Why Are Existing Customers Your Best Place to Get New Business in 2012?
Break out the Rolodex, as we kick off each year we often forget about our greatest and most affordable marketing opportunities – existing customers. As we start 2012, focus on your customers first for two reasons:
- Statistically, professional services firms may lose up to 20% of their clients each year. This attrition alone means that you need to retain more clients and replace what you lose before you ever consider a growth plan.
- Existing customers are the most affordable to reach. A common problem is that clients always view your offerings based on the services that you provided them when they hired you. A regular marketing program to existing customers can expose clients to the leadership that you offer other clients and allow opportunities to cross-sell additional services that they may not currently lean to you for. A basic CRM program, email marketing and social media are three great ways to do this.
With some signs of economic recovery, it is important that your customers understand the full breadth of your services and that they see the wins that you provide your other clients on a regular basis. This way, when they decide to come out of their shell and increase their marketing investments you are the first ones that they call.
What are the best strategies that you have found for retaining existing customers?
Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles of Good Design.
Good design is:
- Is innovative – The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.
- Makes a product useful – A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.
What is Marketing?
I had a good discussion with a friend yesterday who is making a career change from education to marketing. Afterwards, I started thinking about how to start a discussion about marketing at a foundational level. So I started thinking about a conversation with Brad Majors back about 10 or 15 years ago where he gave me the simplest definition of marketing, and I adopted it as my own.
Deadlines, Deadlines, Deadlines. Don’t Let Them Kill Your Best Work.
In marketing, our worlds often revolve around the deadlines. In the good ole’ days we called it “Chasing the FedEx truck” and at least we got to go home at 8pm. But once bandwidth increased and we were sending work over email, we had 24 hours in the day to worry about deadlines, like it or not.
Although deadlines often drive our inspiration, on occasion arbitrary deadlines cause us to turn in less than stellar work.
Why I don’t like Creative Briefs.
In concept, the creative brief serves a great purpose but in the throws of getting work done it is often overlooked and great opportunities to do great work are missed. There are many different formats for a creative brief and I am a believer of simpler is better – and actually, I am not a fan of the creative brief at all.
The Golden Rule of Value: Good, Fast, and Cheap.
You hear it referenced a lot, but the old adage of “Good. Fast. Cheap. You get two out of three”, is still my Golden Rule of Value. You can’t stand for anything if you try to stand for everything.
Pick two:
An Easy Way To Solve A Problem.
I sat in a great session at SXSW 2011 where Intuit talked about how they define the user experience in their software by starting broad and working narrow. They use a very simple question to define user experience decisions, it’s so simple I am ashamed that it took me this long to see it.
Ask yourself this:
Do You Create Good Work or Smart Work?
Good work is subjective, smart work is successful. Great ideas and beautiful design work are often judged on the backend of the project by clients and creative teams. Where smart work is judged by ROI after the results are in.
Smart work takes time. Time to think through the problem before we ever get to a solution. Sometimes it even takes more creativity to find the problem than it does to come up with solutions. So make sure that you give yourself enough time on the front end of a project to identify the real problem and then concept a smart solution.
Good work looks nice but often solves the wrong problem. Smart work defines the problem, and then delivers a great solution that drives results.
35 Things I learned at #FireSessions 2010.
I was fortunate to get a chance to participate in Brains on Fire’s 2010 Fire Sessions today and, as usual, they put on an extraordinary event. I started my career with them almost 15 years ago and over the last 10 years have remained great friends with them all and enjoyed watching them spread their passion and find their voice.
This video was shot and edited entirely on an iPhone 4.
Wow, it is a great time to be a marketer. So, we may have missed Madison Avenue, Ogilvy and rubylith, but this could be one of the greatest times ever to be in advertising. Although the foundations of good marketing cross all mediums and are more important now than ever, the ability to deliver low-cost, high impact messaging has been revolutionized with youtube and handheld HD. This video is amazing and should inspire us with endless possibilities for video on the web. If you are not using video to promote your product or service yet, what are you waiting for?
Credits go to Michael Koerbel at http://www.majekpictures.com and can be seen here on vimeo.
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