Useful Tips and Tools on Customer Acquisition
On June 27th, Dan Marques’07, senior online marketing manager at Reebok, visited the Summer Venture Program to share his tips on using useful online tools on customer acquisition. Marques pointed out that marketing fundamentals we learned in class actually apply to real situations. Marques emphasized the importance of finding your niche market.
Marques provided some tools that will help finding the right niche:
– Google Keyword Planner: This tool helps you measure the frequency of people searching for certain keywords.
– Google Trends: This tool shows trends over time for topics you are interested in.
– Facebook Advertising Audience(Help site for creating Facebook custom audience): This tool shows how many people are interested in certain keywords
– Google Alerts: This tool updates the latest relevant Google results on search query by email.
Marques suggested using different strategies in reaching certain target milestones. In getting to the first 10 customers, Marques suggested setting the goal of making manual interactions and operations with customers to better learn about them. Marques suggested reaching out to friends, family, alumni, writing posts on internet, cold calling, sending emails, and networking at events.
In getting to 100 customers, Marques suggested trying experiments by using quick and cheap ways of marketing to generate and capture the demand. Marques pointed out that studying strategy of successful competitors and analogs are really helpful. Marques suggested using Mixergy (tool to find tips for startups by proven entrepreneurs), Compete (tool to monitor online competition and benchmark performance), and Spyfu (tool to find marketing formula of successful competitors).
In getting to 1,000 customers, Marques suggested narrowing down to one or two really important channel by analyzing how the channels helped on gathering customers.
Marques emphasized to only outsource things that are really challenging because knowledge is easier to obtain than you actually think. Figure out what information you really need and see which tool is right for you and your venture.