Marketing Analytics: How to Identify, Acquire and Activate New Customers
My current and previous jobs involve a lot of marketing analytics and sales enablement. In this article, I am going to mainly talk about the number one questions every marketer or startup founders want to solve: How to identify, acquire and activate new customers. (Retain them is also important but that could be another article) . There is just from my experience and hope you can get something out of it.
1. Customer Identification and Customer Persona
Three steps to identify your target customer
Understand the Demographics, Psychographics, and Behavior of the customers you are trying to reach out to.
Understand the goals and challenges of those people and how your product or service could address that
Where are those people hang out. What platform they use on a daily bases, Instagram, facebook…
Develop a customer persona based on existing customer information or market gap information
If you are an established startup with certain amount of customers. After you identify your top tier customers. Go over the three steps mentioned above to extract common information about those customers. Using those information you can have your John/Jane Doe.
If you just start your company or start your research, try identify the market gap you try to fill and use the above three steps to develop the gap persona. For instance, your gap persona you want to reach out to (your competitors have not done a good job doing) is John Smith, 35, who has two kids and working in consulting. His wife works too at a tech startup. John likes to workout in the morning and hike during the weekends with family. He wants to start a side gig to increase the family income and become more financially free. Here you go and along those information, you could find out a lot of places you can reach out to John based on your product or service fit with his needs.
2. Set up the marketing funnel and understand what KPI levers matter to you
To begin with, you need to understand the customer journey from end to end. From showing interests (traffic) -> sign-up (acquisition) -> purchase . your product or service (activation) -> repurchase (repeat) -> recommend you to their family and friends (referral)-> lose interest (churn). You need to understand each step and know what levers you can pull to turn up and down your funnel conversions. Before your execute your master plan or grand strategy, you need to understand what KPIs matter to you and start tracking it from the beginning.
Here are some sample KPIs people care about.
Traffic volume (users, and new users)
Acquisition or signups (how many people fill the online signup form)
Activation
Repeat Rate
Customer Life Time Value (LTV)
Cost per Lead (CPL)
Cost of Acquisition (CAC)
LTV/CAC
Virality Ratio
Churn
Impact (How much impact you are bring to the community, not only on a money term)
There could be many and many more KPIs you can track but be careful of falling into the trap of KPI junky. You need to pick what matters to your business. First of all, choose one metrics that matters - your north star metrics. Then add metrics that help you achieve or track the north star metric.
3. Choose your marketing channel
Nowadays customer don’t buy your stuff first time they see it. There are normally seven touch points before they make up their mind and give you a try. By understanding this you could see your digital marketing in a different lens. Then it comes to the question - what is the best channel for me? It comes from a ton of trail and error but you can be smart in your testing.
Paid Marketing
Search Engineer Management (SEM): How to effective spend money in search engine to make your business more searchable in a cost efficient way.
Google Adwards
Bing Manager
Paid Social: How to increase your presence on social media
Facebook Manager (including instagram)
LinkedIn Business Manager
Native: When people consume their morning news, those ‘articles you may like’ could be another source of marketing for you
Yahoo
Outbrain
Tablola
Affiliate Marketing or Influencer Marketing: Hire influencers as your spokesman to promote your product or service in a subtle or unsubtle way.
Podcast: Sponsor a podcast or put commercials in a podcast (beginning, middle and end slots)
Sponsor List and Ads: Buy newsletter slots or email list from agencies and do massive ads
Direct Mail: Send physical mails to people if you got their address. It works better for more traditional industry like real estate investing. It could be expensive but you can be creative and doing ‘hand-written’ notes
Owned and Earned Marketing
Content marketing: It is relatively a long-term strategy. You could see ROI very slowly but potentially massive.
Make sure the content you created address the pain points and frustrations of the potential customers you are reaching to.
Make sure you leverage your company blog or learning center to educate and bring value to your customers consistently
Repurpose your content. If you have a video, you can use the audio for podcast and the content for blogs. Try to find 7 uses of the resource you have.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): How to spend no money and get the best results
Design your website layers
Keywords Bucket and Keywords Gap Analysis
Backlink Gap Analysis
Underlying setup
PR & Communication: How to leverage media to promote your product and service. It is especially important in the following situations:
When you have a new product/service that comes with a great story.
Fundraising
Rebranding
PR Crisis
Get reviews to boost your SEO
4. Choose your marketing tools carefully
Nowadays, there are tons of marketing tools out there. What to use could make a great difference in your day-to-day work. Here are some of the tools I used before that is beneficial in my work. You can find more information in my tool review sessions.
Tableau - Marketing Standard for Visualization
Autopilot - Automated Email Marketing
Segment - Lead tracking and allocation. It is important to know where you get all those leads
Google Analytics - Track their ads, campaign, website performance
SEMRush - SEO and SEM Analysis (Refer Code:1946659502)
Spyfu - SEO and SEM Analysis
Heap Analytics - Market Attribution
Hubspot - Marketing Automation
Hot Jar - Website Heat Map Tracking
Feel free to reach out for any questions. I am dedicated to help startups streamline their marketing and analytics.
