Digital acquisition requires a few key tools, resources, accesses, talent and processes to become the best when it comes to digital acquisition. In this article, I talk about what does it take to become great with digital acquisition.
I have worked with organizations in their infancy when it comes to digital acquisition and scaled them up to be one of the best. I share the key secrets to being the best with digital acquisition here.
- Have a good Online Presence i.e Website and/or app
Have a website that is:
- fast – complete page load time should be
less than 3 seconds. Our attention span is decreasing each year. As per latest
research, our attention span used to be at 12 seconds in 2000s and is not at 8
seconds, even less than a gold fish.
- easy to navigate – intuitive design that relates well to how customers think, provides information in ways that customers want (videos, audios, text) along with an easy to understand menu and clear action buttons
- follows accessibility standards – Average age across the world is increasing each year. The best thing about internet is that it is accessible to everyone. This is makes it even more important to follow accessibility standards that have been laid out for websites from things like a reader script enabled, font size change enabled etc.
- Enable easy absorption of information – create content in formats that will do justice to it e.g Videos are a great way to explain complicated products. Animations are a great way to engage audience and share information.
If you are a small business, you can build a website on your own with little/limited knowledge. Read this article to understand how to build a website.
To drive digital acquisition, it is also important to have the right concept of user journey and use it to drive sales.
- Know your customer and their purchase process
The process of digital acquisition starts with an understanding of your customer.
- How do they decide to buy a
product and how long does it take?
- What are the different ways in which their decision is influenced?
Once you understand this, you should think about what kinds of platforms/websites/apps do customers spend time on that can be used to understand when they are in need, when they are researching and when they are ready to act. You are better off using advertising platforms that translate this into active targeting criteria.
- Choose the right paid marketing and organic channels
There are a lot of paid marketing and organic channels that can be leveraged to drive acquisition. How do you choose which one to use? This leads to organizations taking one of the two courses – finding an agency to help support their needs or deciding to do it themselves. When they decide to do it themselves these are the channels they generally start with:
- Paid
Search Advertising on Google, Bing
- Paid Social Media Advertising on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest etc
- Paid Display Advertising using Google Display Network
- Remarketing Ads on all platforms where possible
Very often they ignore other channels that provide niche but highly relevant audiences like content marketing. Other times they forget to work on an organic strategy through content, videos etc..
A good digital acquisition expert will help you decide which channel to start with, create the right media plan for you and optimize them consistently to ensure budget is going towards channels that work.
- Enable tracking (web
analytics) to understand campaign performance – What differentiates scalable and
efficient digital acquisition approach from others is the ability to start with
something and constantly iterate on approaches based on the data being
collected. This requires your tracking infrastructure to include the following:
- Implement web analytics on your site/app. Ensure that all custom conversions that you wish to track are being tracked.
- Implement Facebook Analytics and LinkedIn Insights Tag to understand your website audience better
- Add various platform pixels to your site to enable the different advertising algorithms to learn and optimize.
- Ensure utm parameters are being used on all your campaigns and ads so you can analyze performance on a campaign level. This will ensure you are using attribution based on web analytics as well are able to look at assists being provided by channels
- Hire someone smart and dedicated (Agency or freelancer) for Optimization – This is the hardest part about digital acquisition. You cannot have a great digital acquisition set up unless you have smart people managing your campaigns and optimizing them. This is definitely not the area to cheap out. Choosing the right agency can be overwhelming. I talk about how to choose a digital agency.
- Keep testing and iterating – Finally, the media plan you start with will never be the plan you end up with. This is because digital acquisition is a fluid activity and it should follow where the performance is. A lot of organizations get so tied down to their media plan, that they do not change to drive even more value. This is where they go completely wrong. If you have a seasoned digital expert on your side, they will be able to read the data right and help you make the right pivots vs unnecessary changes.