Often, we see a copy and paste approach to modern digital marketing. Those in the business find a successful formula, write about it or produce a report and every man and his dog jumps on the bandwagon.
Copying another brand’s marketing ideas provides only mediocre results at best, with the chance of complete failure relatively high.
Customers have become blind to the same old tactics. They have learned to ignore the unoriginal strategies thrown their way, or have found physical barriers such as ad-blockers to swerve out of the way entirely.
A successful customer acquisition marketing strategy is individual, smart and designed specifically with the business and target audience in mind.
In producing a fruitful marketing strategy, developing a unique customer acquisition playbook is vital. Ruler Analytics, marketing attribution SaaS company, takes a look at how:
- Understand Your Audience
Unearthing the unique profiles of your customers using in depth research goes further than buyer personas.
Benji Hyam, author of the article “You Don’t Know Your Customer and It’s Crippling Your Growth”, states that “When you know your customer inside and out, that’s when you’re able to come up with ideas, messaging and tactics that will change the growth trajectory of your business.”
He claims that accessing these vital pieces of information using the tools at your disposal hold the key:
- Study The Competition
Whilst copying your competitor’s approach is forbidden, you should know what their strategies are, which of those are working, which that aren’t and how they can improve.
This is where you step in and narrow down – concentrate on the avenues they are neglecting.
Ploughing your energy and resources down a road that’s already blocked off by a successful competitor isn’t clever marketing. Instead, focus more on ways to improve on their successes or fresh ideas to develop your own angle of attack.
Below are some great ways to get the lowdown on competitors:
- Ahrefs – SEO analysis tool allowing you to view which keywords competitors are ranking for and where they’re receiving backlinks from
- SimilarWeb – Research various channels for the best performers across your industry
- BuzzSumo – Find which content has received most shares for competitor and industry keywords
- Google Alerts – Receive a daily digest of competitor brand/product/author name/new keyword sensitive content
- Social media – companies will often shout from the rooftops about their successes. Follow their social media accounts, read their blogs etc.
- Test The Theory
After gathering the audience research and understanding where your competitors aren’t engaging them, you have what you need to formulate your customer acquisition marketing strategy.
The next step is to test the strategies with small experiments. Often once decided, the mistake is to throw everything at the new idea, only for it under perform.
The small experiments identify any failures quickly, so the new approach can be nipped in the bud and a better path can be discovered.
- Follow A Scientific Method
Growth in a business demands marketers to avoid cliches like ‘content is king’ and think outside of the box (… apologies).
Go beyond the guidance of ‘best practices’.
These can work, but those that work specifically for you should follow a scientific method:
Armed with what your customer wants and needs, form a hypothesis on how to meet them, and test them to provide evidence to prove or disprove the theory.
Armed with techniques that are proven to work for your business, you can design a specific customer acquisition playbook to rely on when growing using marketing strategies.
Content may very well be king, but it’s the king of an oversaturated empire. Throwing out aimless content doesn’t do enough.
Businesses must publish high quality, informative, audience-specific content onto the right channels, to make sure it reaches the people who are in the market for what you’re providing or selling.
Failing to have a bespoke customer acquisition marketing strategy leaves you susceptible to wasting time, energy and resources on a something that only serves to pull in poor results.
Grow the business by creating something distinctive and individual. Achieve success by taking the time to create your own customer acquisition playbook, rather than relying on a regurgitation of another brand’s ideas.