necessity to check if what you want to offer is really in demand in the market.

How can you check if you want to offer is really in demand in the market? You can use a special service called Google KeyWords Planner. What you can do with it? You can save your money and time. Period. With Keyword Planner, you can see how many people searched for a product or service (that you plan to offer or sell) in a particular area, in Dubai only, or UAE, or worldwide in general. You can discover if what you are planning to do or sell is really in demand. You can actually see the exact number of people’s searches that are interested in what you want to offer. You can get bid estimates of how much it would cost you, see how often keywords are searched monthly or yearly, how the search volume changes over time.

Another important service-tool is Google Trends, it shows you the most searchable items in a particular region or a city right now. So, if you don’t  know yet what business to do, you might get an idea what interests the market you are working in the most at this very moment.

We do masterclasses on using these and other practical tools of marketing, where we in real time show you and teach you how to effectively use various marketing tools and show you step by step how to do it. So, if you are really serious about it, drop us a line and make sure not to miss our events and masterclasses.

Ok, lets go further. To attract your new customers you need to differentiate two different important concepts: a visitor and a lead. The difference between them is that a visitor is somebody that just visited you web-site, page or group, and a lead is a person that did some important action on your page. What we call an important action on a page? – A click, a purchase, a call back request, a call to your office, filling in the form with email and mobile number, subscription to your email list, downloading a file, etc. It all depends on your product or service that you do and your marketing funnel, but all that I mentioned are important.

Every single website and has statistics of how many people visited website, how many people did interact with it and showed interest (became leads) and how many just went away without taking any action.

The visitor-to-lead ratio is one of the most important key indicators showing if you are performing right or wrong. It is called the conversion rate. The conversion rate shows the percentage of visitors that made a desired action. The most obvious example of conversion rate is a percentage of website visitors who buy something on your website. For example, if one hundred people visited your webpage than you have 100 visitors. Out of 100 visitors, three people bought your product. It means that your website has 3% conversion rate as 3 out of 100 is 3 percent. Knowing this figure can significantly impact your business behavior online as it allows you understand that if you attract 200 visitors you will have 6 sales, 300 visitors – 9 sales, etc. if we have 3% conversion rate. Imagine your website’s conversion rate can be improved up to 5% or 10%, how different your income will be?

Knowledge of your conversion rate will allow you not to GUESS but to KNOW whether you shall have sales next month or not, whether someone buys or not - you can predict your exact figure in income and sales for the next month and feel yourself more confident and sleep well at night.

All right, you know that 3% of the visitors buy, but what about other 97%? Why they didn’t? This is the right question, as most business owners concentrate on those who buy or take action and do not at all work with those 97 people who came to your website and quit, didn’t buy. Imagine the volume of that people if you have 10 000 visitors per month for example. 300 buy but 9,300 visitor just leave! What you should think of here, why people don’t buy: sometimes they are not ready to buy now, they are just researching or need more time to think. But how you can later on get in touch with that 9700 people? That’s when you need to have a remarketing campaign. Remarketing is a clever way to reconnect with visitors to your website who may not have made an immediate purchase or enquiry. It allows you to position targeted ads in front of those that had previously visited your website - as they browse elsewhere around the internet. I’m sure you experienced a scenario when you visited a website and the ad of the very same website was chasing you on Google, other websites or even Facebook or Instagram? That was remarketing in action – a very powerful tool. We have live masterclasses on how you can implement that in your business, so if you are interested – check our nearest event or drop us a line.

But there are cases when the main reason for visitors not to buy is not in them but in your offer or your website. What you should do in this case? There are tools that can help you analyze what is wrong with your page and visualize data on how they scroll, where they click, on what pages they quit, how much time they spend on each single page of your website and all of that allows you to understand where is the black hole in your website where you lose customers. The magic tool that can help you get the tracking of what I’ve just mentioned is called Google Analytics, you can connect it to your website and track what is going on and how your visitors behave.

What is required to start attracting customers?

You need to buy advertising. If you do it on Google you may be shocked how low or high some ads are. When attracting customers, you will need to know your CPC or CPM. CPC stands for the cost per click. It is most often used in click based advertising such as Google AdWords or Facebook Ads. Cost per click is simply a measure of how much you need to pay each time someone clicks on your ad. Assume that you bid 10 cents per click for your CPC ad and commit to a ten dollars budget. You are guaranteed to have 100 clicks. A CPM means Cost-Per-Thousand Impressions of the ad. It means that for the same budget of five dollars 1000 people will see your ad and you might have more or less clicks. What strategy would work better for you CPC or CPM cannot be predicted in advance, you need to check and test each time and then decide what to use.

Ok, so how to get the first leads to your website? The top 5 ways are:

1) Paid advertising on Google, Facebook, Instagram

2) E-mail marketing, when you create a series of emails that offer clients to buy something

3) E-books that can be downloaded in return for an email or phone number (and once you get the email you start email marketing)

4) Online networking (communication with potential clients via LinkedIn and other professional platforms)

5) Webinars (where you teach how to use your product or service, or how to choose it, or other educational staff, it should not be a sales pitch).

I do not cover SEO or blogging here as it requires much time and effort and you need to get fast results now. In the long term, yes, that is something you need to implement as well once you are sure about your business niche.  

    If you want to know more about Dubai freezone company formation, feel free to get in touch with our professional consultant team and we would be delighted to assist you and help you to compare Dubai freezone company setup costs and help you to find that free zone, which would suit your business needs the most.

 Disclaimer: Business Boutique UAE-Consultants.com is not affiliated with any particular government or legal entity. Business Boutique does not give professional legal advice nor any other professional advice subject to a public office in the government. This article merely sets out a simple and basic idea as to the reasons of Dubai freezone company setup and Dubai free zone company formation cost. Business Boutique in no way holds nor imposes any official governmental or legal authority and the article herein is only to be taken as a guide. All further governmental or legal issues should be addressed to the corresponding authorities.