3 Essential Under-the-Radar Customer Acquisition Strategies for 2025

Welcome to 2025! To all of you marketing and agency leaders out there, how are you setting the tone for the New Year to best advance your organization’s goals? In December, I caught an interesting article in IndustryWeek about using a one-word goal to manifest your vision. The author, Ashleigh Walters, suggests choosing one word that becomes a guidepost for your year by providing a singular focus that fosters alignment, removes chaos, and ensures that decision-making aligns with your goals.

I decided to try her idea, and in December our team adopted "awareness" as our one-word theme for 2025. Here’s why: As a performance marketing agency, we’ve seen an overwhelming array of tools and solutions recently become available – many driven by AI innovation. With so many options, knowing which ones will truly move the needle for your customer acquisition campaigns is tough.

We advise leveraging AI innovation and use it ourselves – within our solutions, services and across our operations -- but unless you focus on marketing basics, such as the data that fuels your campaigns, you’ll miss out on the results you deserve.

These three under-the-radar solutions and strategies – successfully used by our Fortune 2000 clients in 2024—are foundational to effective results. They can make a monumental impact on your customer acquisition marketing in 2025 and beyond (read our case studies to find out how):

1. The Evolving ICP:  We are now witnessing an expansion of the B2B2C movement, where the lines between our personal and professional lives are blurring. As this occurs, today’s ideal customer profiles (ICP) need to evolve. They should encompass attributes that reflect customers’ and prospects’ lives at work and home. Further, marketing programs should be designed to include the channels they use the most, whether personal, professional -- or both.

 

Our Universal Person Marketing (UPM) database addresses the B2B2C movement by weaving together a variety of B2B2C prospect attributes to enable more personalized and effective campaigns across channels like direct mail, email, social media, and connected TV and programmatic advertising. The database contains 145 million business contact records, with linkage to residential addresses and alternate emails on 90 million of those records. This is an exceptional match rate. 

How It Works: Through our data linkage service, we can work with you to link and overlay consumer audience demographics -- such as marital status, children, income, gender, age, residential address, and LinkedIn profile – on top of B2B attributes, such as email, firmographics, and job title. In addition, we offer both company- and contact-level social URLs, mobile phone numbers, and a range of LinkID overlays. Most importantly, the B2B2C data remains anonymized at the execution interface to support privacy regulations.

Go here for an example of how we worked with a leading e-commerce platform provider to execute this strategy.

2. The Critical Custom Audience: Personalization is more important than ever in marketing. Every marketing message you craft and activate should demonstrate that you know who you’re engaging with and what that person values. To deliver on this promise, your most critical first step in every campaign should be audience building – whether it's for email marketing, connected TV or programmatic advertising, or omni-channel.

 

In reality, generic audiences built around a limited or non-descript set of attributes just don’t cut it anymore. That’s why OMI developed a results-driven digital audience-building service. Leveraging our extensive B2B Living File® data, which includes over 145 million professional contacts, we craft highly targeted, precision audiences to fuel omni-channel campaigns. This ensures you use your marketing budget efficiently, reaching the most relevant prospects to boost campaign results.

By incorporating intent monitoring—uncovering prospects whose recent online behavior shows interest in specific offerings—and using B2B2C data, we help you execute more personalized and relevant campaigns, leading to higher ROI.

3. The Robust In-House Identity Graph: As more brands seek improved control of their own customer and prospect data, they are moving away from third-party identity graphs and working to build their own in-house graphs. This is why our targeted audience data has become essential. By providing comprehensive B2B and B2C data elements, we assist companies in creating robust identity graphs. This capability enhances reach and scale for campaigns, allowing you to connect with individual prospects more effectively while adhering to privacy regulations.

 

Ashleigh also stated that while embracing a one-word goal will keep you focused, it's essential to be open to change as time passes. We all need to learn and grow with each new opportunity and experience – and sometimes departing from that focus is the right decision.

We invite you to reach out to our team for guidance on expanding your awareness of the tools available to improve your campaign reach and connect with the right prospects in the New Year.