How to find more customers?

[L_Aventurier]

OK, I know that is quite a general question...

And of course it varies from business to business.

Anyway, here is our case, maybe someone has some idea of how we could get more customers to know about us and use our services?


So we are a UK-based mobile app development company, we develop apps for other companies/entrepreneurs and most of our customers so far either came from AdWords advertisement or personal contacts or previous customers who have more work for us.

But Adwords has been the main sales channel. The problem is that, this channel, at least for us is getting more and more expensive and yield fewer and fewer actual good contracts.

Type of customers we don't work with:

1. Large established companies who need an app tends to use big marketing agencies or bigger development studios
2. Individuals with a cool app idea want to use website like Elance using the service of someone in India for a couple hundreds pounds

We focus on customers in between these two groups, not too rich, not too broke, they have between £5k and £15k to invest in their app idea but want to have it done professionally in the UK with someone they can meet, etc. We have had a fair few of these.

The problem is unfortunately we have more and more people contacting us and telling us "Here is my brillant app idea, I have no money for you, can you work 6 months to develop it for free and then we will split the profits if any".

Of course, if we only end up with 'leads' like this, our business will die...

So my questions is:

How to diversify our sales channel and make sure people in our target actually find us, not necessarily using AdWords?

Does anyone relate to this?

Thanks in advance!

 

[ethical PR]

Go back to the marketing plan you did, when you first identified there was a gap in the market for your services .....

Who are your target market/audiences, what do you know about their communications channels, of the marketing activity you have done so far, what has proved most effective for you? Do you have a particular sector/s that you specialise in? Who is the decision maker that you need to engage.

If by any chance you don't have a marketing plan in place invest in getting a marketing agency/freelance on board to work with you to develop your strategy and a plan of activities over the next year to help grow your business. And don't forget one of the best sources of work is your existing customer base.

 

[tony84]

have you tried to develop an app that you think would be useful for businesses take it in to them and talk about editing it for their needs?

There are companies who get in touch with me who tell me they have a system that will help my business and all the rest of it. Its not often I would take them up on their offer as im not really one to use my phone for work (other than phone calls and emails) but im sure im probably in the minority.

I cant really think of any examples for other companies but for me I do have an app for mortgage sourcing (comes free with the software I pay for) and life insurance sourcing app - although I never use it.

There is one app I have been thinking about recently but probably not going to go any further with it - every lender I use I have to put the clients income/expenditure into every lenders website for every client - quite time consuming. Im sure brokers would eat that up, but its reliant on third party companies working with you.