Ask most small business owners where their customers come from and they will have a pretty good idea. For example, at Kona Impact, we ask every new client how he or she heard about us. The answers usually contain one or more of the following: referral from another business, saw our vehicle, saw a sign, Google search or “found us online.”
The last category is the most interesting to us. Finding Kona Impact online can mean many things: online search; clicking a link on another website; review sites like Yelp!; paid search; online display advertising; social media content and others.
Each way has different costs for us, and at the end of the day, I want to get new clients with the least amount of time and dollar costs. That is, I want my client cost of acquisition to be low. That said, I also want to be found in all the places potential clients are looking: I want to grow the total number of clients, with cost being less of a consideration.
I also understand that some clients are worth more than others, and the higher value clients might be more expensive or hard to reach, but they are worth more to my business.
At Kona Impact, we recommend one of the best tools for online client acquisition data: Google Analytics. It’s free and very powerful. Here is some data from Kona Impact:
The pie chart shows that we acquire website visitors (not necessarily new clients) mostly from Direct, which a person is typing in “konaimpact.com” into their browser. These are repeat clients looking for information, and they are also where I’d find some of the referrals from other businesses.
Organic search is where someone would type “kona website design” into a Google, Yahoo or Bing search and click on a result for Kona Impact. Paid search is where someone does a web search and clicks on a paid ad placed by us. Ideally, the organic search is much higher than the paid percentage.
Social is only the source of 10% of our website traffic. We see this same pattern with a lot of websites: social media website provide a relatively small amount of visitors to websites. The myth, of course, is that social is everything, but at least in terms of bringing people to a website, we see almost no data for this. In fact, a business would do much better in terms of return on investment by allocating time and money resources to a great website than spending resources on social media. The data does not lie, as they say!.
So, if you want to know where your customers come from, be sure to take a good look at your website traffic. You might find that the total volume is quite low and you need to spend some time growing your online presence. Or you might find that you are missing large segments of potential customers by focusing too much on social or paid advertising.
Seek balance. In baseball terms, “cover all your bases.”