Marketing Plan for Existing Clients

Marketing Plan for Existing Clients:from Business 2 Community by Dana Prince
A lot of business experts talk about the importance of creating a marketing plan for your business. They’re right; you need a plan for marketing and you need to visit it on a regular basis. You need to continually tweak and refine your marketing strategy according to your industry, your customers, and the results you’ve gleaned from reviewing your business reports.
Twenty first century marketing isn’t a single set of plans that you set and review at the end of the year. It’s something you need to do continually. And if you drill down and create more than one marketing plan you’ll most likely have even better results.
Not only will you see better results but you’ll have an easier time of measuring various aspects of your business, too. If you have at least two plans, focusing on both prospects and existing clients, and review them on an ongoing basis, you’ll probably fare better.

Why do you need to market to existing clients differently?

The needs of your existing clients are probably going to be different new prospects. Sure, certain things are going to be universal in the marketing process, but an existing customer doesn’t need to be walked through the exact same sales process as a new customer.
An existing customer often has a shorter sales cycle for a repeat purchase. They don’t necessarily need the same type of courtship as someone who has never bought from you before. The existing customer relationship is one to definitely go after because it generally has a lower cost to market to than a new customer.
A lot of businesses focus so much on new customers that they don’t pick the low hanging fruit that are existing customers. (Conversely, some businesses get so accustomed to their existing customers that they put too many eggs in one basket and find themselves crippled when a big customer vanishes. Balance is essential!)
Existing customer marketing has another potential benefit — referral marketing. Referral marketing should be something you consider aiming for with existing customers because they have the ability to attest to your integrity as a professional and quality of product or work delivered. Their testimonials or reviews and social media activities can help you reach a wider audience via referrals.
Social proof is powerful! If you can get your existing customers to talk about your products or services as a kind of product evangelist, if you will, this will help you in many ways.
Continual customer engagement while striving to also acquire new customers isn’t always easy and it takes a detailed approach but taking the time to make sure you track activities with past customers can be very helpful. Tracking whether or not people buy more than once can help you see whether or not you need to spend more time refining this marketing plan or not. You’ll also see which types of marketing activities warrant being replicated on a wide basis because they are reaping big benefits.
Within each broad marketing plan you create for both new and existing customers you could also drill down to various types of demographics. You could have several sub plans as part of your overall strategy. Regardless of whether you create 2 marketing plans or 20, what’s most important is to look for every available opportunity to build and nurture relationships. Doing this will help you keep costs low and profits up.
Are you striving to bring new business in and support the business you have with marketing? Striving to continually do both will help your business grow and thrive.