How to find new customers and increase sales

Not seeing results from your marketing? 

Don’t have enough information or data on your audience? 

Struggling to find new customers to love your brand? 

If these all sound like familiar concerns, then have we got a blog for you...

Having an effective marketing strategy can help you reach your KPIs, increase your ROI, and generate leads. But often, it’s easier said than done. 

In a world damaged by inflation, where brands are fighting for customers' attention, overcoming these questions can sometimes feel impossible. 

So, we’re here to help you out. In this blog, we’ll unpack your problems and offer solutions, focusing specifically on Pion’s verification and advertising offerings. From the importance of understanding to diving into the data, we’ll guide you through everything you need to know. 

Addressing your pain points: How to acquire new customers and engage your target market

Become fluent in Gen Z

Step one of finding new customers and boosting your sales: understand your audience. 

Different demographics have different desires and expectations, which means you can’t just fire out any old marketing and hope for the best. Customers, whoever they are, want to feel like they’re understood - that a brand aligns with their wants and needs. When these are met, trust and loyalty will soon follow. 

Taking the time to understand your audience’s interests and needs can empower you to create content that resonates with them - after all, each social media platform has its unique content formats and purpose. Understanding how your target audience behaves on each platform means language, imagery, and content can be tailored to maximize engagement.

By fitting into their lives and offering the products or services that make sense to them, potential new customers will pick you over anyone else. 

The best way to find new customers? Adapt to new trends 

Consumer trends are often reflective of the wider world, whether that be social, economic, or technological shifts, and the secret to attracting new customers and increasing sales is being flexible and adaptable. In a world of new social media platforms and AI, those brands that are slow to uptake risk being left behind; Gen Z may be concerned about the future of technology (40% of US Gen Zers say that AI is a threat to their creativity), but they’re adapting quickly, and brands should too.  

Naturally, adaptability goes hand in hand with understanding your audience. Master one, and you’ve almost certainly mastered the other.

Data plays a huge role in being able to adapt to new trends, with statistics providing invaluable insights into consumer behavior. Whether first-party or zero-party, getting down and dirty with the data can be truly transformative when it comes to brand awareness and lead generation. 

And that’s where we come in… 

Target Gen Z with Pion’s advertising 

The world of Gen Z advertising can be a tough one to navigate. We’re living in a world where young people don’t want to be sold to, where they want ads-that-don’t-look-like-ads. Which makes your job, as marketers, increasingly challenging. 

But, in order to connect with young people and tap into their spending, getting your advertising right is crucial. And this comes back to understanding them. 

Understanding your audience online can help you tailor and target campaigns, allocate your budgets, and improve your ROI. It can introduce your brand to new people, and reconnect with old ones. 

At Pion, we offer a range of advertising products to help you engage Gen Z, including on-platform media, email campaigns, influencer marketing, and experiential campaigns. 

But why should this matter to you? 

How can Pion’s advertising help brands reach Gen Z? 

Growth starts with understanding 

Understanding your target audience will allow you to market your product appropriately and help push it down that all-important sales funnel. But, sometimes that’s easier said than done - after all, the world of Gen Z is a mystery. One day, they’re obsessed with tiny pop princess Sabrina Carpenter, the next it’s a tiny Canadian TV puppet called Mona.  It’s chaos out there, folks. 

The good news? We know Gen Z better than anyone else. 

At Pion, we can help you understand your audiences’ buying habits and drivers to ensure your campaign connects. In other words, we can help you take your results to the next level.

Own your Gen Z audience

Data is the key to every marketer’s heart: it can help you build sophisticated custom audiences and drive results across any advertising channel. 

And we’re certainly not short of it at Pion. 

With our unrivaled zero-party data, we can help you dive into the specifics and target the customer base that matters most to you, be that students or Gen Z. 

The right content, at the right time

Buckle in, because we’re here to bring you full-funnel marketing from start to finish.

Combining research, influencers, experiential marketing, and more, we create content that connects with Gen Z, whatever the brief.  

And, you guessed it: connection = sales. 

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Case study: Simply Cake Co 

On a mission to get people eating delicious cake (the best kind of mission), treat delivery company Simply Cake Co wanted the world to know how convenient and affordable their brand was, so partnered up with Pion to increase awareness and engagement among the student demographic. 

With the help of our social extension team, Simply Cake spread awareness of their great offers across Facebook and Instagram. Their main KPI was boosting traffic to their offer page, and with bright imagery and an enticing offer, they successfully reached 163.3K impressions and over 1K clicks. 

Results: 

• 68.4K reach 
• 1.3K clicks 
• 163.3K impressions 

Get ready to go viral 

Ah, going viral. Every social media user’s dream. In the past, the weirdest things have blown up online. Recently,  a video of some chocolate strawberries got 50.7M likes and 460.2M views. Case and point.

But how can you go viral with a generation that’s so… unpredictable? 

Well, it’s a proven fact that Gen Z is most receptive to content produced by people like them: Pion research revealed that 45% of Gen Z are most likely to be influenced by a friend or peer when making a purchase online. The days of huge, international influencers are long gone. Now, young people want to hear from voices they trust and relate to. 

At Pion, we specialize in award-winning peer-to-peer creator marketing. Our Pion Creator campaigns target our Student Beans audience: it’s content created by Gen Z, for Gen Z. 

But don’t just take our word for it; check out one of Pion Creators in action below:

Visit our website for more information. 

Find new customers and increase sales with Pion’s verification 

Verification is the process of checking the status or eligibility of your customer, for example, a student, and when it comes to the world of discounts, we’re the experts. 

For customers, verifying is fast, free, and easy. They can get their hands on discounts quicker than you can say ‘cost-of-living crisis’. 

For brands, verification helps you stay in control by ensuring only verified customers can access your offers (so long, offer leakage). Our conversions vary by market and sector, however our brands typically deliver a 25% conversion state from sessions to code redemptions, plus a 15% conversion rate from code redemption to transactions. Our verification is also available in over 100 countries. 

How can Pion’s verification and data help brands become more fluent in your marketing? 

Convert a billion more potential customers 

Our verification is instant and immediately recognizable. With Beans iD, you can verify a global addressable market of over 1 billion members from highly valuable closed consumer groups, from healthcare workers to students. 

Does it sound too good to be true? Well, it’s not. 

Verification leads to gated discounts, and with gated discounts come loyal customers, not just casual shoppers. 

By activating Pion’s verification offering, brands can effortlessly verify and convert shoppers with offers just for them. You can read more about our Beans iD button on cart (quite literally a button that appears on your checkout page giving customers instant access to their exclusive offers) here. 

Broaden your horizons and expand customer reach 

Want to find new customers? Well, firstly, you need to broaden your reach. And, you guessed it: Pion can help with that. 

Using our verification offering, brands can tap into new markets by targeting and rewarding consumer groups, like students, healthcare workers, and military personnel. 

Additionally, having these discounts means being able to tap into the power of organic search - for example, searching ‘student discounts’. This is huge for improving your SEO and increasing traffic.

Create emotional connections and loyalty that lasts 

Gen Z engages best with real content - in fact, 44% said they favor marketing that’s authentic. 

Using Pion’s verification offering, brands can tap into their target consumers and build brand affinity - something that will drive repeat purchases and loyalty long into the future. 

Supercharge engagement with zero-party data

Remember when we said that data is the key to every marketer’s heart? Well, here we are again, back on it. 

Pion’s discount marketplace Student Beans enables brands to offer exclusive discounts to the CCGs most valuable to them, and in exchange for these discounts, we collect zero-party data. This includes*:

• First and last name
• Personal email address
• Date of birth 
• Gender 
• Country of residence 
• Academic institution 
• Year of graduation 
• Answers to bespoke surveys, quizzes, or poll questions sent by the brand. 

Using these unique insights, you can grow the size of your CRM database, boost customer trust and engagement with personalized campaigns, capture leads of qualified shoppers interested in your brand, the list is endless… 

So, to conclude. 

Finding new customers and increasing sales is all about understanding your audience. 

Understanding allows you to communicate effectively, grow loyalty, customize offerings, adapt to trends, and allocate resources. 

Simple, really. 

‍Want to know more? Get in touch with the team now to request a demo.