We live in an age of overexposure. We are exposed to all types of marketing messages of every kind from every type of business imaginable. Can you think of how many sales messages an average person gets exposed to every day? These promotional messages are on billboards on the road side, inside trains, buses, they are on TV and radio, they are in newspapers, on leaflets that are being out by kids in the street and so on.

Thousands of such advertisements and promotions during any average day are trying to sell you some thing. No wonder the cooperation is not getting easier for any type of business. it is getting harder by the day.

But that is true only if you are using the same old tactics every one else is using to attract customers. In this age information overload, people are increasingly relying on the power of peer recommendations. If I am looking for a new computer, I will ask for a recommendation from a friends who knows about computers. The same goes for other things as well.

If you are a business struggling to attract new customers then probably you know the cost of customer acquisition already. Else you would have gone out, advertised and got all the customers you would ever need.

McKinsey, the top management consultancy estimates that the cost of acquiring a new customer is 7 times higher than retaining an existing customer. But what I am about to propose can reduce the cost of acquiring new customers to almost zero. Will that help your business?

Mind you, this is a tried and tested method. When I asked my barber to try this, he laughed. A few weeks later he was not laughing.. he was planning to expand because he started to see possibilities. Here is what he did.

He started to offer incentives his existing customers to recommend his friends. Existing customers had been using his services for years and were clearly very happy with what they were getting. So they had no problem recommending friends. The incentive he offered was either a percentage off or completely free service depending on how many recommendations were made. Would you want to get a free hair cut just for passing phone number of a friend to your trusted barber so he could offer the a discount? Well, friend already gets his hair cut elsewhere any way, for a discount he may want to use my barber's services.

Can you see, it was a win win for every one.

A few weeks later, he tried some thing else. Now he was offering incentives not in the form of his own services but some thing that people really perceive highly and had a monetary value. He started to offer free vacations worth hundreds of dollars to any one who will refer 5 friends to his service. Would you want to go to Orlando or Las Vegas for a few days - all paid - vacation just for referring friends? You bet. Soon he had more customers than he could handle.

Now, his competitors were still using the same old tactics: smile and be nice to customers, and hope they come back, advertise in local newspapers for fresh leads, and the other usual stuff. In the mean time my barber was stealing all their customers he could handle... and more.

Moral of the story is this: do not give customers what every one else does. Give them more than what they pay for... and more. Give them some thing that they really value. There is no point in giving away worthless stuff they are likely to forget before they get home.

My barber's vacation certificate give away was some thing that people kept safely for months. When they used these certificates to take their family on vacation, they brought back vacation snaps... which they came back to the saloon to show off. They spoke about this incredible vacation deal to their friends and rest of the family. Do think any of these people got inspired to use the same barber next time they needed a next hair cut?

By spending none of their money on advertising, any business can get lots new customers and take their profits through the roof. If you avoid the hype then you will find that not all solutions are expensive. All they need is creativity.