Attracting, Nurturing & Retaining Customers

Seems pretty basic. According to survey results Heidrick & Struggles, the No. 1 focus for C-level executives in 2009 is the customer—acquiring new ones, increasing retention and improving their lifetime value, in that order.

Attracting, Nurturing, Retaining Customers Equals Marketing Success

So, if these relatively simple metrics are what C-Level Execs are looking at to determine marketing success, why do so many “marketing professionals” try to complicate things with an endless array of jargon, abbreviations and acronyms?

I guess if you can’t dazzle ‘em with brilliance……You know the rest. (another abbreviation)

Now, please don’t get me wrong. I’m quite fond of SEO, SEM, UGC, SMM, IMM, XM, Web 2.0, RSS, NLP, PR, IM, CRM, WOM, DM, and the always popular ROI.

All of these tactics are valuable in their own right. However, I see too many times where the question is which of these tactics is best.

Who knows which tactic will be the most effective until objectives and strategies are put in place? Almost always, it’s an integrated implementation of many, if not all, of these tactics.

Importance of Achieving Growth via Select Strategies

Remember, attracting, nurturing, and retaining customers ( life-long customers) is the focus. If the tactics being implemented don’t serve to meet these objectives they are useless no matter how effective they COULD be.

First design the blueprint. Then you can use all of the tools available to construct a magnificent work of art.