How do rookies promote and acquire customers?

Acquiring new users is the source of growth for a business. Mature companies with strong financial resources can afford high-cost customer acquisition channels, such as launching fierce TV advertising and offline advertising campaigns; but for most companies, improving the ROI of customer acquisition is always the best strategy.

As the penetration rate of mobile Internet continues to increase, the channels through which companies can reach users are also increasing. In order to avoid the ever-increasing number of channels becoming chaotic, we divide channels into private channels and public channels based on the user's access path. Public channels can be divided into free and paid channels:

1. Free channels: Due to different focuses, free channels can be divided into viral channels and organic channels: Viral channels: such as social media, referral programs, community marketing, content marketing, EDM, etc.; Organic channels: such as SEO, community building, website marketing, app store optimization, etc.;
2. Paid channels: Companies can acquire customers by displaying and exposing themselves through various paid channels, such as SEM, information flow advertising, DSP, DMP, ASO, sponsorship, etc.

Some commonly used customer acquisition channels are introduced below.

1. Introduction to customer acquisition channels

1. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

When users have a need, if they find that there is missing or opaque information about the choice they want to make or the product they want to buy, they will actively search on search engines. If the retrieved page displays relevant advertisements, users may click on the advertisements to obtain additional information and form conversions. This is a reasonable logical chain.

Therefore, search engine bidding promotion has become a channel with high conversion rate and accurate customer acquisition. Even today when traffic is highly dispersed, search engine bidding promotion still occupies half of online advertising and has become an important way for large, medium and small enterprises to acquire customers.

The essence of search engine bidding promotion is to purchase accurate traffic, and its ROI is usually higher than other channels.

Search engine bidding promotion requires promotion skills, a clear understanding of one's own products and competing products, and a clear grasp of the psychology of the target audience. From keyword mining, bidding account establishment, to keyword bidding strategy, regional and time period delivery, creative copywriting, marketing landing page design guidance, and customer service/sales communication, all of these will affect the final result.

At the same time, in the process of search engine bidding promotion, fine-tuning the operation of promotion accounts and establishing a good data analysis system will be important measures to reduce costs and increase conversions. We will explain these in detail in the following chapters.

2. Information flow advertising

Information flow advertising is a form of native advertising, known as native advertising in information flow. Its core intention is to make branded content valuable information to consumers by integrating it into the user experience.

Information flow ads, which are placed in the updates of social media users’ friends or in the content streams of information media and audio-visual media, have become an important means of promoting and acquiring customers for many products. Information flow ads can be in the form of text links, pictures, videos, etc. They can be targeted through tags and exposed according to demand, and can directly lead to landing pages or app downloads, etc.

With the popularization of smart phones and the rapid development of mobile Internet, information flow advertising is constantly moving towards mobile terminals.

On the one hand, information flow advertising has the characteristics of precise audience targeting and easy tracking of post-launch effects, which can help advertisers monitor and improve the conversion rate of their advertising; on the other hand, information flow advertising, which has rich advertising inventory and expression forms, can also vividly and intuitively display core selling point information, and better balance commercial effects and user experience.

When placing information flow ads, you can start from four aspects: platform, creativity, content and bidding to maximize the value of traffic.

The leading media platforms have a huge number of users and can provide advertisers with creative ideas based on in-depth insights into users. They also have the technical advantages of precise positioning, efficient distribution and a complete platform ecosystem. They can formulate delivery strategies based on the different needs of advertisers, expand the potential user base and further improve ROI.

Advertising creativity and landing pages are key factors affecting conversion rates. The creativity must be able to attract users' attention and encourage clicks, and the landing page content must be able to solve users' problems and provide users with valuable brand information. Information flow advertising has a variety of billing methods, and advertisers can choose according to product features and delivery purposes.

It should be noted that even if a reliable channel or a series of effective strategies have been found, new options are always emerging. Companies need to embrace change, seek new and better strategies, and make wise judgments among many channels through data-driven and scientific testing practices, so as to truly use their precious time, energy and funds where they are needed most.

3. Content Marketing

Traditional customer acquisition channels are gradually declining, and content marketing is increasingly valued by companies. Research data shows that 91% of B2B companies and 86% of B2C companies are conducting content marketing and spend an average of more than 25% of their budget on it. In the study, 78% of CMOs believe that content marketing is the future development trend.

However, with the bombardment of information flow advertisements, users are increasingly wary when obtaining information. At the same time, people's attention span continues to shorten, from an average of 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds now. How to impress potential users and spread brand appeal in the shortest possible time has become a problem that marketers have racked their brains to think about.

Content marketing is a way of occupying the minds of users by using content as a carrier for communication. The core points are content that resonates with others, valuable content, and content that inspires users to share. The forms of expression include graphics, videos, audio, animations, pictures, live broadcasts, apps, games, etc.

Storytelling is a common form of content marketing. Corporate brands often attract users and build trust through storytelling. Before telling a story, a brand needs to be clear about one thing: what kind of human nature does it hope to understand and convey in order to resonate with the user group it wants to reach?

For example, the phenomenal content marketing case "The Next Wave" in May 2020. On the occasion of the May Fourth Youth Day, Bilibili released a speech dedicated to the new generation entitled "The Next Wave", which focuses on the emotional tone of believing in the future and being positive and optimistic. Just as He Bing said, you are fortunate to have encountered such an era.

But I am even more fortunate to meet you. It is this moving emotion that inspired resonance between the old and new waves, promoted spontaneous dissemination among users, and combined with Bilibili's new brand proposition, helped boost Bilibili's stock price against the trend.

A good story can bring users into the story, trigger empathy, and make users resonate and identify with the information based on the content, thereby deepening the brand value.

• You should focus on and continue to dig deeper into the content field. Even if you cannot become the leader in this field, you should deeply imprint the brand label in the cognition of the audience in this field.
• The content should be high-quality, so that users feel that their time is worthwhile;
• Content results must be accumulative. Accumulating brand content into IP can allow the brand to form a distinct memory point in the minds of users, and even drive product sales and promote business development.

4. Word-of-mouth customer acquisition

The most direct form of word-of-mouth customer acquisition is user recommendation, which uses people as the main communication medium and leverages the fact that Chinese people trust other people's opinions more to spread word of mouth. Word-of-mouth traffic is the highest quality of all traffic, with a conversion rate typically as high as 60%.

Today, when people live in a node-based way and everyone has a microphone, everyone can become an opinion leader in their group. Concepts such as KOL and KOC are prevalent, and social media has become the main battlefield for word-of-mouth customer development. Therefore, social platforms such as Weibo, WeChat, and Xiaohongshu have become a battleground.

In word-of-mouth communication, topics can be used to create trigger points and form a wide-spread communication effect; by sharing brand stories with users, user participation can be increased and relationships can be established; using a simple and easy-to-operate reward mechanism can stimulate old users' enthusiasm for sharing and desire to consume again.

Word-of-mouth marketing is also a common way to attract new users. It reaches users in various forms, including promotional pictures, H5 event pages, articles, promotional videos, etc.

2. How to find the best customer acquisition channel?

There will be a channel list for marketing, products, and operations. This list is a resource that the brand should pay attention to on a daily basis. As mentioned above, based on the attributes of channel traffic, we divide it into private channels and public channels.

1. Private channels: owned media

Owned media refers to the media that a company has had since the beginning of its brand creation. It is the terminal for the company to express itself to the outside world. The traffic brought by this media is private domain traffic.

2. Public Domain Channels

• New media platform: A new media platform means that brands can create their own brand base stations in some scenarios where users are active, and use the platform’s own user groups and platform characteristics to gain their own fans and establish their own brand influence.
• Vertical platform (taking the human resources industry as an example): A vertical platform refers to the vertical portal of its own industry, which often provides some knowledge sharing content and industry information, and even some related courses. The characteristic of vertical platforms is that the audience is relatively precise. Compared with casting a wide net, the traffic of vertical platforms is more likely to be converted into your users.
• Paid platform: Paid platform means that we need to spend money to buy advertisements, or buy clicks, so that users come to our website or APP.

So many platforms can bring us traffic continuously. Although more free traffic is better, it also takes our energy to maintain and operate, and the operating costs are very high. In addition to spending energy on operating paid traffic, you also need to spend a lot of real money.

For example, in SEM, many customers spend tens of thousands of dollars every day to purchase traffic. But are these traffics really converted into your customers? What is the input-output ratio? You definitely want to choose the most ideal channel. So how do we use scientific methods to find the best customer acquisition channels?

3. Judgment of channel quality

Taking the e-commerce industry as an example, we often judge the quality of a channel based on the number of orders and transaction volume obtained by the channel in a certain period of time. This is an effective method to distinguish the quality of channel traffic, but more screening dimensions are needed to judge channel quality more accurately.

From the time a visitor becomes a user until he or she leaves, he or she will make purchases many times due to factors such as discount incentives and brand influence. We call this the user lifetime value (LTV).

If you pay attention to this data, you will find that although some channels bring many one-time purchasing users, their continuous purchasing power is insufficient. Therefore, when judging the quality of a channel, we cannot simply start from the one-time purchasing power, but we must pay attention to the full life cycle value of users.

When we have many customer acquisition channels, unified management and effective management become the focus. Once upon a time, we only focused on how many users were brought in after the promotion, but had no idea about the subsequent behavior of the relevant users.

Perhaps we have many promotional QR codes and many promotional links from partners, but what about their subsequent behaviors? Therefore, it is very important to achieve unified and effective management, which is directly related to the formulation and review of each channel’s delivery strategy. For example, the channel effectiveness evaluation of an e-commerce platform requires knowing the traffic conversion effects of different channels.

With the help of advertising tracking, you can understand the traffic and conversion effects of each channel, and you can easily determine the user life cycle value of different channels. Through different channel effect analyses, channels can be divided into quadrants, and different channels can be treated differently.

Based on channel quality, we can make the following decisions:

• Potential channels with high input-output ratio and low traffic volume can be expanded;
• Channels with moderate traffic and moderate input-output ratio can be optimized internally to extract the essence;
• Low-quality channels must be drastically eliminated;

Once we know the effects of different advertising channels, we can selectively allocate budgets to maximize budget ROI and achieve greater results with less money.

By using advertising to track the effectiveness of different channels and plans, you can know the input-output ratio of different channels and plans, and make a preliminary judgment through horizontal data analysis, which plans cost more money but have fewer conversions? Which plans cost less and convert more?

This not only allows you to see the conversion effect, but also provides assistance for the optimization process. When we know the bounce rates of landing pages of different plans, we can know which landing pages are not performing well, and then perform spiral iterative optimization from keyword selection to creativity and then to landing pages.

Author: Jiuxianqiao Ishihara Satomi

Source: Jiuxianqiao Ishihara Satomi