Customer acquisition. Performance marketing. Lead generation.
Whatever you call it, getting new customers is hard. Getting good customers with a reasonable cost per acquisition is even harder.
There are hundreds of marketing channels for customer acquisition, including advertising, events, direct mail, online marketing, and PR. In the online space alone, there are search, SEO, display, affiliates, social media, and mobile marketing, not to mention your website itself.
None of these performance marketing channels will work for you without the right combination of targeting, messaging, and creative. Some won’t ever work for you profitably.
So where do you start? How do you test each acquisition channel quickly, at low cost? How do you scale once you’ve found a good channel?
How I do acquisition marketing
I have hands-on experience with most forms of online marketing. Whether it’s B2B or B2C, I know which channels to start with, and how to test quickly and thoroughly.
I should point out that all customer acquisition requires testing, and lots of it. You need to test channels, targeting, messages, ads, and conversion paths. And you need to do it step by step, in a controlled, scientific fashion.
I don’t pretend to know everything.* But I do promise this: I’ll spend your money like it’s my own — and I’m notoriously cheap. I’ll give everything a reasonable chance to prove itself, but if something doesn’t work, I’ll cut it off. If it works well, I’ll grow it as long as it’s profitable.
Does my approach work? Well, at Zecco I brought cost per acquisition down 75%. Contact me and let’s see if we can do the same for you.
* OK, sometimes I do. Here are the acquisition marketing channels with which I have worked:
- Search engine marketing and PPC
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Paid social media marketing
- Display advertising
- Content marketing
- Affiliate marketing
- Referral programs
- Email marketing
- Web and e-commerce sites
- CRM
- Marketing & lifecycle automation
- Print advertising
- Direct mail
- Radio advertising
- Public relations
My Blog Posts on Acquisition Marketing
How to Audit Your Digital Marketing Channels
If you’ve been hired to take over a digital marketing project, your first order of business should be to understand and analyze what came before. Here’s how to conduct a comprehensive digital marketing audit.
How to Measure Marketing Attribution Accurately
Marketing attribution is about asking, out of the many marketing channels you are using and paying for, which marketing channels actually work? Which ones don’t? And are you paying the right amount for the ones that do work? Measuring marketing attribution is one of the biggest challenges for high-scalability performance marketing, and I don’t believe […]
How to Choose Marketing Automation Software (or at least, how we did it)
When I was VP of Marketing at Newfi Lending, we decided we needed a new, proper marketing automation system. The selection process was such an educational experience that I thought it would be worth documenting what we learned, and most importantly, how we chose the right solution for ourselves.
The Future of Search Marketing
Somebody recently asked me, what is the future of paid search marketing? At first, I thought, the simple (and stupid) answer to this question is: The future of search marketing is whatever Google says it is.
Spanish-English Glossary for Digital Marketing
If you do digital marketing in Spanish or many other languages, you quickly realize it’s hard to find good translations for English terms that you use every day.
Is SEO Dead?
Recently somebody asked me, is search engine optimization dead? I asked them, what does that even mean? SEO is only dead when people stop using search engines, and I don’t think that’s happening any time soon. So what do people really mean when they say SEO is dead? I took a look at the “literature” […]
LinkedIn Ads: A Hands-On Review
LinkedIn Ads is LinkedIn’s advertising platform. I’ve been using LinkedIn Ads on live clients since 2013, and since there aren’t many hands-on reviews from actual marketers, I thought I’d contribute one explaining how best to advertise on LinkedIn. What is LinkedIn Ads? LinkedIn Ads is LinkedIn’s proprietary advertising platform. It’s similar to other pay-per-click (PPC) […]
SEO for Local Businesses
A number of my friends have small, local businesses, and I often see them making the same mistakes with their search engine optimization (SEO) — in other words, with making their website findable for search engines. Since SEO is often the cheapest and easiest form of internet marketing you can do, I hereby offer my […]
How to Find the Best SEO Keywords
Finding the best SEO keywords (search engine optimization) requires a good plan, some creativity, and a lot of research. Here’s how to do it.
How to Shave Perfectly, Every Time
This is the best shaving technique I’ve found, with dermatologist-approved recommendations for shaving cream, shaving oil, and moisturizers.
The Pitfalls of Retargeting
Retargeting is an easy way to get the most out of your online marketing, but it can easily corrupt your marketing data if you’re not careful. Here’s how to avoid that.
Why DSP Advertising Doesn’t Work As Advertised
Demand-side platforms (DSPs) were supposed to revolutionize how we buy online advertising, but they have trouble delivering for performance marketers. Here’s why they haven’t lived up to the hype.
Your website is only your customer’s second stop
Your website is not the sum of your online marketing. You must consider where customers actually learn about you, and then where they need to go to make you money.
Stop Using Broad Match on Google Adwords
If you are still using broad match for search engine marketing on Google, you are wasting your money. You can greatly improve your ROI by using phrase match or modified broad match instead, in combination with careful analysis of your actual search query performance. Why is traditional broad match a waste? When I started managing […]
How to turn Google Conversion Optimizer into a better bid management tool
Harried search engine marketers like myself — and especially those who don’t have the money to pay for agencies or bid management software — love using Google’s Conversion Optimizer to manage their bidding. Conversion Optimizer automatically increases or decreases bids to hit a certain target cost per action (CPA), leaving you free to do other […]