Population in the world is currently (2018) growing at a rate of around 1.09% per year (down from 1.12% in 2017 and 1.14% in 2016). The current average population increase is estimated at 83 million people per year. This simply means that an estimated 83 million consumers will be added to the 7.62 billion world population as at mid-2018.
The lifeline of any business is the consumer because it’s only when your products or services are purchased that you may be talking about profit and ROI. Your focus as a founder/CEO as you are going into 2019 and beyond should, therefore, be on the acquisition of customers and more customers.
Targeting only 0.1% of the estimated 7.7 billion in 2019 will give you 7.7 million consumers. This will make very good progress for your business given that Amazon, one of the leading online retail platforms worldwide as of the first quarter of 2016, had 310 million active customers.
This, however, is not something you can do out of the blues. It requires articulation, strategic approach, and adequate planning, especially now that the modern day consumer has become technologically savvy and advanced, with it becoming more apparent that the consumer wants a quality product.
In order to make 2019 a year of consumers and more consumers for your brand, you need to toe the following lines.
1. Integrate data science
Data science is the latest news in town and if you are not yet caught up, you are possibly obsolete. You can’t afford to continue trying to attract customers only by taking out full-page advertisements in magazines, plastering the town with bright billboards, and even signing up glamorous celebrities for television commercials.
Marketing these days has moved to another level and brands are overly becoming more effective, extracting value from data by automating and optimizing processes or producing actionable insights. Forbes reports that 91 percent of senior marketers indicated that information gathered on the customer was essential to making decisions.
Data is growing faster than ever before and by the year 2020, about 1.7 megabytes of new information will be created every second for every human being on the planet. But according to a report, less than 0.5 percent of all data is analyzed and used.
You must gather demographic and psychographic information about your consumers which will enable you to find out what they have in common and where they differ. This will place you in good stead to reach out to the right audiences and minimize wastages.
By availing yourself of the unlimited, vast amount, and variety of information, you will be able to train models more effectively and recommend the product to your customers with more precision.
Data science insights are connected to and revolutionizing marketing results. The earlier you integrate data science into customer acquisition, the better.
2. Marketing campaigns
You need to initiate well structured, focused, purposeful, targeted, and content-filled marketing campaigns. You can’t just do it because others are doing it.
It will sound outlandish to assume you have not heard about influencer marketing, what you may not be abreast of is why you should “poke your nose” into it. The fact, however, is that leveraging on an influencer is to be able to create a real authentic or custom content campaign.
According to a report by AdWeek, 94 percent of marketers who use influencers say that the method is highly effective. This may be in increased brand awareness or improved customer engagement. Also, a study carried out by Ogilvy and Google, says that 74 percent of consumers were turned in by word-of-mouth recommendations through influencers.
Experiential marketing which is driven towards three fundamental goals: driving consumer action, increasing sales, and fortifying brand loyalty, is a surefire way of acquiring consumers. According to Nature Torch, the Nielsen’s report which says that 92 percent of consumers seek recommendations from friends and family while only 33 percent trust ads when considering a purchase should be a blueprint for any brand to leverage on and work out strategies on how to embark on marketing campaigns.
The U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics prediction that conferences and events will jump by 44 percent from 2010 to 2020 is a factor to take into consideration while targeting consumers. The Freeman Global Brand Experience Study also reports that 1 in 3 CMOs expects to allocate 21-50 percent of their budget to the brand experience.
3. Quality product
Your product has the ability to attract consumers if it’s of good quality. This you can ensure by going all out to attain the required standards.
A report has it that with no marketing budget, zero connections, and a blog that was only a month old, Robbie Richards, grew his traffic to 272 percent in 30 days by creating quality content. According to Harvard Business Review, some 96.7 percent of 3,000 customers L.L. Bean surveyed said that quality is the attribute they like most about the company.
A combination of quality assurance practice which is the process of verifying whether a product meets the required specifications and customer expectations, as a process-driven approach that facilitates and defines goals regarding product design, development, and production and quality control which is overwhelmingly enmeshed in ensuring that the product is of sterling and impeccable quality, will yield the expected result.
This combination may prove to be financial involving but the end will justify the means. By the time your consumers become your voice as a result of the amazing quality of your product, 2019 will translate into consumers and more consumers.
No matter how you go about targeting customers, it’s absolutely necessary that you remember that we may live in the age of value—but the price is still king. Don’t drive them away with the price. Window shopping does not translate to money in the bank.
Photo Credit: Produce Marketing Association Flickr via Compfight cc
