Commentary

Brand Insider Attendees Name Their Biggest Challenges Facing Acquisition

by Nina Lentini , Staff Writer @Nina_Lentini, July 29, 2020

Before every MediaPost summit, Steve Smith, editorial director of events, surveys his audience on issues of the day. He shares the results in a set of slides, which you can view below.

One of the questions he asked of attendees at our Brand Insider Summit D2C, taking place July 28 - 29, elicited answers about media uncertainty as well as conversion and retention of customers.

“What is the biggest challenge facing acquisition?” he asked. Here is a selection of concerns about media uncertainty:

Deciding whether to include upper-funnel strategy to a program increasingly growing with continued efficiency.

The media mix shifting and the market pricing reacting real time. We had to shift out of a lot of radio and satellite due to commutes evaporating. The challenge is that performance in a channel or segment of a channel shifts overnight. We are having to be even more agile than normal.

Maintaining the efficiency and lower CPAs. Trying to scale that for the rest of the year is hard with the uncertainty of COVID-19.

Unpredictability in the next few months, especially coming into Q4. We’re also very concentrated on Facebook and Google at the moment and planning to be back on other channels like OTT, podcast, YouTube.

Consistency of efficiency.

We also live in this moment of not knowing if positive performance is a steady state or if macro-environmental things like BLM, protests, lockdowns and more will change things yet again.

And here is a selection of concerns about conversion and retention of new customers:

I would say making sure that we are not leaning too heavily into discounting.

Because we lowered the customer cost to entry in order to acquire, the challenge now is to turn this new acquisitions into return customers with good AOVs.