What To Do If You Don’t Own The Chicago Cubs

Yesterday, I made my annual trek to Wrigley Field to watch my beloved-but-hapless New York Mets play the Cubs. I was one of an underwhelming minority of fans faithfully dressed in a Mets jersey and cheering on my childhood favorite team, through their parade of no-name players and comedy of errors – both mental and physical.

But I digress…

Every time I visit Wrigley Field, the same two thoughts come to mind:

1. Cubs’ management through the years has done such a great job of keeping their fans so dedicated that they continue to willingly pack themselves into a decrepit, uncomfortable, ancient ballpark year after year – even though the team itself is famously uncompetitive!

 

2. The Cubs spend virtually ZERO time, energy or money attracting new fans.

Now, you might not be quite as fortunate to have such a large base of raving fans of your business (slight understatement!). So, you can’t simply invest ALL of your marketing time, energy and dollars on keeping your current customer base happy and selling them more stuff.

In fact, all businesses (except for the Cubs and a VERY few other exceptions) need to attract new customers, and should devote about 30% of their marketing resources to doing so.

Unfortunately, as I pointed out last week, the overwhelming majority of business owners insist on focusing almost ALL of their time, attention and resources solely on trying to attract new customers – and practically ignore the gold mine hidden in their base of current customers.

Here’s a simple 4-step strategy you can use to attract lots of potential new customers in the fastest and most cost-effective way possible – through joint ventures:

1. Define your ideal target market – the dream customers most predisposed to purchase your products or services at premium prices.

 

2. Ask yourself what else your target market is already buying, so you can find other businesses to joint venture with. Make sure the customers of these other businesses are members of your ideal target market.

 

3. Come up with an incentive and great arrangement to encourage those business owners to cross-promote with you (where you each promote the other’s business).

 

4. Strike up a relationship with those business owners to propose the joint venture and work out the details.

As a result, you’ll both have a new audience to market to, complete with the suggestion and endorsement of each already-trusted business owner.

By the way…

Want to know how to figure out what kind of incentive and arrangement will work best for you?

Make sure to keep in mind the first and most-important calculation you need to make before doing any kind of marketing:

What is your average Lifetime Customer Value?

Calculating that number will allow you to decide how much you will happily pay to acquire a new customer.

There are many different ways to calculate your average Lifetime Customer Value, including this formula from Jay Abraham:

LCV = (P x F) x N – MC

Here’s what that means:

• LCV is the overall lifetime value of a customer
• P is the average profit margin from each sale
• F is the number of times a customer buys each year
• N is the number of years the average customer stays with you
• MC is the marketing cost per customer (total marketing costs/number of customers)

Once you figure out how much you can happily spend to acquire a new customer, you’ll know just how much of an incentive you can offer to a business owner to help attract new customers from his business to yours.

Which means you’ll become an expert in acquiring new customers the fastest and most cost-effective way possible: through joint ventures.

If you need help working through this process, or dozens of others, check out our FREE test drive for the most comprehensive system of marketing tools and resources anywhere. Click on the image below: