Small companies, cautious companies and dumb companies are often hesitant to spend on marketing. Some reasons include risk aversion, cost of acquisition is not calculated in the margins or plain and simple ignorance, but whatever the reason, this presents you with a problem – how do you get new clients?
(This article is continued after a picture of Abe Lincoln staring you down)
The whole premise of advertising is that if you put yourself in front of more people regularly enough, some of them are going to buy you. The more entertaining, alluring or other adjective the piece they see is, the more likely that purchase is going to happen. The problem is advertising well can be expensive and doesn’t guarantee overnight returns so what ELSE can you do?
Let’s break this down:
- What you want is a behaviour.
- You want the behaviour of subscribing to your product.
- If you have a customer base you already have this behaviour.
- But you want people outside your customer base to subscribe because you can’t grow without penetrating the market.
- Using your product is a behaviour.
- Not using your product is also a behaviour.
- EVERYTHING IS BEHAVIOUR!#@
The question is now simple:
How do I convert the behaviour of non-use to use, via either my customer base or my product?
OR
How do I use my customers to bring in other customers?
OR
How do I improve or change my product so that it gets my customers to bring in other customers?
While the question and the construct are simple, the actual effort is no laughing matter. You will have to invest effort into product development and innovation through a hybrid marketing-product development team because neither team has the skillset by themselves.
But at least, all you have to do now is to crunch the numbers and figure out what’s cheaper – hiring the team and developing product or hiring a marketing agency.
