Five Steps to Acquire New Customers

fctaodrzk · 发表于 2010-3-2 11:47

This is the toughest economy we have seen since the 1973 recession. As the hunger for new customers grows to almost desperate proportions, many firms find themselves at risk of making poor decisions. Executives are under tremen?dous pressure to generate new rev?enue. Unfortunately, under these conditions, human beings are prone to make hasty decisions that may not be in their long-term interest.

In this economic climate, manufacturing executives tend to move straight to tactics without understanding how and why those tactics will deliver the rev?enue they seek. This distracts from sound strategy and a methodical approach to gaining great?er market share. Executives who fail to put strategy before tactics will soon find them?selves with a lot of activity but not the results they were looking for.

The following five steps are part of developing your Marketing and Sales Plan (Target Markets, Brand Strategy and Positioning Strategy) to effectively exploit new opportunities and secure new customers.

?Step One – Define/profile your ideal customer.

An ideal customer is one that you are best suited to serve, and one that has six major characteristics:

?1. Impact – you deliver services that have a significant impact on their business.

2. Budget – ideal customers easily afford your services.?

3. Profits – you earn a substantial profit by delivering these services.

4. Insights – you understand what your ideal customer needs often better than they do.

5. Expertise – your ideal customer wants and needs your specific capabilities.

6. Culture – there is a good fit between the way you do business and the way your ideal customers prefer to do business.

Profiling an ideal customer is useful because it clearly shows you whom you are seeking to serve, what chal?lenges you will help them overcome, what opportunities you will help them exploit, and what results they want to realize from having your firm as a vendor.

?Step Two - Analyze Your Existing Promises

Many companies believe that what they do is about expertise, credibility, and capability. While this may be true,ed hardy clothing, it is not the reason customers buy. Customers buy because they believe in your promise. What promises are you making to your customers, prospects, and the market at large? To answer this question, look at your advertising messages. Gather all the advertising ma?terials together in one location and lay them out on a table. What do you see? Take an objective look at your materials. If your firm is like most, you’ll see in?consistencies of several kinds:

Identity – Do you project a consistent identity across all advertising and promotional materials?
Value Proposition – Is your value proposition consistent from one document to the next? Is it clearly, simply, and elegantly expressed so that it stands out? Can a prospect look at a document and know within seconds why they should buy your services? Results – Do you promise to deliver specific results or outcomes from your service? What are they? Are these promised results consistently stated from one document to the next? Benefits – What benefits will customers realize from your service? Benefits are the psychological rewards of having achieved certain results. Deliverables – Do you consistently outline the deliverables from your service?
It is important to examine your sales and marketing materials from a disin?terested perspective. If you do not feel confident that you can do this on your own, we recommend that you hire an outside firm or find a friend or col?league to do this on your behalf.

?Step Three - Identify Gaps Where You Should Make Changes

When companies struggle to close deals, there is often a problem with their promises. Gaps exist between their promises and their ideal customers’ goals, so their closing rates suffer. Identifying these gaps will help improve the closing rate.

When you compare your ideal client pro?file with the analysis of your promised services, this is the moment of truth where you get to see what the market wants,abercrombie fitch jackets, what they care about, and how you stack up against those desires. You will now be in a better position to determine the effort needed to re-position your services and refine your advertising and promotion messages to match what the market wants and whether this effort will be worth the cost.

Step Four: Build a Client Acquisition Plan Based On a Pull Strategy

Often we see executives?developing a twelve-month plan and inserting activities and tactics without an?comprehensive strategy.

Let’s define pull marketing. Pull Marketing draws ideal customers into your brand by giving them content and ideas that are meaningful to them,juicy couture tracksuits, causing them to want to reach out to you. It is based in the belief that ideal customers are already incredibly busy and will they contact you only if you provide them with some?thing of value.

Push marketing,christian louboutin shoes, on the other hand, is based on the belief that if you tell your target audience who you are, what you do, and why they should do busi?ness with you - and tell them repeat?edly - they will listen and eventually do business with you.

Pull marketing begins with the advertising message and emphasizes the reasons the market should pay attention to your company.? The goal of this step is to help you develop a highly effective customer acquisition plan based on pull-marketing concepts. To build a pull market?ing strategy, you need two things: great content (message) and an advertising and promotion campaign plan. The primary goal of your campaign plan is to insert your brand into the buying cycle of as many ideal customers as possible. Your campaigns should be tactical, short-term, and designed to elicit buying behavior quickly from ideal customers.

?Step Five: Execute Your Pull Strategy and Track Results

In our experience, certain tactics and messages pull much more effectively than others. What’s more, it is nearly impossible at the outset of a campaign to know which are the most effective. Tracking systems great?ly improve your ability to target the right messages to the right audience and increase qualified sales leads. They provide actionable intelligence so you can continually refine your campaigns.

?Final Thoughts

An ideal customer is?one that your company is best suited to serve. Relation?ships with ideal customers produce out?standing results for both your customer and your company. To capture an ever-increasing share of ideal customers, you need to understand them deeply. Your deep under?standing of ideal customers positions you to tailor your services and promises to them. As you implement a pull-mar?keting strategy to attract them, you’ll notice that they perceive you as an expert or specialist.

In today’s tough economic climate, manufacturers need to maximize the impact of their marketing and sales dollars. These five steps, when implemented effectively, have produced outstanding results for The Wilson Marketing Group and for our clients. While they require a concerted effort to realize their full potential,ralph lauren polo shirts, they will impact acquisition of the right customers, revenue, and growth.? Is your firm ready to grow?

?How We Can Help

At The Wilson Marketing Group we understand how much work these steps re?quire. But the good news is that you do not have to go it alone. We would be happy to have a conversation about how we can support you through this process. To begin this conversation, call us today at 763-476-2216 or send an email to contact@wmg-mn.com.

This article is part of the series on a Marketing Profit Hunt –

Surviving and prospering during the economic downturn.

Visit wmg-mn.com to view all the Articles and White Papers

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