Customer Acquisition, The Main Route To Growth.

The main thrust in growth for most companies revolves around the acquisition of new customers. Customer Acquisition involves finding customers who are currently buying from your competitors, customers who are not yet aware of your product, customers who have just became candidates for purchasing your product (baby diapers for new parents), and customers who are currently buying substitute products.

Direct Marketing Techniques

In traditional offline marketing a marketing manager will develop a campaign based based on their knowledge of the target consumer, this campaign may include but is not restricted to:

  • direct mailing
  • telemarketing

Mass Marketing Techniques

  • magazine advertisements
  • billboards

The marketing manager tasked with influencing new parents to purchase a particular brand of diapers would naturaly focus mass marketing advertisements in parenting magazines. Ads could also be placed in other mainstream publications whose readership demographics were similar to those of new parents.

Push Marketing

The above describes Push Marketing where a marketing message is 'Pushed' to a targeted group of consumers who conform to a predefined persona. Push marketing is still a viable approach online in areas such as e-mail marketing where a recipient list has already been created through an opt-in news letter and retention marketing where a customer crosses a predefined tripwire for example.

Pull Marketing

Search engine traffic whether organic or PPC differs in a fundamental way, i.e. internet users do not present a single user group or persona in the same way as there is in the readership of parenting magazines. The internet is accessed by people of all ages, education, gender and social background including those interested in parenting. To successfully access this group of consumers you have to switch to Pull Marketing.

Traditional Pull Marketing (offline) is best described as a chain of events which require high spending on advertising and consumer promotion to build up consumer awareness and demand for a product. If the Pull Marketing strategy for baby diapers is successful, consumers will ask their retailers for the product, the retailers will ask the wholesalers for product so they can meet customer demand, and the wholesalers will ask the producers for product so the can supply the retailer.

N.B. This strategy can also increase web searches as consumers pick up on the offline marketing and turn to the web to further research a product or company.

Internet Marketing does not always have the luxury of a media campaign to support it and there are very few companies that can afford to sustain such campaigns for any great time. Therefore Internet marketing must be able to create and maintain stand alone Pull Marketing strategies that consistently attract targeted traffic from search engines.

This is done by getting pages to rank for terms that are aligned to the consumer, the buying cycle of the product or service and the product or service itself, i.e. pages must rank prominently in search engines for the keywords that are being used by potential consumers who are searching for your product or service.

Design Insite use many techniques to achieve this which are outlined in the Search Engine Optimisation, Link Building and Copywriting sections of this site.

Techniques like e-mail marketing (push) or keyword optimisation (pull) will deliver traffic but this does not guarantee greater customer acquisition. One must also ensure that landing pages provide the information the searcher is seeking in an objective, scanable manner that incorporates benefits, addresses concerns and presents a call to action in tune with the intrinsic motivation of the searcher.

Take the first step towards generating more sales and maximizing profit by requesting a free Internet Marketing quote or talk us directly on +34 69 347 5142