Getting the hand raise: 5 Tips to acquire new contacts for your marketing efforts
In the intro to this series, Mastering the 4 Stages of Lifecycle Marketing, I briefly touched on the first stage — contact acquisition. At its most basic definition, contact acquisition means the various ways that you or your organization strategically pursue contacts that align with your buying personas.
In this deep dive to learn all there is to learn on how to best acquire contacts, we’re going to look at the following components to any sound acquisition strategy:
- Establishing your goals for acquisition campaigns
- Defining your buying / target personas
- Finding effective marketing tactics for acquisition
Establish Goals for Acquisition
Pro Tip #1 — Figure out what you want to accomplish for your acquisition campaign before you do anything else (decide on tactics, content, offers, etc).
That tip seems pretty obvious, but it does not go without saying. Without setting goals in the beginning, your campaign ultimately will not generate the results you want, and thus will fail.
So, what kind of goals may a marketer set? Shouldn’t just X number of new leads or prospects be the goal? No, and here’s why:
While your conversions should be used as a metric in assessing the effectiveness of your campaign, you also need to consider who you’ll be targeting and what kind of conversion you want.
Let’s look at some examples. Say you currently work in a traditional B2C company, where you sell goods or services direct to consumers (primarily online). One solid (and advisable) goal would be to convert a target % of unknown web visitors to known visitors by getting that traffic to sign up for email alerts.
In this example, you could offer a special discount on the first purchase or you could simply advertise new product notices, a newsletter, etc. It doesn’t really matter for this goal (converting unknown to known traffic), because you will measure this campaign’s performance based on that conversion rate and how many new prospects entered your database as a result.
A different goal for this same company may be to convert prospects to customers, ie., that prospect places an order on your site. Now, for this goal you could employ the exact same tactic as the above goal (special offer for email signup), but you would measure it differently. With a goal of converting prospects to customers, you would measure how many new customers your company received from that special offer.
These two goals are very much interrelated — in fact, I would recommend this hypothetical company set each of these goals and then test different tactics to determine which ones are more or less effective. They may well find that the special offer on first purchase drives the highest conversion rate on unknown traffic, but the Black Friday Deals email converts the most prospects to customers.
B2B marketers may argue that scenario has nothing to do with them. Well, let’s replace “special discount on first purchase” with “free needs assessment” or “personalized product demo”. Still holds up, right? The offer may change, but these marketing concepts apply to both organizations.
Define Your Target Personas
Pro Tip #2 — If you don’t know who you need to be targeting, you’ll end up with wasted ad spend.
In order to define your target audience, look at what products / services your company sells. You may have a very broad definition of a target customer, or you may play in a very niche market. Neither is better or worse than the other — they are simply different!
In our B2C example above, let’s say this company specializes in organic, high quality loose leaf teas they sell direct to consumers through their website. For this company, they may choose to define their target audience as a middle to upper middle class person who values sustainable farming practices without wanting to compromise on taste.
Without getting into too much on the effective tactics (more on that in a second), let’s say this same company went to Facebook about running a display ad campaign. If they simply told Facebook to target “everyone in the US” for their campaign, that campaign would not be very effective.
This company would also be missing another key audience — the partners, friends, family of their target audience (all potential givers of gifts to their niche).
B2B marketers can also find themselves anywhere on the spectrum of broad to highly specialized target markets. The complexity of the sale could be used as a general rule of thumb for how nuanced your target audience is.
For example, if you sell paper products, you could sell to local restaurants, banks, law offices, hospitals, or fledgling tech startups. But you are still primarily dealing with a key decision maker at each company.
Pro Tip #3 — It’s equally important to know who your target audience is not. You would not spend time marketing to all the doctors at the local hospital — you only need the buy-in from their operations department.
For this B2B company, they may have many target audiences. It may be the operations team at local hospitals, office managers at law firms, the owner / operators of restaurants, etc.
Depending how focused / specialized your target persona(s) definition is, your utilization of different acquisition tactics may change.
Determine Effective Tactics
You’ve figured out what you want to accomplish and who your target audience is; next, you’ll next need to figure out what appropriate tactics you want to test.
Pro Tip #4 — The success of the tactics your choose to deploy comes back to how well you defined your goals at the start of your campaign.
What are some common marketing tactics you may choose to use to generate new names in your marketing database? Frequently proven methods include:
- Retargeting
- Social (Paid and Organic)
- Search (Paid and Organic)
Let’s go back to our two example companies. The B2C tea retailer set a goal to convert 20% of it’s unknown to known web visitor traffic by the end of the fiscal year (up from 15%).
So first, it needs to actually drive traffic to its site. This company has been in business for awhile, and currently gets 5,000 unique visitors a month through a combination of organic search and organic social. In order to increase its conversion of unknown to known visitors, it may choose to start a retargeting campaign. These campaigns display targeted ads to visitors of your site that do not hit a specific conversion page (in this case, the email signup thank you page).
For this company, they would work with a third party to retarget their unknown visitors when they are on other sites. I would encourage the tea retailer to consider offering a special discount on the first order for this remarketing campaign to increase their conversion rate.
They may also choose to run a paid social campaign, especially through the holiday season. Rather than the faux-pas described above, they want to target anyone who has liked their page, anyone who has posted about tea recently, etc. It’s a chance to get creative with targeting.
For our B2B company, which also has a goal to increase conversions of unknown to known contacts, they may choose slightly different tactics. They may choose to work on their organic search ranking to get more traffic from people actively searching in their niche.
They may choose to start a blog to help increase their organic ranking, writing regularly about different topics such as paper weight, recycled versus non, or why a second color on your return envelopes will help you stand out from the crowd.
Pro Tip #5 — It’s totally fine to experiment with different tactics, even unproven ones, but make sure you know your definition of success and don’t be afraid to pull the plug on underperforming campaigns.
The above tactics are tried-and-true marketing gold standards. After you get comfortable running those types of campaigns, you may come across other marketing tactics and decide to try those. For B2B marketers, that can include going to other industry events with your booth to promote your products / services (and the creative ways you get people to stop by your booth).
B2C marketers can look at a variety of other options (especially non-digital); it all depends on your audience and the way you tailor your message. Influencer marketing can be big wins for marketers — find a prominent blogger or thought leader in your space and reach out. See if they would be willing to review or include a mention of your product(s) or company in an upcoming post.
Next week, we’ll look at best practices on what to do with all these potential new customers that you’ve just acquired!
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