You’ve got a great team, aligned with your own mission, vision, values and purpose – now let’s get them pulling together to create the rhythmic acquisition of customers. This simply means getting the team to bring in new customers in a consistent, predictable, profitable and routine way.
But how?
“Rhythmic acquisition of customers is ALWAYS preceded by rhythmic activity”
Is your marketing rhythmic?
These two important principles will help you stick to a rhythmic marketing plan…
- Marketing = Creativity + Maths
- Rhythmic acquisition is always preceded by rhythmic activity.
We’ve all been ‘guilty’ of random acts of marketing when we felt the pinch and needed to bring in new customers. Perhaps you’ve been quite content with the ones you have and saw no need to bring in any more, but how does your business grow? What happens if one leaves? Do you go to more networking events, start a social media campaign, buy some Google AdWords?
Don’t get me wrong, these tactics are highly effective, but they’re not rhythmic. I will now attempt to help you get rhythmic with your customer acquisition.
What is your desired rhythm?
A good place to start is to figure out how many customers you need. Look back at your seven key numbers. Doing all that work previously now shows you how many customers you need, at your average order value, to create sufficient profit, based on your gross margin. Once you know how many customers you need, you can usually calculate the right rhythm pretty easily.
For example, let’s say you run a B2B service business where your customers pay you an average of £500 per month.
Your T.E.R.M.S number is £200,000pa and you’ve worked out (in 7 key numbers) that you need a turnover of £1m to create that £200k net profit. To get a turnover of £1m with an average order value of £500 per month per customer, means each customer must be worth £6,000 per year (12 x £500) and you’d therefore need 167 customers to hit your T.E.R.M.S turnover number.
If you take away the number of customers you already have, you are left with the number of customers you need to acquire.
How much should you spend to acquire each customer?
The Entrepreneur’s Circle shares a formula to help you calculate how much money you need to spend on your marketing to obtain the number of leads that delivers the number of sales in consideration of your conversion rate:
- How much is your average customer worth to you? Over their lifetime or the next 2-3 years, say
- How much would you pay to get one of those customers? Taking into account their lifetime value above
- How many leads do you need to get a customer? If you sell to half of the people you speak to, you would need 2 leads to get 1 customer. What’s your ratio?
- How much can you spend to get a lead? Answer 2 ÷ answer 3
- How many new customers do you want next month?
- How many leads do you need next month to get that many customers? Answer 3 x Answer 5
- How much marketing spend do you need for the next month to get that many customers? Answer 6 x Answer 4.
Consider this – Is the number one mistake a business owner can make trying to get their leads/customers/clients/patients as cheaply as they possibly can? If so they may be depriving themselves of the number one advantage you can have in business, which is to create a scenario where you can profitably out-spend your competition to get customers.
Are you spending your marketing budget?
This might be a silly question, if there is such a thing, but you might be surprised to hear that many business owners aren’t spending what they could to acquire a customer.
Track and measure your marketing spend – analyse the results, figure out if it’s working, or if you can spend more… Remember that each marketing platform may have a different cost per customer value, depending on the type of customer it brings in and the cost of using it.
Review your marketing for the rhythmic acquisition of customers
Here are some questions to ask yourself, to see how well your marketing is currently working towards being rhythmic and what you could adjust to get it there.
- Are you currently acquiring the same number of customers each month for around the same cost? If yes, what is that cost?
- Are they the right customers for you and your business?
- Where are most of your leads and sales coming from?
- Does your activity generate leads and sales, and at what cost?
Remember, we try to focus on high pay off activities, and delegate, outsource or eliminate those that are not paying us!
Now, when it comes to adjusting your marketing plan, you should have a clearer view of what budget you have, where to spend it and who it should attract. If you feel like you don’t have the budget or are nervous of spending more than you’re used to, try to re-frame any negativity and look at what you need to do to find that budget. Where can you reduce spending, find more time and so on, because that marketing budget will help you achieve your goals. Or you may need to adjust your parameters to fit the budget you do have. It might take longer and be a lower profit, but you’re still going to move forward…
There’s so much more to marketing strategies and tactics that I won’t go into here, but as always, I’m very happy to have a conversation about any of the questions this article may have raised, including working on your seven numbers, figuring out your cost per acquisition or analysing your current marketing activity.