Most of our clients hate marketing. What’s to like, there are seemingly thousands of choices. A right and wrong way that inevitably changes at the drop of a hat. On top of all of this, its constantly changing, vocabulary, metrics, the list goes on.
The goal of this document is to walk our clients through our process for developing their Custom acquisition strategy. If you have customers, you have a customer acquisition strategy. If that’s as far as you go, you likely don’t have enough customers or you are trying to find a better fit. That’s exactly what this process is designed to do: Help you find more of the right clients in a repeatable system.
Overview – Acquisition Cycle
Here’s an overview to 9 value steps each client takes. Understanding the client journey and where you lose them along the way will help you value investment in improving many, if not all of these steps.
Awareness
How do clients become aware of your brand or value offer? If you are doing zero marketing today, your answer is “Word of mouth.” Other examples could be networking with people face to face at meet-ups or trade shows. Running Television or Radio spots. Twitter/Facebook “Social Media” or maybe you are running online ad campaigns and customers see and click your ads.
Its likely you employ several strategies, having a good idea of what is working and what might be worth trying will go along way here to improve awareness amongst your target audience.
Target Audience
Almost every client we’ve worked with could use some help defining the target audience. The most common issue is an overly broad audience. This isn’t to say you cannot sell to certain people or segments all we are doing is trying to define who the target group is.
Example Cushionapp.com
Cushion is an application that helps freelancers visualize their schedule and income from a bird’s eye view. The easy thing to do here is say, Cushion targets freelancers and move on. As most of these steps will show, the more we can drill down the more we learn and less time/money is wasted.
Cushion is targeting tech savvy entrepreneurs that want to deliver a professional customer experience for their clients. This target group are more likely to own an Apple vs an Android device. Their target group are small business owners themselves so they identify with their target as being a small business themselves. The service is provided via web based application so it caters to digital entrepreneurs, that’s not to say a freelance plumber couldn’t use the service, but its less likely. Running freelance plumber ads would likely be a poor customer acquisition strategy.
All of cushion’s running costs are published on their website. We can see they spent a bit experimenting with Google ads, and ultimately ended up spending 10x their google ad budget on stickers. The owner Jonnie Hallman has just under 17K followers on Twitter and is a developer at Stripe.com. Jonnie’s tweets are related to the story of the app’s development behind the scenes and likely is a big part of the apps awareness strategy.
Focusing on the right targets will create greater awareness of your brand in the minds of those most likely to buy from you.