A tool for reviewing the options for online customer acquision and monitoring for social media and other sites

You will have noticed that there's a fair amount of choice online for reaching and interacting with your audience, in fact it's overwhelming! You can't be everywhere, so it's important to prioritise which types of sites and partnerships you invest time and money in to try to gain visibility through outreach, partnering and advertising.

2015 update - introducing the Marketing Bullseye

Since we introduced the Radar in 2010 we have evolved it into the infographic shown below. In this update, we introduce the Marketing Bullseye Framework - a great new tool to review customer acquisition from Traction which has a similar purpose - see the end of the post for a description.

To help you review and prioritise, we developed the "Digital Marketing Radar" which gives a prompt on the different types of…

New research from the DMA compares the effectiveness of online and offline customer acquisition channels

I recently attended the launch of the DMA Customer Acquisition Barometer commissioned by McDowall. This is set to provide a regular benchmark to help marketers compare their approach to customer acquisition. In this post I will highlight some of the most useful findings from the detailed report.

What does customer acquisition mean in 2014?

The video below summarises some qualitative evaluation from marketers showing their views on customer acquisition. The panel, Chris Bibby, Head of Performance Marketing and Wonga, Michelle de Souza, Head of CRM and Customer Insights at Age UK, and the Business Development Director at HP discussed how for customer acquisition investment to be effective it needs to review the long-term impact in terms of lifetime customer value and churn, showing the importance of having the right measures in place. 

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Best customer acquisition sources

The headline…

7 must-check questions for your acquisition strategy

All site owners are looking to reach more prospects, existing customers and raise awareness about their products through a website or other online presence. So, there is plenty of advice on how to increase site traffic through the 6 main online communications channels. Although you can definitely gain improvements in volume of acquisition through optimising how use these channels like SEO, advertising or social media marketing, you may be missing parts of the bigger picture that will make your online marketing more effective. To help you think through how to improve your site traffic, Dave Chaffey and I  have developed these seven key questions to help improve your results. We hope they're helpful - let us know how you find them. You can find more detailed guidance in the Reach section of our RACE digital marketing planning course. This is the first in a short series…

4 Steps to creating a plan for online customer acquisition

Having a digital marketing strategy for your organisation is essential to ensure your marketing activities are supporting specific marketing objectives. The rise in the number of different digital channels available to target your customer base continues to grow as shown by this BIG list of todays customer acquisition channels by David Sealey, so withough without a sound framework in place to manage, monitor and measure organisation performance, not having a digital communications plan could prove disastrous. In a previous post, I provided an actionable plan to help create a retention strategy using key digital tactics.  Retention by its definition is 'maintaining or preserving your existing customer base loyal to your product offering. This post will is an introduction to creating an outline framework to create a plan for online customer acquisition techniques - defined as tactics to help drive traffic or generating a lead or purchase…

A case study of marketing for start-ups with low/no budgets

In our current and future enterprises, we all have the duty and obligation to generate new customers for our services or products. To maintain our dream and vision, unfortunately, despite being an absolute truth, the main barrier for start-up companies is the lack of capital for investment. Case studies of how Nike, Sony and McDonalds invest in brand marketing isn't too relevant - although you are also aiming to build your brand! However, facing this financial limitation, we can use online marketing in our favour to take the first steps in overcoming the investment barrier. Here are some ideas based on our experience of creating an online presence on a shoestring budget.

1. Initial contact to start building contacts

Building initial contacts on an email list is what our initial success was based on. These were our 'Early adopters.' To begin with, we do…

REACH webcasts from the Smart Insights Digital Marketing Priorities 2013 summit

At our recent free summit many viewers asked us to share the slide decks and recordings, so to collect them together we have a short series of posts to point you in the right direction. There will be one for online marketing topics covering each of Reach, Act and Convert and Engage in the Smart Insights PRACE digital strategy framework.

The two webinars focusing on reaching new audiences were:

1. SEO priorities for 2013 with James Gurd of Digital Juggler

The focus of this talk by James Gurd of Digital Juggler was analysis techniques to help improve results from SEO. It also shares examples of tools to assist with SEO.

Related Ebook: 7 Step Guide to SEO …

Research shows the continued importance of  direct marketing in the marketing mix

With our focus on digital media, it’s easy to forget that traditional marketing communications are still widely used and important drivers of leads and sales. This new research has shown that “Almost a quarter (23%) of  overall turnover (sales) can be attributed  to direct marketing” This is based on research from DMA who are are naturally keen to make the point about the ongoing importance of direct marketing in its latest forms. In their recent research completed by the Future Foundation on direct marketing effectiveness in the UK ,600 companies were surveyed including 453 detailed interviews with companies involved in direct marketing. It’s interesting to look at the range of options available from what can be considered direct marketing and we can learn from the most popular since this suggests what is most effective today. If we look at the four most popular…

Models to review your online engagement strategy

At first, online marketing was relatively straightforward, you had a website and you used different “traffic-building tools” like SEO, Adwords and affiliate marketing to drive visitors towards it to achieve the goals you were looking for. There were limited options to engage audiences on other sites, so it was all about traffic building. This is how I show it in my books: But in 2012, developing online marketing strategies is much more complex with many, many platforms to consider. It’s important to prioritise on the customer touchpoints which are going to give you the maximum returns given a limited budget and time . In this post I’ll summarise some different ways to visualise the range of options available for traffic building. I've mainly written the post to introduce the option of the Interractive Brand Ecosystem from Forrester which I show…

8 questions to review your acquisition strategy in 2012

This is a new deck with some new examples for a keynote presentation at the Fusion Marketing Experience in Belgium on 2nd December 2011 programmed by the excellent J-P De Clerck. I talk about how to find new customers, especially at a time when there's pressure on budgets. As always, my ideas are informed by the latest data and show practical examples of implementing the ideas. It's structured around these questions to ask about acquisition: Q1. Does your brand have personality + OVP? Q2. Mix = are you investing your time/money wisely? Q3. Is our publishing process effective? Q4. How do we make online campaigns moreengaging? Q5. Is your business “social by design? Q6. Are your practicing “deep SEO”? Q7. Are we siloed or multichannel? Q8. Are you “competing on analytics?” Attracting quality traffic…

We love this quality infographic - well worth 5 minutes to read through it - it's great to see the inbound model becoming more popular with marketers too. A few highlights of the infographic: People are opting out of our lists - email and phone 86% of people skip TV ads Inbound marketing costs less than interruptive outbound

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