Understanding that digital is a critical source for brand building and direct marketing, Gigaom Research surveyed 300 U.S. digital marketers to ask how digital is being used to acquire customers. The survey was structured to highlight how they are using digital-marketing tactics across the marketing funnel, spanning awareness, customer acquisition, conversion, and retention. Their results confirms that digital marketing is being used consistently across the entire customer experience.
Key Findings:
- Marketers continue to maximize digital tactics depending on their objectives.
- Marketers said that social media, already well-known as an awareness-building tool, is also particularly useful for customer retention;
- Content marketing continues to be seen as especially useful for awareness and retention; and
- Email is consistently used across the entire marketing funnel.
The survey analysis revealed other key findings, including:
- Nearly 60% of companies plan to increase their digital-marketing spend in 2014.
- Email marketing is the digital workhorse, deemed the most effective (relative to other digital tactics) for building awareness, acquisition, retention, and conversion.
- In fact, 56% of respondents identified email as being the most effective at retention, several points ahead of the second-most-effective tactic.
- Social spending is set to increase, but they discern some buying on faith with social.
- More marketers plan to spend more on social media marketing than any other digital tactic.
- But when asked to describe their perceptions of social media marketing, more marketers agreed with the statement “It is difficult to prove ROI for social media marketing” than with any other statement.
- More marketers plan to spend more on social media marketing than any other digital tactic.
- Referral marketing, otherwise known as word of mouth, or in many cases referencing on-line through customer loyalty programs is a digital-marketing dark horse.
- Only 39% of marketers use it regularly,
- However, 43% of those who do use it acquire more than 35% of their new customers with it.
- This is double the percentage of marketers who report such acquisition rates using email.
- Brands that invest in referral can gain a competitive advantage over those investing elsewhere.
- Our take is a coordinated digital/email/loyalty program strategy will reap significant rewards.
- Marketers of course said it a bit differently than us:
- Acquiring customers in the digital era is like creating a mosaic: To achieve a beautiful outcome, companies need to find the right blend of tactics. Brands should consider using referral marketing to complement lists created for email campaigns. Marketers must experiment with blending forms of paid, earned, and owned media to acquire customers.
- Marketers of course said it a bit differently than us:
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