Supercharge your brand acquisition strategy
By Nick Fife
High growth brands are always on the lookout for new ways to improve market penetration. This can be achieved by deepening traction for existing product, launching new product, or opening up new market opportunity. Key to success is effectively launching and quickly scaling to sustainable levels. Then, be brave and don’t stand still – keep on moving.
At vvast, we support brands to get into market at pace and then we set an ambitious roadmap for growth. This approach doesn’t suit all brands, but for those with ambition, we’ve got it covered; and crucially, because of the way our model works, we’ll make sure we plan for you to have enough stock to make it happen.
We leverage two primary strategies to fuel growth:
- Automation
- Human input
Paid media (e.g Google and Facebook adverts) is a crucial investment to launch your brand in market. Although paid media incurs a cost at launch, the immediate benefits make this a crucial launch strategy for any brand entering a market; or even building from a wholesale base. It enables you to capture any existing intent in market, immediately engaging with loyal brand customers before expanding into core markets to grow your initial customer base, reaching your target audience where they spend time online. Ultimately saving you time and money while feeding you valuable data to learn more about your audience to factor into future plans, thus fine-tuning acquisition activity.
Typically, entering a new market can take time and it is vital to draw on data to optimise activity based on new market trends and audience insight. While there is still local market tailoring that needs to be managed, a lot of the initial learnings can be provided by internal teams in other markets and this will save valuable resource and speed up growth.
The key is to collaborate with the existing team to ensure any learnings or historical trends are analysed and localised to the EU market to ensure we make the most of our shared expertise. You need acquisition experts to leverage any existing data and insights to further grow the brand in market; but their work is meaningless without the collaboration cross team to share knowledge about our customers and their buying habits.
There is no question that Google and Facebook have made enormous strides in automation to simplify some of the more complicated aspects of their platforms, but it is still key to have human input to ensure that we are tailoring these automated strategies to align correctly with the core growth, profitability, brand awareness, and that we share goals ongoing. An open and honest dialogue is as important as a platform that gives you a clear pane of glass to view your data.
One of the struggles brands have is the level of investment required for an effective market launch. When looking at the management of paid media channels, revenue and investment are KPI’s used to make sure performance spend is effective. However, we have found that to supercharge growth, we need to evaluate acquisition channels in the context of whole site performance. Establishing a budget as a percentage of net revenue has been, in our experience, the most effective way to balance profitability and revenue growth. This has two main benefits,
- it enables the team to look long term and invest in brand growth from the market launch, rather than exclusively focusing on short term sales.
- it moves past typical attribution discussions around what is performing and focuses on the exposure of the brand prioritising its establishment in the market.
This model can then be adjusted months and years into the brands activity in the market giving flexibility around where investment can be distributed depending on business goals
For long term growth, we need to look beyond past performance to upper-funnel activity and presenting the brand to potential customers effectively. Building brand equity is a core component of any acquisition strategy and there are various tactics you can deploy to drive engagement; but also, pitfalls to watch out for to ensure we don’t devalue the brand.
That’s a blog for another day.