What’s the biggest obstacle Aussie marketers face? Ask anyone who has lived overseas and they’ll probably say it’s the size of the market. Our 23 million people is a third of Britain and just 7% of the US.
That places a real challenge on businesses here. You can’t keep going after new customers, because there’s not an endless supply on tap. You also can’t burn your customers. If they have a bad experience, they’re gone and word gets around.
Think of the companies that set-up here and failed: Ansett, ABC Learning, One.Tel, HIH Insurance. Even Starbucks, an icon in the US, failed to make a mark and was forced to sell-off its outlets.
When the market is small you have to work harder to make sure you are offering exactly what the customer wants. In America, losing a bunch of customers isn’t the end of the world. There are 320 million consumers to go after. Here, though, it can be the death knell.
That’s why Australia stands to gain most from the new era of marketing. Marketing that seeks to build a bond that drives sales, improves yield and increase lifetime value.
Yet, research from The Economist Intelligence Unit, commissioned by Marketo, indicates that we’re perhaps a little slow on the uptake.
When asked the primary measure of marketing at their organisation, one in five respondents in Australia and New Zealand said it was customer acquisition. Outside our region respondents were far more likely to say it was the revenue impact. A smarter answer, surely. It’s the answer we should be giving – leveraging the most we can from the customers we have. Sadly, that’s not the way many see it.
Marketing automation and ad-tech have created exciting new ways for marketers to develop a closer bond with their prospects. The old ad-led way of reaching the masses, then accepting a natural attrition rate through the sales cycle, is old school thinking. The focus is now on reducing losses through the customer journey, by tracking behaviour and developing an ongoing conversation during the influential decision-making period.
Fortunately, Aussie marketers understand the need to increase the use of technology in their activities: 85% agree that they will be using it to build customer advocacy and trust in the next few years. That’s actually more than our North America counterparts. It shows we recognise change is happening.
Yet we continue to be hung up on acquisition. It ranked as the top area of investment over the next 12 months, well above the world average. In answer to the question, what will be your biggest challenge, almost half of the Aussie respondents said ‘customer acquisition’, double the rate in the rest of the world.
It’s a particular challenge here because, of course, there aren’t enough customers to acquire. Aussies need to realise the need to focus more on keeping who they’ve got and building up their spending habits. For that, they need to skill-up on the technology that enables them to nurture prospects and maximise value.
Yet only one in eight Aussie marketers expect to increase investment in marketing automation over the next few years. Many more will invest in social, mobile, email marketing, analytics and advertising management. All of these, of course, can be brought together through an effective marketing automation platform.
Perhaps siloed thinking is part of the issue. Once through the learning curve, more marketers will understand just how feasible it is to influence an audience across multiple channels, with real-time behavioural responses. After that, they’ll start to see that their primary focus on acquisition was an expensive irrelevance. Particularly on such a tiny island.