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If your goal is to raise awareness for the problems you solve or the solutions you provide, or if you’re just looking to acquire new leads and customers, you need an Acquisition campaign.

The role of your marketing is to help move a prospect, lead, or customer from the awareness stage of the customer journey to brand promoter. You deploy Acquisition campaigns to do the work on the front end of this journey, taking the prospect from Aware to Converted (see Figure 2-1).

FIGURE 2-1: Acquisition campaigns move prospects from the Aware to Converted stages.

The stages of the customer journey that Acquisition campaigns complete are the following:

 Make Aware: To bring in new leads and customers, you need to reach out to what amounts to complete strangers. You should structure Acquisition campaigns to reach prospects who are completely unaware of the problem you solve or the solutions you provide.

 Engage: The movement from Make Aware to Engage is often accomplished by providing value to the prospect, usually in the form of entertainment, inspiration, or educational content, before asking her to buy something or commit a significant amount of time. This is known as content marketing, a strategic marketing method focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent material designed to attract, retain, and ultimately drive a customer to a profitable action. Content marketing consists of a broad spectrum of activities and types of content, including blogging, videos, social media updates, images, and more. We cover content marketing in more detail in Chapter 4.

 Subscribe: At this stage, the prospect has given you permission to market to him. At the very least, he has connected with you on social channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, and others) or, ideally, has become an email subscriber. The Subscribe state is a critical stage to reach in the relationship because you can now continue the conversation with more content and offers.

 Convert: The transformation of a prospect from being merely interested and subscribed to converted is the final stage of an Acquisition campaign. At this point, the prospect has placed trust in your organization by giving you either money or a significant amount of her time. Don’t forget that your marketing should be gradual and seamless, particularly online, where you must often build trust with someone you’ve never actually met. If this final stage of your Acquisition campaign involves a sale, it shouldn’t be a risky (think expensive or complex) purchase. The goal here is to simply transform the relationship from prospect to customer.

Note that Acquisition campaigns are not about profit. Although you might be making sales at the Convert stage, the goal of those sales is not return on investment (ROI) but on acquiring leads and buyers. This idea can seem counterintuitive, but keep in mind that customer and lead acquisition is different from monetization. These two campaign types have different goals, tactics, and metrics.

Most of the campaigns that you create to acquire new leads and customers can also work to activate leads and buyers who have never purchased from you, or haven’t purchased from you in a while. We refer to campaigns like this as Activation campaigns. A healthy business has a large number of recent and, if applicable, frequent buyers. Deploying campaigns to activate dormant subscribers and buyers is a good use of time and effort. We tell you more about the types of offers that can activate these leads and buyers in Chapter 3.