Do You Know Where Your Clients & Customers Are Coming From??

There is this first threshold in the life of a small business owner: After working hard to establish your company, you finally have a healthy cash flow and a decent number of paying clients or customers to keep you busy for the foreseeable future.

So, time to lean back and celebrate your success – we don’t do that nearly as often as we should anyway.

Time To Take Stock

But more importantly, this is also the ideal time to take stock, to find out how you got here and how to keep it up in the future. To learn which one of your marketing and sales efforts paid off in the end and helped you get to this point.

And for that, you need to have a closer look at your clients and customers.

To get started, make a list of all your past, present and potential clients or customers. And don’t forget to include any leads you have gotten in the past, even if they didn’t turn into actual paid business.

Then collect as much information on them as you can:

1. Client/Customer Info

Usually it is enough to write down their name and location for the purpose of this list. If you have different target audiences, make sure to note them as well.

2. Source

How did they learn about you and your business? Write down the marketing campaign or channel that introduced them to your products and services and be as detailed as necessary. For example, if most of your leads are generated through your website, have a look where your web traffic is coming from. If you have no idea how they found out about you, go and ask them.

3. Product/Service

Specify what product or service they were looking for and/or bought from you in the end.

4. Turnover

Find out how much money each one of them has generated for your business up to now and if there is potential for repeat business in the future.

Analyse

Now have a closer look at your list:

• What marketing activities have generated the most leads and how many of those turned into actual clients or customers?
• Which product or service seems to be most popular with your target groups?
• Which client/customer has produced the biggest turnover and where did they come from?
• If you have any further need to clarify your clients’ or customers’ motivations, don’t hesitate to ask them.

Action

Take all the learnings from the list and turn them into to dos for your future marketing:

1. Focus on the more successful and lucrative marketing channels and sales tactics and see if you can use the insights to create new marketing campaigns.
2. Check if your marketing reflects your target audience’s preferences regarding your products or services and make sure they are featured prominently.
3. Share these insights with relevant team members and collect ideas how to generate new business based on this list.
4. Consider branching out or moving to a different location if a large part of your clients or customers is from a certain area.
5. Make sure to ask every happy client for a review or testimonial for your marketing material.
6. See if any of these clients have recommended you in the past and make sure to thank them for it. Encourage all of them to spread the word about your business, possibly with a referral scheme.
7. Note when you last contacted your client, customer or lead. Make sure to follow up regularly to increase repeat business or referrals.
8. If another business or organisation was the source of a lot of referrals to your small business, consider hammering out a deal with them to expand your collaboration.
9. Double-check your marketing strategy based on your findings: Is it still up-to-date, are you communicating with the right people the right way?

Denise Strohsahl is the owner and founder of Edinburgh-based marketing consultancy sandstonecastles. She specialises in helping small businesses make the best of their size and their marketing. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook or connect with her here on LinkedIn. You can find her own blog at www.sandstonecastles.co.uk/blog/.