Adopt digital acquisition as a core business growth strategy that is based on strong understanding of your customer, their purchase process as well as the key moments and channels to influence their purchase decision.
The easiest way to build the case to adopt digital acquisition is to answer the below questions:
Who is your customer?
Answer to this question is made up clearly distinguishable traits that can help you distinguish your customer from a group of 50 people standing in front of you. This is not always the same as unique customer persona’s that organizations create to inspire the organization, make the customer feel more human to all employees. Below are the categories of details you should think of when you are finding answer to the above question:
- Demographic – Age, Gender etc
- Location – Country, City, State etc
- Interests / Lifestyle – Interests like gardening, fitness, technology etc
- Career – Employment, organization size etc
- Lifestage – Married, single, parent, retired etc
Some of this information like location might be based on actual data you have on your customers. Other information like interests/lifestyle career might be based on what you see in your customers if you operate a brick and mortar store. Or, if you have an ecommerce site, you might find value in implementing below pixels on your site to understand your customers better:
- Facebook Pixel to understand the demographics of people visiting your site
- LinkedIn Insights Tag to understand the career related aspects of your site visitors
- Web Analytics like Google Analytics to understand key traits about your customers like interests they have, the affinity segments that they belong to
What is their purchase process?
It is important to understand the below aspects for the products they purchase from you:
- How long do they take from first interaction before they take
the right action – submit a lead form, make a purchase etc?
- You can get this answer, If you have implemented your web analytics solution right. Google Analytics User explorer is a great tool that can help you find this answer. Use of utm parameters in your campaigns as well as setting up the right conversion goals will help you analyze this
- Use of an ad server will also help you determine the answer to this question
- How many other similar products/services do they generally
consider before they decide?
- You can fill in this information using your knowledge of customer/industry/product. You can also be digitally savvy and use services like Google Surveys for this information. You can also use traditional research agencies to do this work for you.
- What makes them choose your product/service over the other? What makes them reject your product/service over the other?
Answer the above questions again for the product/service in general keeping an industry view on. This time its not just about your product/service.
What digital channels do they use in their decision process and how do they get influenced?
This is one of the most important and one of the most difficult steps to make a case for why you need to try digital acquisition.
- Are the key decision makers spending time online learning about the product/service you offer?
- Are your customers spending time being exposed to ads from your competition about their product/service and the differentiating factors?
- What kind of content (news, sports, business etc) are your customers consuming through the internet daily and in what form (video, articles, stories, tweets etc)?
- How are they consuming content relevant to your product/service (following influencers, newsletters, emails, specific websites etc)
The questions above are just a few of over 40 that I have created to help organizations collect all the relevant information to build a use case. This then feeds into a strategic 3P framework (People, Process, Platform) to build the final use case on how to get into digital acquisition.
This sounds exhaustive. I agree because it does need to be for larger organizations who are slower to move and have more leadership inertia to overcome. If you are a start-up, then just answer the above questions and hit the ground running. Just build the right infrastructure to measure the value of digital acquisition – launch, measure, pivot and scale.
And if you are having challenges, reach out to me at digitalacquisitionstrategy@gmail.com