With changes in media distribution, marketers are rapidly adapting their methods of budgeting, reporting, and investing in paid, owned and earned media to reach and engage their customers
Investment in media is frequently grouped into the 3 media 'buckets' of earned, shared and paid which each give opportunities to influence customers. None of these media types are new, but what is new is the increasing prominence given to owned and earned media while paid media has always dominated in the past.
Digital media adoption and usage is constantly evolving in today's digital landscape. As of January 2024, 62% of the world's population uses social media. It's fair to say that paid, earned, and owned media offer marketers a never-ending array of new opportunities to win and retain more customers.
Current definitions of paid, earned, and owned media
In short - paid media means the content distribution has been paid for, whereas earned and…
Five steps to creating a 1-2-1 marketing plan that will generate results
Customers sit at the heart of every business. Whether you’re a sole trader or a large corporation, how you interact with your customers helps define who you are as a brand. It’s therefore important to determine how you interact with customers and outline the type of messages to communicate at different stages of the customer journey.
Some businesses are more focused on marketing to existing customers than others. Companies within the FMCG sector, for example, will be more interested in reaching all buyers within a particular category via mass marketing. As a result, Coca-Cola, P&G, and Unilever will have a smaller database of ‘loyal’ customers to reach out to businesses within the banking or telecommunications sectors where customer relationship management (CRM) plays a much more prominent role within the marketing mix.
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Businesses that see the value in customer relationship management must…
How can you supercharge your analytics system to increase your acquisition?
If given extra budget, 32% of marketers would spend more on data and analytics. That’s more than those who said they would spend on search, social and additional headcount!
Modern marketers love data for so many reasons. Why?
Data helps optimize businesses from acquisition all the way through customer purchase and reengagement.
It helps them achieve high ROI Facebook and Google Ads campaigns.
It helps them compete against…
While marketing is certainly a huge part of a businesses’ success, you also need to make sure you have a detailed customer acquisition strategy in order to actually achieve the objectives you want
Growing an e-commerce business and generating new customers on a consistent basis is not just about knowing how to market your business or having the budget for complex, expensive campaigns made with the best agencies in the world. While marketing is certainly a huge part of a businesses’ success, you also need to make sure you have a detailed customer acquisition strategy in order to actually achieve the objectives you want, in as little time as possible and continuously generate new customers for your business.
In this blog post, I’m going to show you how to develop a customer acquisition strategy for your e-commerce business.
What does a customer acquisition strategy imply?
Customer acquisition is, basically, the process of bringing in…
Research giving benchmark of most successful acquisition channels for retail
It's useful to know how your business compares to competitors in terms of the mix of online traffic. You can use the Google Analytics benchmarking feature for companies of a similar size and sector and that can be useful for arguing the case for reallocation of acquisition budgets, for example, more investment in organic or paid search.
It's rare for data to be published which compares your digital media mix, i.e. the relative importance of different traffic sources driving visitors to websites. So, I thought it would be interesting to share this data from US Ecommerce sites.
Location: US Retail
Date: Published Autumn 2017
Sample: Top 250 US retailers (so representative of common consumer behaviour)
Source: Adobe Retail Industry report
This retail visitor acquisition data shows that organic search is in the number…
A detailed list of the best digital marketing tools we recommend to help you reach, act, engage and convert your target customers
Having the right set of software tools to manage data insights, content and digital marketing is essential! Without the right ones, you won't be able to create a strategy which reaches target customers and follower them through the customer journey - giving you insights into customer journeys, personas, conversion rate optimization and many more digital metrics essential to staying ahead of competitors.
The digital tools we recommend will be categorized into our essential toolkits:
Search Engine Optimization: Organic search
Paid Search: AdWords
Analytics
Social Media Marketing (PR and influencer)
Email Marketing / Marketing Automation
Content Marketing
The aim is to provide you with a list of the multitude of different tools available and a comparison of features for various industries, products or services. If used correctly, they can help streamline your…
Chart of the Day: Research shows the importance of social networks to B2C online publishers
It's really interesting to see which digital marketing channels drive the most traffic or sales in different sectors. In retail, this compilation of top online sales channels shows that organic and paid search, email and affiliate channels dominate, with each contributing more than 10%. It's surprising that when using 'last click' attribution the contribution of social media is sub 5%, although this is an average of all categories and we can expect that in some retail categories like fashion, the percentage of sales from social media will be higher.
This research of traffic sources across large publishers who use the Parsely traffic reporting platform shows a very different pattern.
The first chart shows that search (orange) is the largest external traffic source, but with social not far behind (purple). Note that this traffic source breakdown is unusual…
Acquisition cost, lead gen, cost per lead, customer life-time value, ROI... Making sense of customer acquisition metrics
We live in a world of supply and demand, this applies to customer acquisition. Gaining a customer isn’t free, nor is it cheap. It’s a necessary expense when running a business, but it is possible to overspend. It’s important to find a good balance when it comes to customer acquisition, but that’s no easy feat.
It’s difficult to keep costs down because of the competition that’s inherent in any industry. Marketing costs are necessary to beat out the competitors. With so many more demands for customer attention circulating in the modern world, your draw needs to stand out in order to succeed.
Looking at the overall economics of the situation can help with this.
Supply and Demand
The idea of customer acquisition isn’t much different from the way the stock market runs. It’s driven by supply and demand.…
Use these highly actionable tips to give your customer acquisition a huge boost this year
Today, consumers expect brands to have personalities — just like people. They demand that companies break the fourth wall and find ways to authentically connect, whether through personalization or engaging with them in real time at the right moment across channels.
The desire for authentic, personal brand interaction isn’t going anywhere. As you enter the new year, it’s wise to keep in mind the effects this consumer mindset has on your customer acquisition strategy. Here are the five digital marketing trends I see as the most imperative for customer acquisition and growth in 2016.
1. Online video consumption is king.
The 18-to-24 age group is becoming harder and harder to reach through traditional channels such as television. Between the second quarters of 2011 and 2015, television viewing by this age group dropped by nearly eight hours per week.…
Tools for benchmarking and comparing average media mix or percentage of different traffic sources between websites
Naturally all digital marketers want more (quality) traffic. This begs the question where do we find this traffic? What is our optimal mix of online media?
One approach to answering this question is to turn to the traffic sources report in Google Analytics. Where Google Analytics benchmarking once again presents your mix of referrers relative to others in your category. Your relative performance is shown under the Audience menu accessed via the Benchmarking option like so:
If you're not familiar with these, the four main traffic sources reported at this level in Google Analytics are:
Search traffic – This is separated into natural or organic and paid search (Adwords)
Referral traffic – This is traffic from other sites which have direct links to your site
Direct traffic – Direct traffic results…
