Jeremy Fain is the CEO and Co-Founder of Cognitiv, the first neural network technology available for marketers.
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Many companies spend millions, if not billions, of dollars on research and development, attempting to create the most sophisticated, best version of their products. Yet a lot of those same companies allow their marketers to rely on generic tools and intelligence to carry out their campaigns — despite the fact that, without effective marketing, those expensive products will go nowhere. Proper marketing requires the proper tools. And without the right technology in place, brands have no hope of gaining customers in a competitive marketplace.
Good marketing should do two things: It should convince people who are not existing customers to come into the fold, and it should encourage current customers to stay loyal. Both customer acquisition and customer retention are key parts of any competent marketing strategy, but at the moment, marketers seem to be struggling to do both effectively.
According to a 2021 Gartner survey, almost a third of marketers (29%) reported falling short on new customer acquisition or customer retention goals. This demonstrates not only how difficult it is to acquire and retain customers, but also the need for innovative strategies that will enable marketers to maximize the utility they receive from their budgets. In fact, Gartner’s survey also revealed that for marketers, four out of their top five digital marketing aims “relate directly to the goal of new customer acquisition,” a consequence of the decision that many brands made during the pandemic to focus on their existing consumer base.
For many marketers, the budget cuts necessitated by the pandemic forced them to choose between customer retention or customer acquisition. And with customer acquisition costing up to seven times as much as retention, it is not hard to see which choice marketers opted for. Yet the reason that customer acquisition is so expensive currently is because marketers on the whole are relying on antiquated tactics — tactics that fail to take into account the complexity of the customer journey. Marketers need to optimize campaigns in real-time based on customer behavior and preferences.
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There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach to marketing, and this is especially true when it comes to customer acquisition. Each customer has a slightly different path to purchase, which means that companies need to tailor their outreach strategy to the values and habits of each individual. Without technology’s helping hand, this process can be extremely arduous and incredibly inefficient, leading to lost revenue and missed opportunities to convert people who are otherwise ripe for the picking.
For multiple reasons, deep learning is one such tool that is especially well-equipped to help marketers gain the competitive edge necessary to succeed at modern customer acquisition. First, it can examine data related to the behavior and traits of your customer base and identify others in the general population who share those same behaviors or traits (and are consequently ideal targets for acquisition). Second, it can quickly use those insights to automatically optimize campaigns in near real-time, thus maximizing the impact of your media buys. Third, each outcome, regardless of its success, is fed back into the deep learning algorithm as a new data point, thus allowing it to learn from its mistakes and become more effective over time. Finally, deep learning can focus on incrementality — customers who were converted as a result of your advertising — while avoiding needless advertising to your existing customers.
As marketers make their way back into the customer acquisition game, they have to be aware that the competition is fierce. People’s attention spans are limited, and there are so many additional customer touchpoints that brands have to navigate — from review sites to social media to CTV and beyond. All marketers are also ramping up ad spend at the same time, driving media costs up in all the popular digital places like Facebook and Instagram. Being able to lean on technology, especially sophisticated technology such as deep learning, is an incredibly valuable advantage because it enables marketers to take out the guesswork and focus on the areas — and people — who will produce results.
The best way for marketers to stay ahead of the curve is to find the technological tools that will enable them to do their job better and faster while maximizing the resources they have available to them. Even if you don’t have millions of dollars to spend on advertising, there are still ways to optimize so as to take advantage of the information and budget that you do have — mostly by investing in technology that will be able to provide value in the long-term.
Effective marketing requires foresight: the ability to see where the market is going and what customers want before they know they want it. However, relying solely on intuition is a dangerous and, most likely, wasteful prospect. After all, how many marketers could have predicted the pandemic and its effect on their businesses?
For marketers to truly succeed, they need to have access to a system like deep learning that will not only draw their attention to trends in the making but also give them a roadmap for surviving (and thriving in) difficult situations.
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Author: Jeremy Fain, Forbes Councils Member
