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What Is Customer Acquisition?
An informative and helpful article filled with tips and tricks that answers the question: What is customer acquisition?
How does digital customer acquisition work in the connected TV space? Learn how to maximize your customer acquisition strategies for CTV.
How to use CTV data and techniques to acquire customers and grow your business
Large or small, businesses need customers to drive profits and move product. Customer acquisition is how to bring those customers in the door, and advertising plays a huge part in that process.
Customer acquisition is the process of converting potential customers, or leads, into paying customers. There are a variety of ways to achieve this conversion, but advertising has traditionally played a large part.
Unfortunately, traditional advertising platforms are showing diminishing returns. Magazine and newspaper advertising are down 40.5% and 52%, respectively, over the past two decades, and linear TV advertising, once the gold standard for advertising ad spend, is also on the decline. The total linear TV ad spend is projected to decline from $61.31 billion in 2023 to $56.83 billion in 2027. Meanwhile, over that same period, the CTV ad spend will increase from $25.09 billion to $40.90 billion.
The lesson: Digital is the new gold standard, and CTV, in particular, is where the customers are. The qualities inherent in the platform can work in your favor to help improve your odds of acquiring quality customers. With that in mind, let’s explore why CTV is a particularly potent channel for digital customer acquisition.
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Digital Customer Acquisition Channels
Why CTV Drives Customer Acquisition
Discover strategies, metrics, examples and more with Customer Acquisition: A Practical Guide.
Digital Customer Acquisition Channels
There are a growing number of channels for digital customer acquisition. Here are a few to consider making a part of your digital customer acquisition strategy.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is content published by you on your own blog, or at other outlets that highlights. Some businesses write about themselves or their own experiences as a company. Others write about their or their expertise in their industries. Content marketing can be about anything, really, so long as it is authoritative and genuine.
One of the key components of acquiring customers is building brand authority and trust. Content marketing plays into that perfectly, building your brand’s authority as an expert in the field you are writing content about. It can also, if your content is genuine, build consumer trust in your brand.
You will want to be sure to include clear and specific calls to action (CTAs) in your content. This will help drive potential customers to the action you would like them to take, whether that’s downloading a demo, signing up for a newsletter, or contacting your sales team.
Social Media Advertising
Social media has become an important part of digital customer acquisition in recent years, but it is not without its challenges. Brands are expected to be more transparent on social media than on other channels, and the very nature of social media means customers will have direct access to your team. This can be both a positive and a negative.
To succeed on social media, it’s recommended that you research the proper trends and tone for each platform, as each has its own unique quirks. What works on a platform like LinkedIn might not work on Facebook, for example.
It is also worth remembering that it takes time to build a social media following. While it may seem like broadcasting into a void at first, over time, consumers will come to recognize your brand’s presence and become more comfortable engaging with your social media ads or posts.
Email Campaigns
With approximately 4 billion daily email users, email remains an effective means of reaching potential customers, but with a typically high signal-to-noise ratio, it helps to have a targeted email list. According to MailChimp, advertising emails achieve a roughly 23% open rate and a click-through rate (CTR) of just under 3%.
This means that between a quarter and a third of people who receive a marketing email will open it, and only 3% of those will click through to your website. This puts a high priority on emails that are clear, succinct, and have a direct CTA. Compelling subject lines that engage curiosity and directly appeal to your target’s interests will also help achieve a higher open rate.
The more people who open your email, the more who will click through, and the greater your conversions will be.
Influencers
Influencers are a huge and growing digital customer acquisition channel. This is because about 69% of consumers report that they trust influencers, family, and friends more than they trust brands. Like it or not, your message coming from an influencer will gain more traction than it will when coming from you.
The challenge when dealing with influencers is to select those who share your brand’s values. Not every influencer will be a good fit for your brand, no matter how popular they are. Remember, for almost 70% of consumers, the influencer is the trusted ambassador for your brand. You want to make sure they’re a good fit.
You can also help influencers achieve conversions by offering influencer-specific discounts and offering the influencer free or discounted samples of your product. The benefits of receiving a positive review from a popular influencer will easily outweigh the cost.
CTV
Connected TV (CTV) is another big and growing channel for digital customer acquisition. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s 2023 survey, the projected ad spend for CTV has increased by 14.4%, more than double the industry rate, meaning more brands are spending more money in the CTV space. And it’s no wonder why: CTV ads work.
As of 2022, 92% of U.S. households are reachable via CTV ads, and a whopping 82% of DTC shoppers report taking action after seeing a CTV or OTT ad. Why? Because more people own CTV-compatible televisions or streaming devices and OTT is becoming an entertainment mainstay for many viewers. Market penetration of OTT content is expected to hit 85% in 2023 and 90% by 2027.
This means CTV ads absolutely must be a part of your customer acquisition strategy. But why does CTV drive digital customer acquisition?
Why CTV Drives Digital Customer Acquisition
Customer acquisition on CTV includes many of the same steps as in traditional or linear advertising. You will still need to create ads that speak to your audience and appeal to their needs. But with CTV, as opposed to linear TV, you are able to directly target audiences who may be more favorable to your brand to begin with. CTV also trumps many other digital customer acquisition channels because of the data you receive back.
For information about how to acquire customers using CTV, read our report: How CTV Advertising Powers the Performance TV Revolution.
Measurement
The major benefit of CTV over other digital customer acquisition channels is data. With CTV advertising, you are able to generate granular data metrics, so you know precisely how effective your campaign has been, how many people you’ve reached, and what specific campaigns have been more effective than others.
With CTV ads, you can get precise data on who is watching your ad, what portion of your potential audience they represent, how much of the ad they’ve watched, and your brand’s overall reach. And because CTV audiences are already connected to the content they’ve chosen, you can target audiences who are already interested in brands or properties similar to yours.
Segmentation
With accurate demographic data, it’s possible to create distinct audience segments and target those segments with specific ads aimed at their interests. This can greatly enhance the impact of your marketing and introduce precise, actionable leads that will drive conversion.
In the past, using linear TV, advertisers simply aimed their ads at popular programs and hoped that their customers would be there. With CTV, you now have advanced audience metrics and demographics, so you can specifically target segments of the audience with ads customized to their interests. You know exactly what your audience segments are watching and when, and can target ads specific to that data.
Attribution
Attribution is the process of measuring the impact of a CTV ad on consumer behavior. This gives you actionable insights into how your ad is influencing the customer and whether or not you’re successfully converting them.
One of the benefits of CTV advertising is that audiences tend to be more receptive. They are more relaxed and willing to consume advertising to offset the cost of the content they are consuming. In 2022, 48% of audience time spent watching CTV was on ad-supported apps, up 55% from the end of 2020.
This means, unlike with other digital acquisition channels, almost half of the CTV audience actually favors seeing ads. If these receptive audience members see the right ad, they will be even more likely to convert.
Incrementality
CTV also allows for a form of A/B testing called incrementality. Incrementality allows CTV advertisers to test the performance of their ads against other marketing channels. You are effectively creating a blind study, with your CTV ad on one side and an ad on another channel on the other.
This allows for a much more precise measurement of the effectiveness of your CTV ads because it gives you an idea of customer behavior on other channels, how your CTV ads compare to ads on those channels, and which channel is driving the customer behavior you want to see.
Incrementality testing will reveal to you when you might want to increase your investment in CTV advertising, or when your other channels might be performing better. This allows you to refine your CTV approach, and drill down to what actually works to drive conversions.
How tvScientific can help
Customer acquisition doesn’t have to be complicated. With tvScientific’s sophisticated CTV advertising platform, precise audience segmentation, and real-time performance measurements, you can be on your way to reaching your audience quickly and growing your business exponentially. Get in touch today to learn more.