Whether your focus is increasing sales or new customer acquisition, lowering your cost per acquisition (CPA) is key to long term success. In fact, in a recent survey, one in five senior marketing officers said that lowering their CPA was one of their top priorities. It just makes sense: each marketing department is working with a finite budget.
The lower your CPA, the harder your budget can work for you. If you are not sure where to start, begin with these three strategies.
Manage Your Media Better
The single highest line item in most marketing budgets is media investment so the most important thing that you can do to improve your CPA is to manage how you plan and buy your media.
For example there are several tools you can use to help find where your ideal prospect spends their time online. You may also want to review your closest and most successful competitors to see where and how they are investing in media. Let’s face it, you need to find the media channels your prospects are using if you want any chance of connecting with them. I know this sounds basic but this is a surprisingly common challenge. Only one in seven professionals say that they are able to identify their audience members extremely well.
The marketers who understand their audience best do not rely solely on their own observations.
Some may use first and third party data to get a better grasp on who is likely to do business with them. In fact, sixty percent of marketers said they use third-party data for research.
It is vital to understand when your audience is in-market. Nothing works better than putting ads directly in front of interested consumers who are actively looking for products or services like yours because you are reaching them at the point when they are most likely to convert. Between a better understanding of who your prospects are and a better understanding of where they are in the decision-making process, you can make every media placement more effective.
Pay Closer Attention to Your Creative
No matter how much the media landscape changes creative is still king. It’s not enough to be in the right place at the right time. You also need to grab your audience’s attention. People don’t want to be marketed to, they want to be entertained. And if you’re speaking to them during their leisure time, you’d better make it worth their while.
How can you tell what works? Testing. Try out different messages. Try different offers. Observe the effectiveness of design changes such as ad size, color and creative format. By A/B testing one factor after another, you will soon build a more clear picture as to what creative style and messaging works best.
Be Ready to Convert Traffic
We’ve known for years that a bad in-bound call center can absolutely kill valuable prospects and lose conversions. They can ruin a prospect’s potential of ever returning to your business. To increase conversions today, it’s all about having a great user experience online (and offline). When marketers don’t meet audiences where they are and proceed with an order in that environment, they lose conversions.
For example, we like to drive all our direct response ads to a dedicated landing page. The landing page should be well-designed. The content should be related to the ad or promotion that sent the prospect there in the first place, and the call to action needs to be clear. Above all, make sure that every ad and page are mobile-friendly. More and more traffic is originating from a mobile device so it’s important your brand is ready to interact with potential and existing customers.
Summing Up
Not every campaign is about driving a direct sale. But when your goal is lead generation and new customer acquisition, it’s important to get the assistance of someone who understands the process from beginning to end. TEC Direct Media staffers have the skill, experience and expertise to help. Helping identify and locate your in-market target audience through proper media planning, paying closer attention to creative and messaging, measuring results and optimizing campaigns to meet your specific KPIs all help lower your CPA.
Check out this case study to learn how we helped our University client learn more about their core audience and acquisition costs. Ready to talk? Shoot us an email so we can drive down your customer acquisition cost and make your marketing dollars work harder for you.
