Smarter Ways to Drive Customer Growth

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Over the past 30 years driving customer growth has become far more complex. There is now a myriad of digital channels across a mix of paid, owned and earned media assets you can leverage to engage customers. However, many organisations are still taking an old school approach, over focussing on acquisition and under focussing on retention, when there are much smarter ways to drive customer growth.

To get insight into this topic I had Gareth Begent join me on the Customer Smarts podcast who has a wealth of experience working for companies like Adobe, Foxtel and Optus in senior marketing roles. Where he helped them find smarter ways to generate customer growth.

We explored:

1.???? The complexity of driving customer growth

2.???? The answer to organisational silos

3.???? The mid funnel opportunity

4.???? Imbalance between acquisition vs retention

5.???? Focussing on the right customer data analytics

6.???? How to adjust for the tight economy we’re in right now

If you would prefer to continue reading, scroll past the video for the core insights

6 Top Insights

1) Determine what’s actually driving growth with smart goals

We’re at a point now where digital has made it really easy to track user interactions, so it means most marketers and companies are drowning in analytics. It doesn’t help when marketers are in the routine of running lots of campaigns without aligning them with core business goals. So, getting clarity on what is actually driving growth has become really important. Using smart goals is one way to help create better clarity on how marketing is driving business success. That means your KPIs need to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound.

?2) A data sharing culture is key to driving growth efficiently

Many organisations still have customer intelligence sitting in silos with some teams not willing to share their aspect of the customer data, often because they are competing against other internal teams for customer attention. However, to be able to operate at the speed that’s required in 2024 and beyond you need a data sharing culture, where the entire organisation is working together to build customer intelligence and continually sharing insights to drive customer improvements. From this position it allows you to see collectively what’s impacting growth, for example you can see if an acquisition campaign has driven unnecessary customer churn, which allows you to make adjustments more holistically. Essentially it enables you to reduce the internal competitive behaviour because you’re all working from a single source as one big team which is far more efficient.

3) Do you have a mid funnel gap?

Many organisations structure their marketing budgets with 2 tiers, firstly with an awareness layer so customers know who you are (also called top of funnel) with impactful brands ads/initiatives. This top layer is supported by “bottom of funnel” initiatives focuses on converting active buyers with performance media (digital ads and search etc). However, performance media has become a crutch for a lot of marketers, almost like an addiction. Mostly because it’s the easiest media to track and prove ROI. It’s really important in your marketing mix but sometimes they get caught in a race to the bottom of the funnel and forget about “the middle of the funnel”. These are prospective customers who are interested but not quite ready to buy. You can’t sell to them just yet, but you need a way to keep them warm. This is where if you need to help them with guidance content useful tools and help them at a time of need along their journey. Not a lot of brands do well, so there’s a lot of opportunity if you get upstream here.

4) Why there’s imbalance between acquisition vs retention?

Companies have pressure from shareholders/investors to grow, that’s why there tends to be more focus on acquisition. In saying that, improving retention is held back often because internal teams are structured in silos competing against each other for customers attention. You can get up to 4 departments, including acquisition, retention, loyalty, service all trying to hit the same customers. So, it can be very political and “too hard” so it’s easier to spend money in silos on acquisition if you have deep pockets. However, it’s not a sustainable way to drive growth. As customers continue to have more choice in the market, retaining the ones you have is becoming far more important and CX has become the core differentiator.

?5) Shared KPIs are the answer to organisational silos

Organisational silos inside companies are enormously inefficient. They often form because KPIs are siloed. It’s pretty simple, employees perform based on how they are marked by their boss on their KPIs. If teams and departments also have siloed KPIs, then the inefficiency compounds. The answer is moving towards shared KPIs and building agile squads with a mix of people from different departments, acquisition, retention, customer service, product, sales, research to drive towards shared KPIs. It helps you 1) operate more efficiently, 2) create more seamless CX and 3) have a better impact on the business with less wastage. It seems obvious but many companies are still struggling to implement it.

6) Becoming more efficient in an economic downturn

With a slow economy, marketing budgets tend to get cut, but there’s still an expectation to maintain growth. Gareth’s advice was to get serious about customer retention. At times like these you’ve got to do everything you can to keep customers by offering additional value. If you don’t have a great customer content program it puts you in a vulnerable position because it makes it harder to leverage your owned channels which are free to use. Loyalty programs also become massively important because they are a reason for customers to stay as long as they offer enough value. Optimising the design of your customer experience by removing pain points is also critical. From a media perspective you can do things like cut down to your best performing media channels, formats, messaging and messaging to weather the storm and focus more on active buyers.

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About me

I’ve spent the last 20 years working on digital transformation and CX projects all around the globe with brands like Samsung, Virgin, Lexus, eBay, Australian Air Force as well as being Head of Brand and Digital CX at a professional football team. If you would like to get in touch or have any questions:

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