Customer Acquisition Techniques With Help from 360° Marketing

We’re all aware that our purchasing habits have changed on a radical scale. However, many brands are still investing in intrusive actions with a dubious return on investment merely because that’s how they’ve always done it. Today’s consumers value coherent, connected experiences that align with their interests. That’s why we use customer acquisition techniques that seamlessly fit into a 360° Marketing strategy to respond to these new dynamics in our businesses. After all, Einstein said, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”

Why use 360° Marketing in your customer acquisition for your prospects? 

360° Marketing is a marketing philosophy that focuses on coherent, cohesive, connected campaigns to create a seamless brand experience across all its customer touchpoints. It’s about using all the available tools and techniques out there to connect with your target consumer and drive them gradually towards conversion. 

In practical terms, this involves: 

• Creating a richer 360° brand experience.  
• Adapting your messages to every single one of your channels and audiences. 
• Placing every ad using proper segmentation techniques. 
• Connecting with your target. 

This philosophy lets us avoid “interrupting” consumers with messages they’re not interested in that they often find annoying. It allows us to introduce our messaging in a more subtle way that fits into their moment of consumption as we gradually nurture their interest in our product or service, even after turning them into our customers. 

In this context, 360° Marketing customer acquisition techniques are the perfect path to reach your customers. 

How do you use 360° Marketing in customer acquisition? 

The first thing to consider is how traceable the marketing actions we’re taking are since this will help us track our ROI and correctly guide our strategy. And, of course, we’ll get comprehensive knowledge of the customer journey to create a compelling, integrated customer journey.  

Maybe you’ve been asking yourself for the past few years where the customers you had ideally located years have gone. Those customers that crossed underneath your building’s awning, went to trade shows or contacted you with questions about your product or service. Have they disappeared? Have they stopped buying? How can I recover them? Well, the way you go about that has changed, and we should assume that people make most of their purchase decisions without talking once to one of your salespeople. 

The power in the purchasing cycle has moved from the seller (who you went to for more information) to the buyer (who gets that information online without your help). Many entities that are unaware of this change remain trapped in this gap formed between the way people research and buy and the old way of selling.  

Craig Davis, Chief Creative Officer of GRIFFIN Accelerator, once affirmed and declared: “We should stop interrupting what interests people and be what interests people.” 

How can you start to change your customer acquisition strategy? Study the customer journey, map the critical touchpoints along the journey, and make yourself the points of reference with all the information/help that your customer needs at any moment. 

Six methods for acquiring potential customers 

1. Your website as a sales channel

The first step to acquiring more customers is to convert your website, and this is not just if your website is an e-commerce site, into an asset. Your website should be built for capturing visits from your prospects, turn them into leads, and then move them through the funnel until they become brand ambassadors. Don’t overestimate the potential stemming from turning your website into a magnet that brings business continuously and predictably. 

Proper web positioning, robust design, and applying usability best practices will let you improve your site and create an optimized conversion funnel to provide more value and connect with your target in a more personalized manner.

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Your website should talk to your customers and meet their needs; make sure your content has this focus, and your visitors will show up.  

Once you’re there, how efforts can you employ to ensure they leave us their data? Be creative and use lead magnets or conversion assets that provide the user with value to justify that our visitor shares a piece of their precious personal data for us to get access to their inbox. It could be an ebook, guide, free assessment, cost or savings calculator, subscription to your newsletter, etc. 

2. Social Selling

Social media is a “new” communications channel between companies and customers and is a potent channel for loyalty and segmentation. 

We can get closer to users through a social content strategy by offering them valuable content of interest to them and gain firsthand knowledge about their reaction when seeing what we have to offer. It also provides tremendous segmentation potential, making the center of our prospecting operation much more effective. If we then add the ability to disseminate content and make it viral, we’ll see an exponential multiplication of this efficacy. 

However, we need to consider who we’re targeting in every acquisition strategy to set appropriate objectives and create a plan where the content has variety and is not pure advertising about how fantastic your product or service is. And, above all, you should give feedback to your followers, be part of the conversation, and not interrupt it. 

Also, take into account that you don’t need to be on every social media platform. You should be on those platforms where your target is and maximize your presence as much as possible. 

3. Marketing Automation, Segmentation, and Personalization 

63% of businesses that have a competitive advantage are using marketing automation with a powerful segmentation and personalization strategy in their communications. Email marketing, for example, has excellent potential for making our business grow. The caveat is that the potential lessens when we put it on autopilot by sending the message to all our contacts and compromising our reputation as a sender. What’s even more crucial is we lose out on one of the few opportunities we have to have a one-on-one conversation with our customer. 

We must work on segmenting our database using smaller lists and taking advantage of the technology we have to personalize our messaging. We can offer every contact what they want, need, and look in a scaleable way by using digital lead acquisition tools like Pardot or Marketing Cloud from Salesforce. These tools let us create segments and email workflows to establish a relationship with users as well as personalize our messages based on customer characteristics with dynamic content.  

Immediacy, when reaching your audience, connecting any time and anywhere, and the possibility of analyzing consumer behavior are some of the other advantages of betting on email marketing for growth. Remember that email marketing is a marathon, and if you practice, you’ll be even more relevant in your communications. Greater relevance through targeted segmentation has its reward in engagement, ROI, and brand loyalty. 

4. Identify Triggers

The buyer indeed has a lot of information within their grasp in this new context, but the good news is we have it too. There’s no sense wasting the opportunity that a hyperconnected world offers us to pinpoint those shoppers who already started the purchase journey and intercept them with information that helps them in their decision-making.

Look for hints that alert you to possible buyers needing something you offer that they’re already seeking. Set alerts with keywords, watch out for every time they name your competitors, follow blogs that your blogs follow, find out what influences them. Participate in LinkedIn groups where your target is, stay alert to changes in your customers’ org charts, inform yourself about new financing rounds, vital changes that justify a purchase, etc. Put yourself in your clients' shoes and be creative when detecting their needs. And remember, be useful; it’s not about boring them with a sales pitch, but instead, it’s about positioning yourself as a leader in the material or guide by learning about them.  

5. An omnichannel strategy both on and offline 

One of the crucial pillars for 360° Marketing geared towards customer acquisition is omnichannel strategies because they offer a consistent experience to users through diverse channels such as brick-and-mortar stores, phone lines, websites, or an app. It’s about your organization providing an integrated brand experience without any faults.  

Every customer behaves differently, so we should be aware of each of these factors and offer a global yet personalized strategy. Even if we have the same goals for our messaging, every channel requires a different format. At this point, we need to identify and know our customers by creating a complete profile called a buyer persona.  

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It’s important to measure user behavior in both the online and offline spheres because it lets us offer more personalized messaging based on the communications channel we’re using. And, once we detect it, measure and analyze the data we get.

We’ll be able to optimize our brand strategy and effectively drive them through the purchase cycle and help them to finalize their action. We can’t forget that customers value comfort and immediacy when making a purchase. Achieving that the consumer feels attracted in every step of an omnichannel strategy leads to a successful one. 

6. Create an Influencer Marketing strategy

You can increase your business’s online visibility by identifying and connecting with influencers. Influencers have a solid brand image and lead a community that follows them and gives visibility that many brands covet. Turning these people into prescribers for your brand will help you land greater credibility online, boost your number of followers, increase traffic to your website, and develop your community. 

You must identify the influencers that best fit with the product or service you’re offering, have renown, and align with our company’s values. 

We Are Marketing can help you create your digital marketing strategy to achieve your goal of attracting potential customers that turn into real customers that boost sales. Let’s talk?