5 Key Strategies Successful Entrepreneurs Use to Find and Keep their Customers

2. Explore both online and offline media

In today’s world you have to go where your customers are. We live in a complex world combined with a mix of online and offline media. With the shift across the generational gaps from baby boomers to gen X, Y and now the new millennials, its inevitable that we need to shift how we reach out to them.

As we become more technology savvy and more time poor, you as a business owner have to keep up with changing buying patterns as well. There is a big shift towards online marketing, as well as digital services and it may not surprise you to learn that mobile marketing is one of the biggest growth factors. It’s shaking up industries and forcing change.

If you are in business, you cannot rely on just offline media and traditional streams to reach customers. Today’s economy demands both and you need to look at leveraging the online space and social media – i.e. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, just to name a few, or you could be missing out on conversing with many thousands of potential customers.

3. Identifying your target audience

This is one of the most important factors to consider in your acquisition strategies. Regardless of what tactics you employ, if you haven’t worked out who it is you are trying to attract, you may well be wasting hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars on all the wrong stuff! So who are your customers? More importantly from your existing customers, who is your best customer? And how do you get more of them?

Doing the due diligence to work this out and develop an ‘Avatar’ which represents the ideal customer for your business will narrow the search considerably and then you can selectively target your messaging to the right areas both online and offline to reach these people – and because its targeted, more than likely you will identify with them with the right language and messaging.

You know the saying, ‘birds of a feather flock together’ – so once you have tapped into the right target audience, you will find it easier to find more customers that fit the same criteria, and this will make your customer acquisition easier to manage.

4. Test and measure along the way

One of my earliest mentors said to me that if you can’t test or measure it, then stop doing it. It sounded harsh, but in reality so many business owners do things on the fly and have no concept of whether its working or not, like running ads in the paper for years, or advertising in yellow pages, just out of habit. Once upon a time it may have been relevant to do this, but are you still getting the returns to justify doing this again and again? Do you have clear criteria that dictate a certain number of leads or revenue that you expect out of a customer acquisition strategy to know if it worked or not?

If you don’t then its time to start thinking about this – before you throw more valuable dollars and resources on the wrong efforts. Also by not being able to measure effectively, you can’t really improve. Simple rule of thumb, every acquisition campaign should have clear measurability techniques laid out early on, and campaigns that can’t be tracked shouldn’t be undertaken.

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