Customer Acquisition 2020

Why brand awareness can no longer be one of the main KPIs, why traditional survey-based research is wrong for planning and measuring, why last-click attribution is questionable, why 2020 needs to be the year when we stop defining audiences as “18-45 income average+” and why search is so much more than Google.

It is not my intention to argue with Philip Kotler or other distinguished professionals on the marketing fundamentals. But there is enough material for a new textbook as the world is entering a new era (not just because of the coronavirus). The approach to marketing is changing. Again.

I hope the trends as I see them will help ignite some ideas that you will implement for your business, no matter the industry or the size of the business.

1. PEOPLE NO LONGER REMEMBER THINGS.

Mobile phones have no doubt influenced the way we live and how we consume information. One of the key changes that has a domino effect on all marketing activities is we no longer need to remember anything. Phone numbers, addresses, directions, where and when the next meeting is, how much {anything, you name it} is etc. Pretty much any information is accessible within a couple of clicks. Everything is in our phone and the internet is now available everywhere.

Another reason we no longer remember is the amount of content we are exposed to daily. The amount of content is increasing. The below graph from Statista is just for the websites and does not include apps, text messaging or the social media content. 

Do you remember what you saw in your social media feed this morning? How about yesterday? Most likely people reading this article have some connection to the marketing and advertising industries and pay attention to what content they see. Your consumer? Not so much. We live in the world where the attention span is between 0.3 and 3 seconds. According to MMA (Mobile Marketing Association), the human brain needs less than ? second to engage with mobile advertising and trigger a reaction.

Should brand awareness continue being one of the main marketing KPIs? Or should there be a totally new KPI that takes the above into account? It of course depends on the brand and the business goals, but the fact that people no longer need to memorize and remember information is a particularly important change in planning the marketing activities and communications campaigns.

And this brings us to another topic. When we plan campaigns and when we measure brand awareness, we turn to research to discover what our customers know, think, feel and want.

For your business: think how the fact that people no longer need to remember anything influences your brand and your marketing activities. Do you need to make any adjustments?

2. TRADITIONAL SURVEY-BASED RESEARCH IS NOT ACCURATE ENOUGH. IT’S TIME TO LEARN TO READ DATA.

What is wrong with a survey? Isn’t it what has been used for centuries to know what people think? Yes, and it has served its purpose. But in 2020, let’s leave the cave and use the tools that allow getting a new wealth of consumer insights.

When I launched New York Online, a website for international visitors to NYC, I discovered a whole new level of insights through data and analytics.

Here is one example. New York City has 25,000 restaurants. When asked about culinary preferences, most international visitors said they wanted to explore all the great cuisines available in the city. I had no doubt that was the case – I am also one of those people who admire the diversity of foods one can experience in New York. But the search analytics data told me something else. People visiting from Brazil were looking for Brazilian restaurants in New York, tourists from China – for the Chinese restaurants, visitors from Russia – for the Russian food in NYC. You get the idea. The percentage of those who wanted to have the food of their own country when visiting NYC was 90%. This can be interpreted in many ways, for example that they wanted both: to experience the culinary heaven and to have access to their own foods, but no – we used other data sources to learn people mostly cared only about their local foods.

Once I realized there are two different worlds – what people say and what they actually do – my approach to content and to marketing have changed. I started planning campaigns on “what they actually do” insights. And it worked. As obvious as it sounds, but when you give the customer what they want and help them resolve their true needs, your business results are on the right track.

I kept analyzing multiple data sources, not just search queries. It is not that straightforward, but there is a wealth of consumer insights available today – and you can’t find most of these in surveys. Apart from being incomplete, what else is wrong with the traditional research data?

Social desirability bias – consciously or not, we want to be perceived better than we are. The answers we give to an interviewer often reflect that.

Because we no longer need to remember things, even when we provide an honest answer, we may simply not remember if the type of a toothpaste we purchased 6 months ago was an Artic Fresh or a Mint one and if we bought it at Shoprite, Walmart or Target.

There is one type of question that our New York Online customer service is being asked at least a couple of times a day. The question comes from people who purchased some NYC activity – a tour or a Broadway ticket – but they did not buy it from us. Why do they contact New York Online? They do not remember where they bought their tickets! A Broadway ticket is on average $120-150, and an average order is usually 2 tickets. It is a significant spend for most people, and a special occasion. Yet, people do not remember where they purchased their tickets because they do not need to remember.  If we don’t remember the website where we spent $300, will we remember the toothpaste type purchased 6 months ago? Does using traditional research survey still seems like the right approach to measure brand awareness?

But surveys continue being used today to measure awareness as well as for the consumer insights discovery.

A friend of mine who works in the media agency in London (and who has heard my “traditional research can’t be trusted” story too many times) suggested a book by Seth Stevens-Davidowitz, “Everybody Lies.” I highly recommend reading the book to everyone whose passion is understanding people. “Everybody Lies” should become a textbook for everyone working in marketing and research. 

How can you start using data in your business? Start small. Set goals. Understand what first-data sources you have. Explore search queries and customer service queries (emails, phone, chatbots etc.). Be creative and think out of the box, correlate some of the evident topics and queries with the most unexpected ones. But be careful – no data set will give you the exact answers to solve your marketing goals in one click. Keep in mind that many things are not yet accurately and consistently measured (for example, the engagement in messengers). We may use machines to collect data, but the analysis needs to be done by a human – for now. Marketing Scientist will continue being one of the most in-demand professions in 2020 and in the next couple of years.

For your business: audit the research tools you purchase and use today. Create the list of data sources you have or can have. Design your data as research strategy 2020.

3. FIGURING OUT MULTITOUCH ATTRIBUTION IS THE WAY TO EFFICIENCY.

What is multitouch attribution? AppsFlyer came up with a great way to graphically explain it. 

What still happens too often is once the campaign data comes in and shows that most conversions were brought in by the last link in the chain, the next campaign budget will see reallocation to that last link channel that brought in a conversion. Such approach is called last-click attribution. I consider it wrong.

Customers are exposed to multiple touchpoints throughout their purchase journey. Allocating most budgets only to the channel that brings the conversion can be a costly exercise that might seriously damage your business results.

How do you measure what channels were involved in the attribution process? I hope a tool becomes available soon, but there is no simple answer. The most reliable way for now is splitting your campaign into several experiments and comparing the results. For example, Campaign 1 includes an email, a Facebook ad, Facebook shopping catalog and Google branded search. Campaign 2 includes only Facebook ad and shopping catalog, Google branded search, but excludes email, and so on.

Experiment, measure, compare. If you work with a media agency partner, have a discussion with them about the best way to measure multitouch attribution, even if there is no simple plug-and-play solution.

Oh, and please, do not ask your customers where they saw your ad – they won’t remember.

For your business: How do you measure attribution? Set goals for understanding multitouch attribution for your business. Plan several test campaigns in a way you can compare the results. Discuss with your media partners.

4. UNDERSTANDING YOUR CUSTOMER ON A WHOLE NEW LEVEL.

When I see “18-45, income average+” as the target audience description, I am ready to burst into crying. Why many agencies and marketers continue using this broad audience definition is beyond me. Audience segmentation should be done not only by geo and demographics, but also by where your customer is in their customer journey. I never liked the word “funnel” – I do think it’s a journey.

Once you have defined the audience segments, think through where your customers are in their purchase journey. I usually design a matrix with the journey stages on top (Awareness, Consideration, Preference, Action, Post-purchase) and with the audience segments on the left-hand side. Each of the columns for the journey stage gets several more columns to include the message, touchpoints, action we want to achieve etc. at that stage. You can design messages and separate creatives to reach various audience segments with the right message at the right time.

It is a creative process and the one you need to get comfortable with, but it does help you get to a totally new level and leave “18-45 income average +” behind. Here is a snapshot of how I approach the exercise, but you can build your own tool.

This segmentation exercise, combined with the right data insights, helps a great deal to exclude subjectivity. Using subjective assumptions is still a huge issue both in the agencies and on the marketers’ side. We think we know what the customers want, but in most cases – we actually don’t.

For your business: Segment your audiences. Design customer journey. Do your version of the customer journey by segment matrix. Do a test campaign, measure the results, adjust, repeat.

5. SEARCH IS SO MUCH MORE THAN GOOGLE.

The human psychology is based on search – we search for information, food, entertainment, jobs, friends etc. The world of Google search has changed tremendously in the last 18 months.

Search is still key. But is Google the only channel where customers search for information? No. Search is in the channel where the customer is. Asking for a recommendation in social media is a version of search (be it because we trust our friends more than a list of impersonal links or because we are lazy to make an effort and go through multiple search results in Google), discovery through hashtags and images on Instagram is search, the “how to…” videos is search, using voice assistants like Siri or Alexa is also search. Even chatbots in text messages are a form of search! 

As always, it all starts with understanding your customer. Where they are and how they discover your brand. The search and discovery strategy 2020 is very different from 2019 and even more so from 2018, and it doesn’t need to be limited to just Google.

For your business: What is search for your brand? Where are your customers? How can they find you in different stages of their consumer journey?

6. RUN FAST AND HAVE 360° EXPERTISE.

For your business: embrace the fact that customer acquisition in 2020 is even more complex than a couple of years ago. Digital Transformation is so much more than figuring out PPC or transitioning files to the cloud. An ecosystem where everything happens extremely fast means the need to design agile internal processes, to learn to read data and get value of it, to design one-second strategy to get your customer’s attention. 2020 is also about keeping long-term goal in mind but moving in short-distance intervals.

There are no right or wrong answers, but not keeping up with the changes can become costly.

Thank you for reading till the end! ??

About Marina

My experience has always been around understanding the customer. I spent 17 years working in agencies – media, creative and digital, and 8 years in an online travel startup that I have taken from an idea with 0 investment to a successful e-commerce business with customers in more than 50 countries. My passion is discovering insights through data, translating insights into messages, into marketing communications and into business results.