Customer Acquisition 2012

Businesses fail because some of the following reasons:

Keep the Doors Open

– 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)

Leverage Free /Inexpensive Tools on the Web and Save Money!

It’s not having a bad product or service that causes eight out of ten startups to fail, some of the reason include,no market research and/or  not understanding the market needs. Experts will tell you startups fail because they are “under capitalized”. That’s a business school term for not having enough funds to muscle your way through the startup period. Alternatively, not having enough capital due to a run of unexpected expenses.

So coming out of the starting gate, do everything you can to preserve cash. It’s crucial to your company’s success. Of course one of the first things you need for your business is making sure you have the right technology solution.

What exactly are the right solutions?

Small Businesses can save a lot of money by leveraging technology solutions available today.

Business Fiscal responsibility.

• A computer with enough muscle to get your tasks accomplished. What’s right for one business is often far different for another business. Graphic designers needs are different those of accountants.

• Having the appropriate software solutions. Again, there is a lot to choose from. An expert can be helpful to you, in getting the best solution at the right price point, for your needs. Fair warning, there are a wealth tools or solutions  and it can be overwhelming, I guarantee,  you will find tools and resources you would not have thought off and hence making a decision is a challenge.

• Good communication tools. No, this is not just having a phone line, website, email and the Internet. Having good communications tools include project management, collaboration tools, business-class Instant Messaging, Social Media networks just to mention a few.

• Leveraging free/inexpensive solution in the arena of cloud computing. This saves you the expense of the  purchasing software for you PC/Server for your small business network. Explore the vast solutions within the Software as a Service arena. There are the questions regarding the security on these solutions, for which I say to you, someone has to take some ownership on securing your information, whether it,you or the service provider.

Example: Recently, a client, who works for non-profits, thought she got a great deal on a solution that supports the organization’s marketing effort. She paid $$$$ for it, and thought she got a good deal. When we showed her the same solution for less, she was ready to kill the messenger. And that does not take into account the time she could have saved researching on-line. Alternatively, a company with millions in revenue using a free tool to management invoicing as well as book-keeping solution.

Do not spend money, unless you really have to.

Here are some sites to check out for free tools and resources and keep your profits. Do a search on Google there are tons’ resources out there.

Let us know what works for you. The next post will list the solutions out there you can leverage and succeed in growing your business.

http://www.expensefree.com/

Check out NFIB.COM

Check out smbceo.com

We are creating a list of inexpensive solutions for small business, if you have one please post it in the comment section of this posting.

Contact us:  We will be happy to help you find and implement solutions that fit your small business.

Tel:  404-806-6817   | Fax: 404-806-0186            | Concierge at errandmanager dot com   |www.errandmanager.com

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