The vast bulk of my postings address marketing for new business development – all the actions to introduce your products or services to people who have never heard of you or never purchased from you. In short, to get new customers, clients or patients.
But what about your existing and past customers?
The fact is, in many businesses, the low hanging fruit for marketing is people who have previously bought from you.
Marketing efforts should really be directed to both groups. If you don’t market to your existing customer base, you’re wasting a lot of the effort it took to get them as customers in the first place.
And if you don’t continue to market for new customers, you’ll eventually run out of customers. People move, close their businesses, die, get wooed away by your competition. There’s always attrition going on in a customer base.
Each group should have its own campaigns and approach. What works and what you need to do to market to existing customers is usually very different from marketing for new customers.
The emphasis may be different at different times. Right now, many businesses are finding it harder to bring in new customers and are surviving by servicing their existing customers like never before.