Meaning & use
drum up business
Last updated
Meaning
phraseidiominformal
To make an active effort to find new customers or orders, for example by advertising or contacting people.
Grammar: Behaves like a verb phrase: she drums up business, they drummed up business.
Patterns
- drum up business for something
- drum up business by doing something
The new cafe handed out free samples to drum up business.
She called old clients all week to drum up business.
A cheap sale in January helped the shop drum up business.
Word forms
| third person singular | drums up business |
|---|---|
| past tense | drummed up business |
| -ing form | drumming up business |
Common combinations
- try to drum up business
- The plumber tried to drum up business by leaving flyers.
- drum up business online
- Many freelancers drum up business online.
- drum up some business
- We need a campaign to drum up some business before summer.
- drum up new business
- He went door to door to drum up new business.
Synonyms and how they differ
- generate
- Generate is more formal and neutral, while drum up suggests visible, energetic effort to attract customers.
- attract
- Attract can describe customers being drawn by reputation alone, whereas drum up implies you are doing the pushing.
- canvass
- Canvass means going around asking people directly for orders or votes, a narrower method than drum up business.
Word family
Commonly confused: drum up business or drum out?
drum up business vs drum out
To drum someone out means to force them to leave a group, which is unrelated to finding customers.
Practice
The new gym offered a free first week to ___ business in the neighborhood.
Choose one answer.
Drum up business means to work to attract customers; drum out means to expel someone, and the other combinations do not form this idiom.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “drum up business”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.