5 tips on navigating the customer acquisition minefield

When it comes to customer acquisition, targeting the right market is essential, but with so many options and choices to make, the process is a minefield.

While we all know to target the people with the highest combination of propensity to buy and value as a client, a lack of insights often reduces us to making marketing decisions based on gut instinct. In most circumstances, marketing managers hold meaningful information on the market or product, in the form of their customer base. The challenge, more often than not, is to discern insights from raw information.

 What if I'm starting from scratch?

When starting from scratch, where you have no experience in marketing the related product or solution, going with your gut instinct isn’t a bad idea. It is, however, also worth testing multiple additional groups outside of your key target group in small (but statistically viable) volumes, to prove your theory. A carefully designed testing strategy will assist with this process. The key is to build a small test campaign, designed to learn, as much as it is designed to succeed, so that refinements to future targetting can be made based on a solid grounding of initial results.  

 Can I describe my customer?

It is almost always beneficial to every organisation to analyse their customer base to paint a better picture of who buys their products / services, and more importantly, to start to understand why. With this knowledge, we can know better how to communicate with existing clients, future clients, and segment the market more efficiently. This is where (shameless plug warning) a third party, like Dataphoria, can assist in deriving this knowledge. In many circumstances, Dataphoria can append key segmentation variables (think age / income / geodemographics / business industry or size), where they are missing in your database, to help paint a clearer picture of each customer segment.  

 How do my customers compare to the rest of the market?

Profiling against a base audience provides more robust insights on which to build a targeting criteria than analysing a customer database in a vacuum. By carefully selecting a group to compare with a meaningful base, you can start to understand what separates your customer from the rest of the market. 

For example, a NSW B2B sales organisation may want to understand how their customer base compares to NSW businesses in general. When looking at the business customer base alone, there may be an apparent skew towards property and business services companies, as these make up 15% of their customer base (the largest % of any group). When comparing this percentage to the wider business universe however, we may find that this is actually an under-representation, as the industry might represent a greater percentage of the market at large.

Is my profile robust?

Make sure that the base market you compare to is related to the marketing you have done prior, or your marketing might become a self-fulfilling prophesy. For example, don’t compare your consumer customers to all Australians if you have only targeted females, aged 30+ in all previous marketing campaigns, or the insights will be too heavily skewed to your previous selections to enable robust learnings.

When profiling, the analysis segment selection is also key. If running lookalike profiles for acqusition, for example, remember that not all customers are created equal. Not all customers are profitable, pay their bills on time or stay around long enough, after you may have invested heavily in acquiring them. Therefore, try to establish a group that reflects the traits of the customers you are looking to acquire to use in your analysis.

How can Dataphoria assist?

Dataphoria can assist with a range of data mining, segmentation, profiling and modelling challenges. We help clients to understand where their best customers have come from, what they are likely to buy next and who is at most risk of leaving them. Contact us today to learn how we might assist you in reaching your marketing goals. We might even be able to help with your next game of Minesweeper.

p: 1300 537 787 www.dataphoria.com.au