The very aim of a marketing agency would be bring your brand closer to as many audience with a lower cost.
In the traditional context, a marketing agency will choose a medium , TV, radio, print, or billboard with lowest cost of acquisition.
For example , your company would have spent a $5000 for an interview slot on a pay TV channel last year and as a result would have gained 10 new customers. The cost of acquisition of $500 per customers. Now, that is $ 500 per customer.
If you were given a task to reduce the cost per acquisition down next year, how would you execute it ?
The best way forward would be to identify a slot with highest viewers of your targeted audience and that means you can choose a different programme at a different time or find another alternative medium to reach your audience. However if the same were to happen in the social media context, you would be left with more alternatives to bring your cost down.
The author has put together 5 different ways to bring your cost of acquisition down with digital media
1) Awareness Campaign
We wish to reiterate, at the beginning of any social media campaign , you would need to invest in paid medium and hence the first content that goes up online should be an awareness content. Indirectly we are saying don't put a hard sell content first and burn your pockets. The awareness campaign will serve as a a warm up message before your turn them into customers. Awareness is the top of the marketing funnel.
2) Remarketing
Something I always tell my customer, consistently remarket to your customers as you would not know when they will be interested in your product or services. This group of customers would have required your product or services and were not able to search for you. Invest in display campaigns that retarget the customers who have engaged with your brand. You will ultimately bring the cost of acquisition low for this one. There are many retargeting methods available on Facebook. There is an option to create custom audience which enables you to create audience who have engaged with your page.
3)SEO
The long term goal of a digital campaign is to boost organic growth on your online platforms. This way you will pay less and less for a advertisement campaigns while banking on your organic customers. The SEO checklist is a pretty long list. To summarize, you have to initiate the work with keyword research, finding the best keywords to be used to enable others to find you on search engines. Upon that, start building up links to your website from various sources. Map the ways people can locate you from other blogs, websites, social network using the keywords
4)TARGET AUDIENCE ANALYSIS
I have elaborated about conducting a segmentation of you audience in earlier articles. I am repeating this point because this is a factor that influences cost of acquisition. Try to group the audience into three group. Group 1 will consist of customers who wants your services immediately, Group 2 consist of customers who wants your services but unsure on where to find you and the final group consist of customers who don't need your service at the moment but will need it in future. Customize your ad according to the audience by first concentrating on paid ad for Group 1.
5) Distribute your advertising cost
Do you ever wonder why sometimes your ad just does not bring any new customers? Thats probably due to an ineffective campaign . The performance of your advertisement can only be measured after it has run for a period of time. Hence, try different ads with same keywords to measure the effectiveness of each ad and finally decide on the best one.