Here's one of my favorite definitions of the marketing process:

"Marketing is the buying and selling of things with good will at a profit.  If you can only have one, take good will because it is tomorrow's profit."

Your clients need to build relationships with their customers.  They want to keep customers happy because:

• The lifetime value of a customer is a large number.  A customer who spends just $20 a week will spend $1,000 in a year and $30,000 or more over a lifetime.
• Repeat customers are happy customers who tend to increase their purchases each year, recommend your client's business to others, step up to more deluxe products that yield a higher margin.
• The cost of acquiring new customers is very high.

The first step in keeping customers is finding out why you lose them.  Lost customers can tell you exactly what parts of your business you must improve.

When we help our clients to measure their ROI, we need to walk them through the process of figuring both what it will take to pay for their advertising one time and what the lifetime value of those new customers might be. Consistent advertising will encourage new customers to walk in the door. Our clients must then convert them into long-term customers.

Happy, satisfied customers tell others about their experiences.   Our clients' advertising can mushroom exponentially. Sales grow.  We need to prepare our clients for this process so that we may  hear, " My advertising is working!" from our clients.