Prospecting
The final question to address is that of the Next customers – the new acquisition. Today, this is the central focus of a marketing department. In the new map, this becomes an important but small program because it is the existing customers who become the key growth drivers. Two ideas can help marketers dramatically slash their adtech spending.
The first idea is referral marketing. The best advocates for a brand are its happy customers. Most existing referral programs tend to focus on getting any and every existing customer to try and attract new ones. This is a mistake. What brands should focus on is constraining referral marketing and offering it only to the Best customers because they are likely to get customers like them who can become tomorrow’s Best customers. Such referrals should be handsomely incentivised because a good referral cuts down the cost of new customer acquisition to zero. Tokens as part of the Atomic Rewards program can be a very good incentive for both the referred customer and the referrer.
The second idea is to create an adtech-martech bridge to ensure much better targeting in new customer acquisition. By analysing data from Best customers and using only this (rather than data from all customers), the acquisition program via the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon can be sharper. ROAS (return on ad spend) should be the metric that should be measured and connected to CLV. Of course, the fundamental premise for this program’s success is the availability of zero- and first-party data. That in turn needs a CDP (as part of Martech 2.0) and incentives for customers to share their preferences. AMPlets in emails can use the footer space to craft a ‘zero-party data’ journey for each customer. The better a brand understands its buyers and the buyer journey, the better the acquisition program can be. Acquisition is where costs need to be controlled because the spends here are open-ended and exponentially increasing. Done right, brands can generate huge savings which can go straight to the bottomline.
Adtech spending thus is at the bottom of the funnel rather than being at the top. This inversion is what will propel brands to profitability. The Adtech era has made marketers lazy – pour money to the Big Tech platforms and watch as new customers steam in. But this has come to a huge cost – because there is little of the budget left for spending on building better relationships with existing customers. Unless this funnel is inverted to maximise spending on existing and especially the Best customers, brands will not be able to escape the pull of continuing cash burn on new acquisition. Referrals done right and the bridging of martech data to drive adtech spending are the two ways to stop the 50% waste.
