Online Internet businesses are often in the business of attracting and selling to new clients. The strategies for selling to first time customers are referred to as Front End Acquisition.
Front End Acquisition refers to all of the marketing and communication that happens before a person becomes your customer or client.
First some clarification to make sure we are all on the same page here. When I use the phrase grow your business, I’m referring to generating more revenue and, by extension, increasing your profits. This guide is not intended to turn you into a multi-national goliath with trillion dollar assets. It’s not about the big money game of mergers and acquisitions, leveraged stock buyouts, or anything like that.
Since consumers are skeptical, by nature, of advertising and marketing claims, it’s tough for you to convince them that what you offer is as good as what you say. Prospects don’t know you, so they have no reason to trust you. But here’s an interesting phenomenon: even though they don’t know them either, consumers trust other consumers and their opinions. The psychology behind this is that, unlike a sales person, a “regular” person has no reason to lie.
Achieving success requires thinking outside the box. Resources are often limited and the competition is often better armed than you are. It takes creativity, aggressiveness, and sound strategies to overcome these disadvantages.
The Internet is many things to many people. To marketers, it’s an efficient direct marketing delivery system. That’s right. The same effective principles that work in traditional offline direct marketing can be applied to the internet. So if you can take these principles and get good at them, you can start to move up the “food chain” from a low-priced product to a $100 product, then a $500 product.
Compared with advertising, getting media coverage has practically no impact on your bottom line. The only costs associated with press releases are printing and mailing. And if you’re using electronic distribution like email, you can take mailing costs out of the equation. However, unlike advertising, you can’t buy publicity, you have to earn it.
It’s time to really get to the heart of the matter of marketing: education. But this section isn’t about your education; it’s about educating your prospects. No matter what product you sell or service you provide you must think about customer education.
While many marketing techniques have fallen by the wayside over the past several decades, direct mail marketing has seamlessly made the transition from the horse and buggy days of past centuries into the current era. Often overlooked by entrepreneurs who are drawn to the Internet and its virtually “free” delivery system, direct mail marketing still packs a punch when it comes to converting readers into prospects and prospects into buyers.
Most owners and managers want to grow their business. Most of them concentrate exclusively on getting more new customers. Odd really.
There is lots of marketing research that is pretty consistent in pointing out that it costs somewhere between six and twelve times as much to get a new customer as it does to sell to an existing customer. And once you have a customer it is generally pretty straightforward to get them to buy from you more often.
Once upon a time, shortly after dinosaurs stopped walking the earth, the hard sell was invented, used, and probably all that was needed. Without a lot of competition, Fred Flintstone could just stand on his doorstep screaming, “Buy from me.”Cavemen are out. Social marketers are in.
Follow us:
0 Comments