What is Acquisition Marketing?

Acquisition marketing is the art of winning the hearts and wallets of new customers. At the core of customer acquisition is a customer acquisition strategy that doesn’t just cast a wide net but specifically and strategically targets consumers that are most likely to engage with your brand. When we talk about customer acquisition strategies, customer acquisition refers to the tailored approaches that go beyond general brand awareness campaigns, zeroing in on prospects who may already be looking in your direction. Some overarching key acquisition marketing strategies include:

Paid Advertising

Social Media

Email Marketing

Website Optimization

By implementing these strategies, you can effectively acquire new customers and grow your business.

By orchestrating marketing activities across a range of customer acquisition channels, businesses can court their target market effectively. The ultimate goal is to guide these potential customers through the buying process, transforming them from casual acquaintances into loyal advocates of your brand. Some key customer acquisition channels include:

By utilizing these channels, businesses can reach their target audience and potential new customers to build a strong customer base.

Key Acquisition Marketing Use Cases

You can create the most compelling creative for your marketing campaigns—from engaging text to strong visuals—and it won’t matter unless you have the right foundation for reaching your customers through first-party data.

Traditionally, acquisition marketers could use third-party cookies to follow and advertise to their prospects across channels. But with signal degradation coming from third-party cookie deprecation and increasing privacy regulations, brands will need to design a strategy around first-party data to succeed.

Below, we’ll take a look at some key acquisition marketing use cases you can launch with your own first-party data.

Prospecting Direct to Paid Media

In the wake of third-party cookie deprecation, walled gardens like Meta, Google, Bing and DSPs like Yahoo and The Trade Desk have made huge strides in their direct first-party activation capabilities in ways that connect with their own proprietary identity graphs.

This means that organizations can activate directly to walled gardens without copying data with an onboarding solution first, which incurs added cost as well as inefficient workflow copying the data with an intermediary identity.

Rather than contend with increased customer acquisition costs (CAC), reduced efficiency and match rates that aren’t measuring up, brands can embrace a more flexible solution to identity with their first-party data.

Prospecting With Lookalikes

Use all your first-party data to find higher quality leads through lookalike audiences. Increasingly, brands are turning to first-party data to model best customers, and pass attributes about their best customers directly into ad platforms like Google and Meta to target lookalikes among the prospect base. The result is a significant drop in acquisition costs and improves conversion rates.

Website Personalization

When a new visitor hits your site, give them personalized experiences using your data. On a user’s first visit to a site, execute real-time experiences delivery with the last-mile delivery system that serves experiences based on enriched identity.

If there’s an existing first-party cookie with a footprint of that user, you can then build a profile around that user. If they’re authenticated, an email or customer ID would be used to make a profile around them. Profile API returns in real time the personalization factor to then orchestrate experiences which can then be replicated.

Retargeting

Did a new user hop off their site before taking any of the actions you want them to? That means it’s time for a retargeting campaign. Retargeting means targeting prospects who have visited your website and left without taking the action you wanted them to.

With a robust tag/SDK infrastructure that collects behavioral signals paired with the ability to synchronize and centralize various (non-third-party cookie) identity standards to maximize addressability. This allows you to serve up ads to recently-engaged accounts to remind them of what they’re missing over on your site.

Paid Media Suppression

Do you need to control your acquisition costs? With paid media suppression, you can stop wasting money on customers who have already converted by programmatically removing them from paid media advertising – think lower RoAS, higher CAC.

Add additional layers of intelligent suppression with filters, so you can get even more granular with the audience you’re targeting on paid media. Conversely, you can target shoppers with a particular product affinity on paid media as a mid-funnel and bottom-of-funnel tool.

The role of data in acquisition marketing

A data-driven approach is crucial in acquisition marketing. The use of analytics and customer insights allows businesses to refine their strategies, optimize their budget and improve the customer experience. For example, conversational analytics looks at real-time and historic customer conversations for data related to customer behavior, preferences and other engagement drivers. Using artificial intelligence, organizations can leverage this data to optimize core acquisition marketing functions, including:

Customer segmentation

Data allows businesses to segment their audience based on various characteristics such as location, age, purchase history, and interests. This segmentation ensures that marketing messages are tailored to specific groups, increasing the likelihood of a conversion.

Performance tracking

Analytics platforms such as Google Analytics, social media insights, and CRM tools help track the performance of acquisition marketing efforts. By measuring metrics like website traffic, conversion rates, and ROI, businesses can adjust campaigns in real-time for better results.

Personalization

Data also helps businesses personalize their campaigns. Whether it’s customizing emails based on a lead’s behavior or targeting ads to individuals who have visited the website before, personalized marketing increases engagement and conversion rates.

Measuring success in acquisition marketing

To gauge the effectiveness of your acquisition marketing campaigns, it’s essential to track certain metrics. Here are a few key performance indicators (KPIs) that can help you evaluate success:

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

CAC measures how much it costs your business to acquire a new customer. It’s calculated by dividing the total marketing and sales spend by the number of new customers acquired.

Formula: CAC = Total Marketing Costs / Number of New Customers

Conversion rate

The conversion rate indicates the percentage of visitors or leads that actually become customers. It’s a vital metric for measuring the success of your campaigns.

Formula: Conversion Rate = (Number of Conversions / Total Leads) x 100

Return on Investment (ROI)

ROI measures the profitability of your acquisition efforts. By comparing the revenue generated by new customers to the marketing spend, you can assess the cost-effectiveness of your campaigns.

Formula: ROI = (Revenue from Acquired Customers – Marketing Spend) / Marketing Spend

Conclusion

Acquisition marketing is an essential strategy for businesses looking to drive growth by acquiring new customers. By leveraging the right mix of paid ads, content marketing, SEO, social media and referral programs, businesses can build a robust pipeline of leads and increase conversions.

AI-powered solutions that capture and analyze data from customer interactions enable organizations to refine and optimize acquisition marketing efforts. Using data-driven insights, businesses can stay competitive and expand their customer base in an increasingly digital marketplace.

Learn more about Uniphore and how we can help enhance your marketing strategies with AI-powered solutions. For a deeper understanding of marketing-related terms, explore more glossary terms.

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