As a marketing leader, it is your responsibility to grow top-line revenue. So how do you do that exactly?
Well, it’s a pretty simple formula, you need to:
2) Get your existing customers to purchase more.
When you’re provided limited budgets and fixed amount of time, you have to determine how you are going to prioritize your efforts. It’s widely known that it’s easier and cheaper to increase revenue from existing customers, then it is to acquire new customers. On the flip side though, you need new customers to grow market share – so what do you do? We would challenge you first to look at your existing customers.
How to grow and retain existing customers?
We would suggest that you ask yourself these questions:
- Do I know who my top customers are? Am I doing anything special to retain them?
- Do I know on average what customers spend with us per year?
- Do I understand the segments of spend from top customers, medium customers and low engaged customers?
- How frequently are these customers purchasing from us in a given year?
- Do I understand the different types of customers that purchase from us? Do they have different needs? Why do they purchase from us?
- Do I understand where the company is headed, our biggest growth areas and which of my current customers align with this strategic direction?
- Am I thinking about other products/services that we offer that would be of benefit to our customers that they might not be purchasing currently?
- What conveniences can we provide our customers? How can we better impact our customers lives?
- Do we continually communicate with our customers so that they are fully aware of who we are, what we stand for, how we can help them, what we fully offer? Do we have a welcome program? Do we have a loyalty program? Is our email program strong?
These questions can lead to a good whiteboard session and hopefully some insights that can give you some great ideas as to opportunities to improve your customer relationships, communicate at the right level with them, provide opportunities for them to further engage with your company and its products and services… and ultimately grow your lifetime customer revenue. It’s important that you feel good about your ability to grow and retain existing customers – and provide an overall great experience, before you drive an influx of new customers. Based on the opportunity you identify here, will help you know how much focus you need to put into new customer acquisition.
Strategies to attract new customers
When it comes to new customer growth, it is best to do two things: 1) clearly understand business strategic direction 2) understand who your existing top customers are… and do these two things overlap/intersect? If the answer is yes that they intersect, then it makes your job a little easier from being able to leverage learnings, case studies (if applicable) and grow where you have established expertise.
Clearly understand your prospective customer(s) (your Ideal Customer Profile or ICP)
- What does their purchase journey look like?
- Where along the journey can you provide value, drive demand, improve their experience, appropriately communicate?
- What is the intersection between your customer’s needs and your value proposition?
Develop a communication and content strategy
- Are there business/product promotions or sales that we need to plan throughout the year?
- What are all the ways that we can educate and drive demand based on our ICP’s needs and our value proposition?
- What are some of the big topics that might create interest with your customers? Can I create leading, valuable content pieces from these?
- What are the common questions that customers ask our customer representative/sales teams?
- Think in a “funnel”. While we all know that a customer’s path isn’t this linear, it is good to think about how to create awareness, how to keep people engaged and educate, how to bring them to a purchase, and how to retain.
- First, identify, what are the big topics that could create initial awareness and drive demand.
- Once they’re engaged with us, how do we keep them interested and educate them along the way on our value offerings and help them to think differently and that we are the only option for them.
- Then – how do we then bring them to a tactical level and get ready to buy.
- Once they purchase, how do we ensure they feel great about their purchase and then continually come back.
What is the best digital marketing mix for acquisition?
Well, you probably know there’s not one silver bullet answer to this, but based on your ideation and planning above, you should start to get a pretty good idea for how you need to put the pieces together. This is going to include: strong content that drives interest and demand, digital advertising to promote content and brand messaging (likely display + social – and use video when you can), email marketing to keep customers engaged, and SEO and PPC to capture those in-market.
How to know if your digital marketing is successful?
A good measurement plan is critical to have in place when it comes to knowing how your digital marketing is working. Depending if you are DTC or B2B will determine how you establish your measurement strategy. You will want to determine how long it typically takes for someone to move from awareness that they have a problem and you offer the best solution to purchase, and then establish metrics to gauge the movement through this funnel/path. Make sure you have appropriate metrics at appropriate objectives/phases. For awareness/demand gen, you will be measuring things like impressions, brand lift and clicks, for engagement/demand capture you will track both engagement and conversion metrics, and lower funnel is focused on conversion metrics. You should decide how much you’re willing to pay for a new customer, based on your understanding of lifetime value. With a strong demand gen program, over time, you should start to see your demand capture metrics improving and becoming more efficient. If you have a strong customer growth marketing plan, then you could pay more for a new customer, which would allow you to cast a bigger net and bring in more net-new customers, for a bigger long-term growth plan. Ultimately your entire program should net an ROI that brings in the right level of return for your company’s overall growth.
Investing in research and development to create cutting-edge products or services that cater to emerging market demands can be a game-changer. Moreover, exploring new markets and international expansion can open up fresh revenue streams. Collaborating with strategic partners and exploring joint ventures can further extend a company’s reach and increase revenue opportunities.
It’s important to make data-driven marketing decisions, but it’s also good to know this is an art and science. At the end of the day, we are creating a great experience for humans, our customers. Humans are variable and we want to continue to learn and evolve our digital marketing programs. If you would like help developing your right go-to-market strategy or overall digital marketing program, please reach out so we can help you create a measurable and scalable plan.
