when are you going to get new customers today?

When are you going to get new customers today?

As a small business owner it is easy to get caught up in the day to day running of your business. I know from owning restaurants that there is always something to do. I used to be busy from morning into the night. In fact, I was so busy that I didn’t have time to run the business properly.

Sometimes you have to stand back from the day to day work and think about the big picture. The most important thing to a business is its customers. You need to focus some of your time each and every day on getting new ones.

In the morning it is too easy to come in to work and open the emails and react to what we see; do these new important tasks. But I think it even more important to do the other tasks that we have to do, emails can wait.

So I suggest that you put aside an hour of each morning solely for the purpose of getting new customers. This is marketing time…

For many years now I have been an advocate of multiple streams of marketing: having a system of systems running in harmony. These might include your website and SEO, local SEO, blogging, article marketing, press releases, magazine adverts and features, newspaper adverts and features, cold calling, networking, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, mass mailing, events, shows, referral programs and many more.

What I do as a consultant is set up and run these systems for businesses. Each business is different and needs its own system, however most have a lot in common and anyone can set up their own system. I heartily recommend this because once the system is set up you should be able to run it with an hour a day.

So I suggest setting aside one hour of each morning specifically for getting new customers. This is vital for the future of your business. If you don’t have the time, get someone to do it for you. You may think that you don’t have the money to afford that but you can’t afford not to get new customers so ask yourself a few questions such as the ones below…

What does it cost you to get a new customer?

Up until now how much have you paid to get new customers? If you have run a newspaper advert what did it cost and how many new customers did you get from it. What other advertising or promotion have you done and what was the ROI?

What is a customer worth to your business?

Over the lifetime of a customer what are they worth to you? How much income and profit do they provide the business?

Once you have a clear picture of that number you know that your business will be successful if in order to get new customers you spend less than they net you over time. Now, it may be wiser to calculate this with the profit in the first 6 months from each new customer; this depends on your business model and cashflow.

So now you know what a new customer is worth. As long as you are paying less than that amount to get new customers you will be making money.

How Many New Customers Do You Want?

Some businesses only need a few others need many. To get a basic marketing/sales budget all you need to do is multiply the amount of profit from each customer by the number of customers you would like to get.

So now you know that you can spend this amount to get that many customers and your business will grow and increase profits. But the trouble is, if you spend this on advertising or traditional marketing you do not know what results you will get. That is why experts are needed to build a marketing plan that best uses your budget to get the number of sales you need, or more.

But now you have increased costs and still don’t know if it’s all going to work; it may seem like a bit of a gamble…

Alex Joll takes the gamble out of the equation by getting paid on results and not big fees upfront. So if you are looking for more customers to grow your business get in touch through http://www.alexjoll.biz