Is Meta getting too pricey for you?
How is your CAC doing? If you are anything like the companies we’ve been talking with, we might hazard a guess that the spend to acquire new customers is heading top-right on your graphs. We feel your pain. So here’s 5 other tactics you might want to (re)consider if you’re not seeing the kinds of ROI on your ad spend that you’d like:
Get out and be where your customers are
Freddie’s Flowers, a flower delivery subscription service, was launched in 2014 by Freddie Garland (perfect name, eh?). In the first two years, every single customer was brought in through face-to-face sales. They simply went around houses in London knocking on doors (my door was one of them.) Of course, there was a bit more science to this than randomly walking the streets - they targeted the right areas, had the right people doing the selling, and polished the sales pitch until it sparkled. But once they had these bases covered, they realised they were on to something. Freddie reports, “We had a compelling story and a cracking product, and people were excited to help a small start-up.” Speaking at a recent event, their Head of Sales, Georgia Kerr, was bullish on the need to get in front of your customers, describing the approach as “impactful and authentic.” She recommended trialling it first (low cost and not too onerous), see if it works for your brand and go from there.
Partnerships
We can’t recommend brand partnerships enough for a low-cost, high impact solution. A win-win for you and the brand you partner with. Ask yourself, what product or service do you offer that a potential partner can’t or hasn’t done yet? Might be in your sector, might be in a totally different field. Collaborating with them means they enhance their offering to their customers (driving their own growth and retention) and you reach a new audience (ie your own growth). Only slight downside is that brand partnerships done well takes time to develop (it’s a relationship after all) and get to market. So, if you haven’t dabbled in this space yet, best to get cracking now!
Referral programme
If you have a great product that your customers love, why not set up a referral programme? Disruptor bank Monzo attracted literally millions of new customers this way. Yes, they started out running some Facebook ads to get their first 20,000 customers, but once they had this critical mass and could see these early adopter customers were super-engaged, they flipped their whole strategy to referrals and enjoyed exponential growth as a result. At first they didn’t even feel the need to offer a monetary reward for a referral, instead employing gamification tactics, such as ranking people and giving out different status levels. If your customers are passionate about what you do they’ll naturally want to tell people about it. Referral programmes simply formalise this and provide encouragement.
Affiliates
The healthy food delivery plan Fresh Fitness Food is a great example of achieving growth through developing affiliate relationships. To begin with, they tried many standard marketing tactics and were busy on social and the like, but once they got clear on who their target market was (health conscious, young people who might have a fitness/ weight target and go to the gym regularly) they cut back on spend on those channels and instead developed affiliate offers for successful personal trainers. They realised those trainers will talk to their clients about nutrition, but generally won’t be nutritionists themselves. By promoting FFF these trainers can bring added value to their clients (and make them more successful with their ultimate goals) while earning additional revenue in the process. According to Head of Sales, Gabrielle Doughty, their affiliate channel sales are up 30% yoy.
Customer Community
We talk a lot about the impact empowering your customer base can have on your growth ambitions, so we won’t dwell on it again now. If you happen to have missed our repeated messages around this topic, however, and you want some examples of brands that have enjoyed significant and long-lasting growth take a look at Duolingo (market cap of $9.2Bn), Notion (last fundraise valued at $10bn with no advertising or “standard” marketing. C 30M customers), Figma (Adobe tried to buy if for $20Bn) and many others. Just a couple of examples of community-led growth. You can read more about this topic here (and quite honestly most other posts from us!).
Of course with all of these you need to start with the foundation of a great product and know who your core customer is, but we know you know that already!
This newsletter is brought to you by www.customer-ization.com. We work with B2C brands to activate and empower customer communities to deliver growth, retention and satisfaction. To find out more why not book a call to explore how we can help you harness your customers’ enthusiasm and achieve a step change in your business outcomes. Find out more about the work we do.