Customer acquisition is a hot topic in every marketing meeting. Challenges here range from questions like how much budget to acquire customers, to tracking precision, increasing ROI and enhancing the lifetime value of the customers. While a lot of these are marketing challenges at a macro level, businesses often miss some key issues at the micro level as well. This can have a significant impact on the way budget is allocated, tracking is done and ROI is calculated. Here are a few of these challenges that you may have overlooked.
Tracking Non-Paid Traffic Sources
The conversion rate is directly related to how well your landing page answers the questions that a visitor has. This is taken care of by building custom landing pages for each keyword that they target on paid acquisitions. But marketers often overlook these requirements for a referral or direct visit. Direct visitors to a business website mostly land on the homepage where conversion rates are seldom measured. Similarly, referral visitors land on a wide range of blog and content article pages and here too, marketers overlook measuring conversions. The thumb rule here is to precisely measure the source and behavior of each of the visitors to your website, irrespective of their traffic source, and using the conversion metrics from here to make macro-level marketing strategies.
Unreliable Acquisition Channels
One reason to pay for customer acquisition is reliability. All factors remaining the same, spending $2000 on PPC ads is likely to get you nearly double the number of customers as spending $1000 does. However this is idealistic and may not always happen. Mike Opera, the Director of Social Media at a San Diego based agency writes that his team recently conducted an experiment where the navigational movements of paid traffic visitors from the Facebook Audience Network were visually tracked – the result was that each one of those visitors spent less than a second on the site and did virtually nothing. Mike concluded that this Facebook network was a waste of marketing dollars. As a marketer, if you are looking at spending on customer acquisition, make sure that you only spend on channels that are reliable in terms of conversion rates.
Instant Sales Assistance
A 24-hour turnaround may seem like a reasonable timeframe on your SLA. But if you are really looking for higher conversions and loyalty, the turnaround needs to be much quicker. With businesses investing in cutting edge business tools like sales chatbots to assist new buyers, marketers should at least invest in live chat tools in order to assist new visitors to the website with making a purchase decision.
Product/Market/Marketing Fit
Identifying the profitable market segments is great. But what matters is to ensure that the product you build and the marketing campaign you run are directly aligned to the market that you are targeting. PPC ads may not be suitable for a first of its kind product. Similarly, marketing on Pinterest may not yield the desired results if the decision maker in your product purchase is a male. The bottom line is that as much as there is a need for the product to fit the market it caters to, the marketing too needs to be aligned with the same goal.
