Brand marketers across the globe are constantly looking to improve their customer acquisition strategies. Some brands are successful using traditional mediums such as direct mail while others have executed successful digital programs, such as influencer marketing campaigns.
The goal, for every company, is to create sustainable and systematic customer acquisition strategies that keep up with industry trends. It is important to note that customer acquisition should not be confused with lead generation. While there are so many views of marketing tactics and where success and opportunity align with the consumer, we often visualize the customer journey in the form of a funnel.
As part of their journey through the marketing funnel, consumers will:
- Gain awareness about your brand and interest in its offerings
- Add your products or services to the list of alternatives they are considering, and
- Decide to become a paying customer of your business
Lead generation makes up the top part of the sales funnel, awareness. Lead acquisition is the middle section including interest and consideration. And lead conversion is all the way at the bottom with intent, evaluation and purchase.
Customer acquisition, however, is the entire end-to-end process that involves all of these stages. When it comes to integrating influencer marketing into a customer acquisition strategy, Find Your Influence offers the following tips.
Define Your Target Audience
The first step is to identify the right users or potential audience for your brand. Chances are, your product is the perfect solution to a problem a certain demographic of consumers are looking to solve. It’s only a matter of discovering who they are and focusing your customer acquisition efforts, primarily, on them. Conduct complete market research to better understand who and how you should market your product to win over new customers.
Upon completion of market research, consider creating a buyer persona that includes both demographics and buying habits of your target buyer. Once you know your audience, it will be easier to identify who they follow on social media.
Use the Right Acquisition Channel
There are a number of different frameworks that can help you identify the best channel to use for your customer acquisition strategies. But for the most part, it takes a lot of experimenting to find the right channel. Based on your media mix, you should set clear goals for yourself and your campaign. Even having rough goals will help you understand whether your tactics are working or not. Once you’ve tested different channels, you will be able to compare individual successes relative to each other.
Influencer marketing has the benefit of being one channel that allows brands to implement brand awareness, referral traffic and end-to-end actions being driven through visual content.
As you develop your influencer marketing strategy, it’s imperative that you first understand what you want to accomplish with your campaign. Are you solving for top of funnel, middle of funnel or bottom of funnel challenges?
If your focus is top of the funnel, you can engage influencers to create buzz and increase brand awareness with strategies focused on getting your product/brand name mentioned and shared. This tactic often leads to an increase in brand followers and engagement. When your focus shifts to bottom of the funnel tactics, influencers can add coupon codes or unique swipe up links to drive sale and increase your return on investment (ROI).
Create High-Quality Content, Regularly
Content marketing is easily one of the most effective and evergreen customer acquisition strategies that exist today. It helps brands establish thought-leadership in their industry or niche. Getting consumers to trust your brand is half the battle and content marketing helps you win that battle.
From a lead generation perspective, content marketing is more effective and less expensive than typical outbound marketing. Starting a blog for your business, sharing content on social media, and publishing white papers are all great ways to establish yourself as a trustworthy expert in your industry.
Consumers are more educated and informed these days. By empowering your prospects to make informed purchase decisions, you’ll gain their trust, and in all likelihood, convert them. Creating valuable, informative, insightful, and engaging content will, ultimately, help drive your customer acquisition.
Choose an Influencer Marketing Strategy
When designing your influencer marketing strategy, you must first determine which part of the marketing funnel are you looking to impact. Are you looking for customer acquisition or lead generation? Both are worthwhile and can be tackled from different angles.
Some influencer marketing strategies to consider include:
- Gifting: Provide free product or services to an influencer in exchange for a review or mention.
- Contests and Giveaways: Run a contest and ask an influencer to share your giveaway event with their followers or readers.
- Influencer Takeover: Allow an influencer to take control of your social media accounts for a certain amount of time.
- Guest Posting: Create or contribute content for an influencer’s blog.
- Sponsored Content: Paying for your brand to be featured on an influencer’s blog or social channel. You may or may not create the content for the post.
- Co-Creating Content: Partner with an influencer and create content that you can feature on your website, their website or a third-party website.
- Social Media Mentions: Your social media influencer marketing strategy can include a personality mentioning your brand, sharing your content or posting about you.
- Affiliates: Providing a unique code that gives influencers a percentage of each sale they drive.
- Discount Codes: Giving an influencer a unique discount code for your product or service that they can promote and offer to their audience. The thing we love about this is you can compare the performance of the various influencers on your campaign.
- Brand Ambassadors: Form relationships with loyal brand fans and have them mention or promote your brand, products and services in exchange for exclusive offers, free products or being featured by your brand.
- Add a link: You can actually put the link in the post on Facebook. With Instagram, you can have swipe-ups within your Instagram stories that take people right to your product.
It all depends on your influencer marketing strategy, but regardless of which route you choose, you’ll be exposing your business to a whole new targeted audience. There are numerous routes to explore within the influencer marketing space—especially with the primary goal of customer acquisition. Are you ready to get started? Contact Find Your Influence to get started today.
Freelance contribution written especially for Find Your Influence by Lindsay Jacobs.