Know Your Customer! Step Three: Customer Acquisition
We’ve discussed how to find your target audience, and how to pick the right channels to reach them. That brings us to the third and final part of this series—how to use all of this knowledge about your potential customer in order to convert them into an actual customer.
The key thing to remember with user acquisition is that you want to move people from anonymous to known. With a structured content and channel approach you can guide them through this transition—being in the right place, with the right message, at the right time to win them over.
Read on to learn more about that all-important stage in the process—making the sale.
Remember the Journey
We talked a lot about the overall customer journey in the last post in this series, and about how to use your knowledge of the customer to pick the right channels. Now that you know which channels they use, it’s time to think about how to get onto those channels. It’s especially important for you to be strategic about how you’re responding to your customers’ needs. As they move along the journey, how will you respond? Let’s say you paid for search-engine marketing, and they clicked through. What now? What’s the next thing you want to communicate with them? How will you help move them along the funnel? Remember to think back to your persona, and consider their wants and actions.
If You Create a Buzz, They Will Come
Beyond building a great app, what else can you do to encourage conversion? You can create content to support your game or app, and you can make sure you have a presence in the places where your customers are spending time. There are several approaches worth considering, depending on how much money and time you have. Look for things you can do for free, be strategic about using limited resources, and also look into partnerships with trusted names to get even more traction and attention.
Spend Time, Not Money
No matter your budget, free is always a good sell. In this case, it also makes good business sense—the efforts that don’t cost money also tend to be the ones that people trust the most, making your message or content hold a lot more weight.
- Content Creation. Publish your own content. This includes anything you can create yourself, including blog posts and images. Think about shareable content such as GIFs and infographics.
- Testimonials. Get established bloggers or influencers to feature your product or write a review. Think about who you know …
- Scarcity. Create a sense of scarcity as you launch or roll out features. The more limited the content or downloads feel, the more people will be interested.
- Gamification. To build momentum, incentivize participation, such as encouraging users to post on social media or invite their friends to play.
- Social. Create a social presence, and make sure you're sharing all of the above content. Join existing communities and get involved in the conversation. Again, credibility is key, and one of the most powerful tools you can have is word-of-mouth. The more your customers share, the more opportunities for new customers to find you.
Make A Big Splash with a Little Coin
Not everything in life is free, of course. When you do need to spend money in order to acquire new customers, be smart about where you choose to focus your efforts.
- Content Creation. With a small budget, you can create even more content, like trailers for YouTube, gaming sites and video channels. Depending on your product—and your target customers—these can be really crucial in gaining users.
- Social media advertising. With effective targeting, and a message that’s crafted for your audience, these ads don’t have to cost a lot and can have a lot of impact.
Friends in High Places
One of the most powerful tools in your arsenal may be partnerships. Joining forces with a bigger business can be a great way to get access to more resources than you’d have otherwise and reach a wider audience. By joining forces with a bigger corporation, like Intel, you can collaborate on promotions to increase visibility and traffic, and you can also access their creative teams to create new assets. Take a look at our case study with Canadian independent gaming studio Torn Banner to learn more about their partnership with Intel and how that's worked for them.
Putting it All Together
Not all of these marketing efforts are necessary for every product. You may be partial to videos, but if your audience isn’t, or your interface is extremely simple, a video may not be worth your time or budget.
Return to the customer journey tool you created earlier. What actions can you take to make sure your message gets in front of your customer at each step of his or her particular journey? Take some time to identify a specific marketing effort you can take for each customer action you identified.
For instance, we determined that our fish lover, John, values expert opinions on new products. To capture his attention, we’ll want to make sure the experts he trusts are talking about our app. We can reach out to bloggers in the tropical fish community and ask them to try out our product and write a review. When John reads the review, he moves forward in the customer journey. We might also use our small budget to create a professional demo video for the app store, ensuring that John will get to see it action—making him more likely to download it after he goes searching for more information. Knowing your customer allows you to make a plan you can follow—with an understanding of your customer's likely behavior, you have a much better idea of how they act, where you can find them, and how you can appeal to them.
Always Be Optimizing!
It’s important to tag everything you’re doing, so you can understand which efforts are working best and what isn’t worth your time. Essentially, if you can’t measure it, you shouldn’t do it. As you have more actual customers, and more sales, continue to pay attention to the ROI of various efforts, so you can continue to fine tune and make sure you’re spending the bulk or your time and money in the places that yield the best results.
Have you seen a free marketing effort that knocked your socks off? Tell us in the comments!