customer loyalty

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11 Ways to Attract and Retain Your Ideal Customer

Do you measure the results of your business building tactics?

When you tot up your expenses, including sales costs, your marketing probably accounts for around 10% of your operating budget – if not more. But many business owners and managers don’t have much idea as to where all this money is going to, let alone the results that are being achieved. In other words they spend money on brochures, advertisements, web sites and so forth with no real way to link specific results to specific actions.

Knowing which marketing tactics pay dividends will save you time, money and effort by allowing you to focus your marketing budget on activities that work. This means that you should learn how to measure the effect of your marketing efforts to increase revenue and profit.

Create your dashboard
Think of it like this. You are flying your personal Learjet to the Caribbean for a well earned break. You’re flying at night at 30,000 feet and your only help are the instruments on the dashboard. Similarly, can a business guide its flight towards its objectives without a set of dashboard dials? Of course not!

Every business needs a set of dials or controls – or metrics as they are now called. We can have the best of plans but metrics are the things that drive them. The most important of course is profit. But what if I asked you to name a couple metrics that are fundamental to business success? Could you name them?

Two of the most important metrics for growing business are;

1. Cost Per Acquisition
2. Lifetime customer Value

These metrics are so robust that just knowing their values will give you a pretty clear idea of how well your business is doing – and what’s more how to make it even more successful. Just to make sure we are really clear about this let me explain what these metrics will do for you:

Metrics will allow you to measure your marketing and business results, eliminate unproductive marketing tactics and they will help you save money and make more money, by showing you which marketing tactics you should reinvest in.

Points To Remember Are:

• Marketing planning should concentrate on tactics to attract customers and tactics to keep, reward and make the most of your customers’ loyalty.

• Optimise the way you measure your business activities and results in order to grow your business.

We examined the first of two really important tenets of successful strategy – creative insight and competence? Well it’s time to look at the second of these: what is it that you and your business are good at doing?

People tend to think that profit is purely to do with market opportunity. But this is to miss the truth. Great strategies are built on a clear appreciation of “what we’re good at doing” and converting this into competitive advantage. This core strength or competence is the driver for market penetration and development.

The importance of the question: ‘what are we good at doing?’ can not be overestimated. For what you – and your business – can do that’s of real value for your customers will help you differentiate your business. It then follows that if you concentrate on activities that leverage your strengths so that you can get the best output you are capable of, you can continually improve the strength until it becomes a world beater.

Producing ‘hearts and minds’ loyalty
You can also build on your business’ strength by turning it into a compelling vision that can often be more seductive than the product or service you offer. Most people in life haven’t really worked out their real purpose in life. This means that they’ll attach themselves to someone that has if given half the chance.

This is much bigger than finding a niche because if you want to win over the ‘hearts and minds’ of your prospects you’ve got to go beyond the product to a cause – your business strength lends itself to being that cause. And this applies to the people that work for you too. After all they are your ‘internal customers’.

The issue then is to be absolutely clear about the one thing that you are really good at doing or put another way; what distinctive competence makes your business special. It might be something to do with safety, or durability, or size.

Points To Remember
• So remember don’t underestimate the value of having a strategy.
• Creative insight and key strengths should be the true focus of business success and achievement.
• Concentrating on what you’re good at can win the ‘hearts and minds’ of your most important stakeholders.