How to Create and Keep a Database of New Customers …. at Low Cost (part two)

You may have heard from marketing gurus about the high cost of acquiring new customers. They say it is easier to hang on to your existing customers, to get repeat business. Sure, that is a valid preference but remember there is an on-going expense in hanging on to your existing clients.

Then there is the people and companies who say, “We don’t have to advertise, we generate business by word-of-mouth”. This is a nice position to be at ….but it is a flawed concept.

Markets change and can change very quickly and to be left high and dry without a marketing process is a fatal mistake.

An excellent head-in-the-sand story from history was Commodore Computer and their Amiga PC. The company motto was, “Our product is so good it sells itself” …yeah right! We all need to exercise our marketing muscles.

We don’t go to the gym once a year and hope to keep in shape, as regular exercise is needed for both health and marketing. It is not a solution, frantically spending money on advertising when a recession hits. It does not work! At the same time, your business buddies or preferred customers can’t fix your cash flow problems as they will have troubles of their own to solve.

Learning to market is an art not a science. When the bad times hit you cannot rush out and start developing new skills overnight. It is a learned process. Marketing people that produce superior results get very well paid. These are the ideas people that keep the rest of the company employed and guarantee a profit at the end of the year. They are the ultimate problem solvers.

You will have heard of relationship marketing in corporations, where an on-going relationship occurs between key company executives. These companies have ample funds available for relationship marketing. Big money is spent at events where the suppliers and their clients get together to cement a business bond.

As computer techs we don’t usually have ample funds for a marketing budget. So how does a small computer repair company learn to get new business at low cost?

One common scheme used in small business is to belong to an organization like Rotary. Here you can develop relationships with other people in business. It works very well but it still does not solve the tough times bogey where you are all thrown into the same lousy business environment. If our business is running at a loss, what do we do?

The solution is to ask ourselves is, “How can I generate new business out of thin air?” What we need is a guaranteed method to get our message to the market, to get new business and retain our existing clients. The answers to all the questions are here on this site!