Customer acquisition is something every business continues to do, it doesn’t matter if your in B2B/B2C or D2C.

What varies of course is the type of business you’re in, along with the gestation time and cost it takes to not only acquire new ones but generate the all important ROI..

So, is the answer to continue fuelling the intrusive, fraud ridden ad tech world, along with the cost of those cosy introductory offers to entice people to sign up?

Customer/client recruitment seems to be a lot sexier than customer retention and in my experience this bias is what's holding companies back whilst adding to increased acquisition cost.

Many years ago i was asked if i could help to 'recruit new customers' - my response was "what's wrong with the ones you already have?" 

In marketing land we often talk about 'who we want to target' for the next campaign, or how close did we get to the 'target customer' during the most recent campaign.

What we really want to know is did we get the return on spend, and if so should we do more of the same.

An awful lot of old school marketing thinking has been transferred into the social network landscape.

This is a place that now allows us to get even closer to the groups of people we most want to broadcast our message into because our stats tell us they are most likely to respond. 

Today we know their browsing history, we can tell gender, geography, and age range, its not quite the one to one personalised approach we were all promised but for now, close enough? 

With GDPR now in full force, businesses in the EU now have a clear set of guidelines to ensure they collect and process their customer’s data. 

The reality is that cost increases in 'customer acquisition' and the introduction of GDPR is the price we pay for not understanding how to use 'Social networks' in a strategic way.

If considered in the context of a 'strategic' ambition and done right with the right skill set training your cost don’t increase with reach, you don’t need a database, you don’t need to pay to get the ‘right’ attention, and your customers will become your advocates which in turn significantly reduces your acquisition cost. 

If your a regular reader of my blogs (thank you) you will have seen I produce quite a lot of stories, or 'content' as some call it, I produce and publish 3/5 articles and post each week. 

This includes posting on a weekend when I know we're all taking time out.  And I'm usually 2.5 weeks ahead with various forms of content that allow me to continue to remain focused on 'business as usual' stuff.

Blogging without a strategy or an audience in mind won't really get you very far. And if it's all just a bit random and tactics you will lose heart very quickly.

For you to become a consistent producer of content that will engage people there are a few things you need to sort out first, otherwise, and based on my on experience you will simply not enjoy it, and most likely give up.

1. What's your passion - where do you have subject matter experience and expertise?
2. You need to understand your purpose - what's the subject matter?
3. Whose the audience - who is it aimed at?
4. 'Why' are you doing this?
5. Content Calendar - align your output and timings, the input will be aligned to this.
6. Don't sweat the grammar - try and be authentic, use natural language.

There are a plethora of 'social listening' tools out there, but as with most tools they can be used for good, or evil, or in far to many cases not used at all.

The reality is that producing content is hard work to start off with, if you ever went to a gym or chose a weight loss program the magic didn't happen overnight, you got better at it, as you got better at it, if you get my drift?

Building content plans around creating, stimulating, and joining in conversations requires a different mindset than the 'promote and intrude' marketing of yesterday. Tactical ad-hoc content creation combined with 'Social listening' that is used to simply target more people with adverts most definitely isn't the way to go. 

But with an internally aligned social media strategy social  'listening' could in fact be one of the key tools that can help you on the road to building a truly authentic social media relationship with your existing customers, and of course help you to find all those new ones, and help those new ones to find you.