Every business needs a marketing strategy. It is a fact that businesses with a well-developed marketing strategy and initiation succeed and compete on the market much better than those without it. However, the business has to identify two main questions in order to initiate the strategy:

1. How much business comes out from your existing customer base and how much business comes out from new leads and new customers?

2. How many marketing resources are spent on marketing and generating new clients and how many resources are allocated to generating repeated business from your existing clients?

The answers for those two questions are essential in developing a good marketing plan, as they should answer many why’s and give you a good analytical overview of things that you need to develop. While it is very important to retain your existing clientele and make sure that they stay with you it is also critical to growing your business by acquiring new “fresh” customers. The reason why it is important to acquire new accounts is that while maintaining your current base there is no growth, basically, you’ll be generating your profit from the “maintenance” of the client’s account. It is important to understand that there should be a specific amount of marketing resources spent on developing and continuing the relationship with your current client base, however, the allocation should be approximate:

· 70% of the marketing spend should be focused on acquiring a new customer

· 30% of the marketing spend should be focused on keeping current clientele

As you can see the majority of your spending should be going against targeting new clients, it is rational because you have to realize that if you currently have a customer it means that you’ve hit him before with your marketing efforts, therefore there is no need to attract the customer who is already on your account. You should be doing totally opposite; you have to be creating messages that would keep him from going to your competition. You have to allocate most of your marketing resources against identifying and targeting new customers. The 70% marketing spent has to be equally divided between many marketing initiatives, such as online marketing, SEO, web optimization, direct marketing, advertising, relationship building, tradeshows, and other marketing activities.