By Brian Moran
They are the clients who make your business tick, give you a strong return on investment, and allow you to build a company around them. Yes, your company’s “bread and butter” clients are the ones who provide you with a good night’s sleep.
For too many companies, however, there are never enough of these clients. These companies fail to do the proper things to entice enough customers to be faithful and spend the big dollars, while promoting their businesses to friends and family.
As a business owner, how can you land enough top-notch clients that you feel better at the end of the workday?
Make It a Goal to Land These Clients
The first task is setting a goal of landing such clients as your business opens and grows.
At the end of the day, the goal of any business is to find ways to turn visitors into leads, leads into customers, and customers into repeat customers. Yes, repeat customers, those customers who will be your biggest brand advocates, spreading positive feedback about your company and its services time and time again. And while this subsection of customers may not account for the majority of your revenue, they do account for the majority of your profit.
Check this against your own numbers; you will see that promoting repeat purchases can be the difference between a profitable business and closing up shop. Turning a customer into a repeat customer is both cheaper and easier than turning a new lead into a first-time customer.
One of the trickier tasks for businesses can oftentimes be determining just who those star clients are.
These clients are identified by getting personal with your customer base. You need to truly understand what your “perfect customer” is looking for, and what needs she is trying to solve. As you get your arms around that feeling, cater your offerings to meet those needs as perfectly as you can. Keep in mind, however, that if you fail to take the time to get personal with your clientele, you will just be taking shots in the dark with new offerings. I, for one, would never take that risk.
Communication is Key to Maintaining Top Clients
If you have clients that you feel can be your “bread and butter” for years to come, make sure you understand how they communicate.
In the event your customers communicate through email, it’s wise to create an email campaign that suggests added products and services to help these people achieve their goals quickly and simply. For those customers who use the phone for communication, you need to take the time to pick up the phone to chat with them.
How a business communicates with their top customers makes all the difference. While the majority of companies will choose to communicate via the medium they believe is best, smart companies understand that the way in which they communicate matters. The bottom line is you need to select the medium that your customers are most comfortable with.
While having “bread and butter” clients is certainly something to be proud of, make sure that you never take them for granted. To do so is to just watch such clients move to the competition over time. When all is said and done, it comes down to truly understanding your market’s core desires and goals.
Apple’s Identification with Customers at Core of Its Success
For example, Apple knows its “bread and butter” customers are design-oriented, trendy, and tech-savvy. As a result, their marketing is aesthetically wonderful. They incorporate minimalist design, bright colors, and trendy music because they know exactly who their “bread and butter” group is.
It isn’t their particular marketing message that works, because that same marketing would never prove successful for a business selling power wheelchairs. It’s that Apple knows their customers and does everything they can to meet the exact needs and desires of its “bread and butter” clients.
In both good and bad times, the “bread and butter” customers will more than likely stand by your side, refer you to others, and provide you with revenue. As a business owner, make sure you remember who butters your bread.
Brian Moran is the Director of Online Sales at Get 10,000 Fans, a marketing agency and blog that teaches business owners how to make money off their Facebook fan pages.
