30 Years in any profession doesn’t guarantee that you’re an expert. But it sure does allow plenty of time to make enough mistakes to recognize what works and what doesn’t for developing a new advertising project or campaign. I’ve been so lucky to have a job in ROI-New Customer Acquisition Marketing that allows the performance of my work to be measured and tracked for building true long term success. It makes my work so meaningful to share all we’ve learned and to watch that knowledge translate into real building blocks for our clients and partners.
Here’s White Star Media’s list of 5 Keys behind any successful customer acquisition media campaign:
Create a strong offer: Test several offers over time until we find the control offer. Offers need to show consumer value: use Free Premiums, Free Shipping and proven price points to ensure success. Know the best sized creative to use. Smaller ad sizes work effectively online and in newspapers. Larger sized ads generally work better in consumer magazines. Here’s an example of a successfully finished creative from our client Kansas City Steak Company.
Eliminate Your Financial Risk: Test the lowest minimum circulation/impressions allowed while using as many publications as your budget allows. Use proven channels and work only with experts in ROI based customer acquisition marketing. Use relevant case histories that will take the guess work out of your testing and provide shortcuts to achieving your CPA Goals.
Scale Your Campaign For The Big Rollout: Test the channels that deliver the largest universe and circulation scale across your target demographic. Use a multi-channel approach that can aggressively shift and optimize ad dollars as you move forward.
Reach Across All Channels: Consider developing an integrated rollout plan for your ROI campaign that combines print, digital and social channels with one consistent message, offer and price point. Each channel will drive incremental sales to the others with minimal saturation. Our friends at Moving Targets offer us some key tactics and strategies on how this works best for ROI and Customer Acquisition print and digital media offers.
Use Credible Audience and Tracking Data: Beware the ROI Campaign Killer: Unique impression counts and audience circulation shouldn’t be purchased without an auditing guarantee. Media buyers and analysts often let this slide instead of demanding audited counts as a condition of sale. Digital Media is especially vague on their audience counts while Print Media Magazines are most reliable and use USPS mailing receipts to validate their paid audience. No small coincidence that print media generally maintains a higher level of response per quoted circulation.
Capital Media Solutions has published a basic guide to help prevent fraud with digital media buying.
Please let us know if you think we left anything out or if we can answer any questions you have.
See you next time, Jim Smyth (jim@whitestarmediainc.com)