I started an online writing service 5 years ago. It's a really competitive market and in as much as we've invested in designing a pretty good website and backend systems, our market has reached a plateau for a number of different reasons and we haven't grown much in the past year. We are now investigating the possibility of diversifying. As we have a solid team of people, writers and a backend system we can readily adapt to a number of other related services. Our weakness however is limited resources and inability to easily identify cost effective ways to acquire customers in our existing market and also with these potential new services. My question is: if you're diversifying into a new market area, how do you investigate whether the market is viable, and how do you find cost effective customer acquisition strategies? Nowadays it's relatively easy to design a good looking website, have good copywriting, and get Adwords running. But it's really hard (even if you have the people and systems) to acquire customers in a cost effective manner. I'd really like to know if anyone has been successful at this, and if they can offer any advice.
Perhaps, rather than focusing on acquiring new customers in new areas, you ought to evaluate first what additional services your existing clientele pays (or might pay) others to perform.
If they come to you for writing but then go searching for something else, then perhaps you could efficiently offer them services in that other area.
That would be the low-hanging fruit.
You can reverse this pattern as well. What services have your writing clients ALREADY paid for by the time they come to you? If you were to begin offering services in that area, then any customer acquisitions could lead to follow-on services in your bread-and-butter field.
Services that precede or follow those you already offer would permit you to double what you offer without doubling the number of clients.
Nothing revolutionary in suggesting add-ons, of course. But thinking in those terms might help you prioritize options.
Answered 10 years ago
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