How to Keep Current Customers While Getting New Customers

For small business owners, it can be hard to focus on the marketing function of your job when you have a million other things to do. However, marketing is not something you should put off and say you’ll get to later. You need to get to it today to make sure you have customers tomorrow.

Marketing helps you achieve visibility, and visibility is what you need to get noticed amongst your competitors. If you fade into the background, working on the back end of the business instead of the front end, you’ll soon find yourself with fewer customers.

There are so many different ways to market yourself – it’s not all flyers and brochures. You could try newsletter printing, sending your current and past customers news that they can use about your business and industry.

According to Jay Conrad Levinson, the founder of guerrilla marketing, you should spend 60% of your marketing budget on current and past customers and 30% on getting new customers. The remaining 10% of your budget should be spent universally. The reason for the uneven split is that your current customers are your best chances for business. Repeat business is easier to get than new business. Your current customers know you and have confidence in you and your product or service so you don’t have as much convincing to do as you would with new customers.

The key to a great marketing campaign is that all these different types of marketing are going on simultaneously. You need to keep your current customers happy while also bringing in new customers. Here are some tips to keep your marketing campaign going.

Replace your former customers by using a repeated message. Customers come and go. You need to replace all your former customers with new ones. This means you need to always be marketing. You can’t just market when your customer base starts shrinking. You need to continually get your products and business out in the marketplace so that new customers will come through your doors and replace the customers that have left.

Customer service is part of your marketing campaign too. You can consider everything you do to connect with the customer as marketing. This means your customer service too. Good customer service breeds referrals and word-of-mouth marketing. That’s right – word-of-mouth marketing – which can be the best kind! It’s free and people are more likely to believe people other than you about your great product or service.

Don’t market just to announce sales. You should also be marketing to keep your customers informed about new developments in your business. If you’ve added new products to your lineup, there’s no better way to generate interest than by marketing ahead of time. Use press releases, newsletter ads and advertising to let customers know what’s coming. It’ll build up anticipation for the release of your new product, which can drive even higher sales.

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