In the first four parts of this series, we've talked a lot about how to bring in new direct customers. These are people who heard about your business either through your marketing campaigns, or through some other kind of exposure, perhaps on your social media accounts or elsewhere on the internet. This method of acquiring customers can be quite labor-intensive, not to mention expensive, and when you factor in attrition, sometimes businesses find that they're lucky if they get any growth at all past a modest user base.
Now that we've covered the three As of the Pirate Funnel - awareness, acquisition, and activation - it's time to move forward to the R steps. This half of the funnel is where visitors turn to paying customers, and where that customer base grows to the point where your business can thrive. The first of these steps, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, is retention.
Parts 1 and 2 of this series on growth hacking were all about the process of bringing customers into your sphere of awareness, and acquiring them in the sense of getting them to engage with you on an informational level. Once those steps are complete, it's time to progress to the crucial turning point of activation.
Last time, in part 1 of this series on growth hacking, we talked about awareness, the initial step in the AAARRR funnel (also known as the Pirate Funnel). This time, we're moving on beyond the point of awareness to when you have your first transaction with a customer. This is referred to as acquisition.
As a business owner or startup founder, you know firsthand how important it is to grow a loyal and active customer base. The pressure to go from zero to self-sustaining is enormous, especially if you're a small enterprise starting with a modest marketing budget. Fast growth is the buoy that will keep your business afloat, and amassing that critical customer base is what growth hacking (or growth marketing) is all about.
It's no secret that where modern marketing is concerned, digital is where it's at. Over the past twenty years or so, companies have slowly shed their traditional marketing tactics in favour of email, web advertising, and more recently, social media.
That said, enough time has passed since the dawn of digital marking that it is no…
It's quickly becoming one of the biggest questions facing small businesses: how much money should you allocate to digital marketing?
It's estimated that by next year, nearly a third of web browsing will be done without a screen, and half of all searches will be conducted by voice. While there's no way to predict if those exact numbers will play out in that precise time frame, the trend is certainly apparent: voice search is becoming more and more a part of our everyday lives.
It's every marketer's dream: having a captive audience who are completely on board and ready to hear what you have to say. It may seem impossible, but with the latest trends in the evolution of social media, marketers now have a chance to create true communities like never before. But how can you move from traditional marketing strategies into this more socially-driven landscape? In order to make the most of this important shift, you need to incorporate these four elements.
The new year is right around the corner, and as usual in the digital marketing world, in order to keep up you have to stay ahead of the curve. With that in mind, here are the marketing trends you need to keep at the forefront of your planning and strategy for next year.
As you start reviewing your marketing results for 2018 and preparing for 2019, one of the questions you want to ask is how you can make the process more efficient in the year ahead. An integrated marketing strategy is one where you consolidate your efforts on every front and create an overall arc, rather than just looking at each aspect of marketing on its own. Here are the four main benefits of this approach:
Last week, we talked about some practical tips on how to start preparing your 2019 marketing strategy. Having goals and taking steps toward them is important, but of course any serious plan is going to require some funds to back it up. So how do you know how much you need to set aside to reach each of your digital marketing goals for next year? Here are some tips on how to portion out your marketing budget.
