Marketing plan objectives explained

- Customer acquisition, we finally made it. We finally made it to customer acquisition. It's such an important topic. It's one of my absolute favorite topics. I love talking about this. I could talk about it day and night because it's so crucial to your business. This is what's going to define you as either being a home run success or a bankrupt company. It's all about customer acquisition and how you execute this strategy is going to make the difference between success and failure. And I call it customer acquisition for a reason. I call it customer acquisition because that's the new, the modern way of talking about acquiring customers, both from a marketing perspective and a sales perspective. We merge them together and we create a customer acquisition strategy. Now, a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with this and because they don't come from this discipline, they tend to be tactitions. They tend to be really good at the product or service that they're delivering but they're not as good, in many cases, at selling and marketing their product. So, we got to get you into this mode. So I really want you to pay attention because this is the difference between what makes your business sizzle and what makes it flop. All right, now, have you ever wondered why, when you walk down the street, and you look at a restaurant and the line is out the door. Love those restaurants. I always get jealous. I'm like, wow, that's great. What's going on in there? I want to run that type of business and people are clamoring to get in from eight in the morning 'til midnight and then you go down the street a little bit further and the other restaurant down the street is empty. There's nobody there. Well, you know what? It's all about, it's two things. One is the quality of the food but usually that's not the actual indicator of why that line is out the door. It's all about customer acquisition. It's the branding. It's the social media. It's gone viral. It's the advertising. It's the events. It's the search engine marketing that's driving those people to that and then at some point, that restaurant kind of gets this status, like this incredible status, where it just is always filled up. I'll give you an example. The hotel I stay in in New York has this burger joint. It's actually called "The Burger Joint," and it has a line out the door and it literally is a hundred deep sometimes at lunch time and people waiting an hour to get a hamburger but it's considered one of the best hamburger places in New York City so everybody goes there. It built that reputation but it built it on branding, social media, all of the things that they do in order to acquire customers and now it has, like, this status that is almost untouchable. It just, like, it just happens. So it's a simple concept that says people have to know you exist in order to buy from you. I mean, it's a very simple concept obviously, but entrepreneurs continue to forget that. Again, they stay so focused on their product or their service and mastering that, that they forget, "Oh, we still need to get customers," or, I love this. Entrepreneurs say this all the time which is, "If I built it, they'll come." Yeah, that is a fallacy that will kill you, right? Yeah, it's if you build it, all of a sudden just people are going to come in. No, if they don't know about you, they're not going to come in. So we really need to get this down and we need to master this and put this inside your company. Now, I want to talk a little bit about entrepreneurial types for just a moment here because there are different types of entrepreneurs that will identify this. Some people that are watching me right now are like, "I got it. "I'm a sales and marketing guy." They're thinking of themselves, "I got this one nailed. "This is the fun stuff. "This is where I can use all the knowledge "over the last 20 years of selling or marketing. "I'm going to nail this." There are other entrepreneurs that are watching this video right now that are product people or their operations people or they're finance people and they're going, "Oh my goodness. "I have no idea how to sell a product. "I'm shy in front of people. "I don't want to actually sell it. "I'm going to go hire somebody else to do it. "And I don't really know a lot about marketing "so I'm, you know, that's a foreign thing to me." Now, I'm a marketing and sales guy. My entrepreneurial type is marketing and sales. That's how, as a CEO, that's how, that's my discipline. I went out on every sales call at MarketLive, my prior company, when we were closing deals. Like, every customer I met in the history of the company, and that was, like, 21 years, so it was a lot of shaking hands, a lot of, what we call, CEO hugs, where you go into the executive meeting and you'd finalize the deal because that's the kind of person that I am. There are other people that want to sit in the back corner. They're technicians. They're going to tinker with the product and that's okay, but if you're the founder, if you're the entrepreneur, you need to come out of your shell and you're going to need to be seen because your customers expect to see you as well. This is a really, really important thing. The wrong thing to do is to leave up sales to somebody else. Like, "Oh, I'm not going to worry about it. "I'll just hire a great salesperson." That's right. Hire a great salesperson, but you need to go along with them because you're the expert. That's who your customers want to hear from. That's who they want to see. They want to see you. So let's make sure we do that. You've got to put a marketing mindset into your overall existence. That means that you always have to be thinking with your marketing cap on. It's not that difficult. A lot of marketing concepts are pretty easy to gather but we've got to get them organized. We got to get objectives done and we've got to get them into an action plan where we can make this thing go. So customer acquisition, as I said earlier, is made up of two things. It's made up of marketing and of sales and you really need to put them together in order to call it kind of customer acquisition. Now, marketing is getting your customers to know that you exist. It's creating demand for your product or service. Selling is actually getting your customers to pay for your product or service. So you've got to marry getting them to know you exist with actually getting them to write a check or give you cash or whatever. Bring those two together and that's what we mean by customer acquisition. Customer acquisition is kind of the modern term for sales and marketing. In a lot of business plans, by the way, the older business plans, and the older boring outlines that you might've looked at instead of ours, new and modern, those older, boring outlines will call it marketing strategy and sales strategy and that's fine but we're going to put a banner over that by calling, this is the customer acquisition section of your business plan. And I will tell you, investors will identify with it. They actually like the term, customer acquisition. It's much more active. You're going to acquire customers and make money, 'cause that's what they care about. So the definition, if I was to give you a definition of customer acquisition, it's the act of getting people both interested in your product or service and buying your product or service. The systematic way that you attract and secure customers. You're combining sales and marketing together and that are closely linked and these are going to work hand in hand with one another, all right? So yes, they are going to work very close together but, we also have to treat them separately, and so I want to make sure that we do that because every marketing activity that you do has to actually live on its own. Everything has to live in its own. Every sales activity that you do, also. They need to be measured. They need to have a set of objectives. They need to be measured separately, and if one is not working, it needs to be jettisoned. It needs to be out and you need to replace it with something else. So I want you to keep in mind those types of things. On the sales side, really what we're talking about is it defines the way that you sell your product or service. Maybe you sell it online, in a retail store, or maybe you use direct sales or telemarketing sales. Maybe you sell via distributor or via partner. That's kind of your sales channels and so what we're going to do is we're going to marry up creating demand with your sales channels and we bring those two together and that's what creates this thing.