Establishing a solid customer-base is crucial for any start up or small business owner—after all, without any customers/clients, you make no money and without any money your small business will crash and burn. While hiring a strong marketing team can help you acquire a good number of costumers, this route can be pretty expensive. And naturally with any small business owner, funds are tight. But there are few things you can do on your own to help build your number of customers that is relatively cheap or even better, free. To learn how you can increase your clientele and help ensure the success of your business, continue reading below.

1. Do Research

First and foremost you need to get in touch with the needs of your target audience. You could be selling the most innovative product or service known to man but if you don’t know how to appeal and relate to your target audience’s wants and needs, your campaign may fall flat. For example, could your audience be hesitant about taking a chance on you because they are hard up for cash? If this is the case you need to directly state how your product or service is beneficial to your customer despite their economic hardship, which leads us to out next tip—

2. Offer Exclusive Deals

The truth of the matter is that consumers are always looking for a good bargain, especially now (during the holidays). To appeal to the masses, offer some discounts and exclusive deals to new customers or offer a promotional limited time-only offer to people already on your email list serve for example. You can offer an immediate discount or a next-purchase discount, you can offer a 2-for-1 deal, offer free shipping and handling, or even offer a free consultation or an introductory class. The goal is to find a way to persuade new costumers to try your product or service because the deal is irresistible (and of course superior than your competitors.)

3. Get on the Social Media Map

This is crucial. If you do not know how to use popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ to self-market your business it’s time you learn now. Right now. The power of social medial isn’t going to dwindle anytime soon and these free tools are a great way to reach your target audience and establish your brand free of cost. In fact, even those that refused to give-in to social media in the past will be jumping on the bandwagon come the New Year. According to statistics, 40 % of surveyed small business owners said they finally plan on using social media in 2012.

4. Be Mobile and Tablet Compatible

If you’ve created a website or blog to get your name out there that’s a great start but it isn’t enough—it’s the age of the smartphone and the tablet and consumers must be able to access your website/blog through these devices. Your site has to be compatible. While some platforms will automatically convert, others do not and you may need to download a special plug-in like WpTap to make your blog compatible. And you’re going to want to make your site convert. After all, some experts predict smartphones and tablets will replace the laptop one day and since the latest figures say one-third of the U.S. population owns a smartphone and uses it for its remote mobile access, you don’t want to risk missing out on a pool of smartphone/tablet- using costumers.

5. Hire Ambassadors

Lastly you can hire someone to utilize the traditional “word-of-mouth” marketing technique by hiring someone closely related to your target audience. For example, if you created a product that is specifically tailored to college-aged students, then you can hire a few students at the campus nearest to you and get them to tell their friends and other students how great your products or service is. You wouldn’t have to pay them much (or you could offer free merchandise instead for example), but it’s a great way to dig in deeper and go straight to the source.

Of course these aren’t the only things you can do to expand your costumer-base, but it’s a start. Do some research and investigate all of the other resources that are available to you to ensure that you find costumers and keep them coming back.

About the Author: This guest post is contributed by Katheryn Rivas, who writes for online universities blog.  She welcomes your comments at her email Id: katherynrivas87@gmail.com.