Comment Central

Rob Pierre, Managing Director, Jellyfish

Regardless of the techniques used to entice customers, a standard acquisition strategy generally has the potential to deliver prospects of both high and low value.  On the positive side, prospects who are converted into active customers may prove themselves to be worthwhile targets because of the revenue they generate in the short and long term.  On the flipside, other new customers may not allow such a fruitful relationship; they may take advantage of an introductory offer or only make a single purchase, costing more to acquire than the brand can ever hope to secure a return from.  And of course, yet more customers will fall somewhere between these two extremes.

New customers delivered through investment in search marketing – both SEO and PPC – can deliver both types of customers.  However, PPC, in its prime role at the entrance to the sales funnel, can be used in a much more tactical way, in order to encourage the acquisition of consistently higher-value customers.

Firstly let’s consider how PPC works.  A good PPC agency will be constantly improving and enhancing the search terms associated with a brand campaign, to capitalise on those terms which are delivering the greatest responses.  By adding another layer of insight to this process – namely identifying which search terms deliver higher-value customers - the campaign can then begin to evolve to appeal to a larger majority of these prospects.

It sounds simple, but there is the obvious requirement of developing a more detailed understanding of customer value, in order to clearly recognise and group new customers, and utilise this information within PPC activity.  Value isn’t an exact science, and can be more about examining the potential a new customer can deliver to the brand, as well as considering other factors like risk and attrition.  The brand may need to develop a communications strategy to successfully unlock value over the long term, based on customer insight and its own product and service portfolio.  But if an accurate enough gauge can be created at the point of acquisition, the PPC campaign can develop to reflect the need to attract certain customer groups over others.

The brand will obviously benefit from the improvement in quality of new customers it acquires, and the PPC agency can use this in combination with other methods of campaign enhancement to improve its own performance; especially important if it’s working on a cost per acquisition model.  If the average value of new customers increases, it can even lobby to increase the acquisition fee to reflect this.

Brands should investigate the opportunity to use PPC in a strategic and considered way.  In doing so they can improve the quality of customers entering the sales cycle while simultaneously maximising their search marketing investment.