Customer Acquisition 2012
January 26, 2012
Businesses fail because some of the following reasons:
– low awareness among a target market
– didn’t acquire enough profitable customers
– acquired enough customers but at too high of a cost
Customers are assets, acquired, managed for profit and retained to keep a competitive edge in the market places. Customer acquisition is major priority for all start-ups or small businesses. It is a daily activity to keeping the doors open. When entering new geographic or customer market segments or launching a new product/service.
Within the customer acquisition process is the economics, cost of acquisition and retention vs. profitable customer.It’s imperative to understand the economics of customer acquisition. To know the cost/benefits of different customer acquisition strategies and tactics. To gather up metrics such as customer numbers, average cost value, acquisition-to-conversion and cost-per-qualified-lead can help distinguish the effectiveness of your acquisition efforts.
To keep the doors open in 2012 and beyond, small businesses/starts up (really, all businesses) have to be more calculating, on how they go about acquiring their assets and especially when working with limited resources in the way of fund, bandwidth or talent.
Creating a plan, strategy and processes can go along the way in saving time and money.
Create a customer acquisition strategy:
Define a customer acquisition process.
Define a role that focused on prospecting.
Identify your success factors and metrics for the new strategy
Develop a marketing campaign process that requires integrating lists.
Monitor process and feedback loops to adjust the process as necessary
Customer Acquisition Tactics:
Social media -Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Bookmarking Sites
Content –Blog, Articles, Case studies or White papers
Direct Marketing –Direct mail, email campaign, Webinars, podcasts
Paid Search- Online ad campaigns (Facebook,LinkedIn, Google Ads etc)