Every year, private equities acquire thousands of public and private companies. Profitable organizations merge. Brands on the brink of bankruptcy are bought out. And then what comes next? Aggressive sales projections from the new board with tightened timelines.
For the sales department to meet its year-over-year (YoY) targets, marketing needs to go beyond the usual baseline and generate high-quality leads.
But there’s a problem: existing data is messy, marketing channels from both entities overlap, and the entire structure feels unfamiliar. These complexities can stall your campaigns and make it nearly impossible to hit your goals.
Sounds like what you’re facing right now? Not a problem.
In this article, we’ll explore some tips to overcome these challenges and work together with the sales team to scale your business’s ROI post-acquisition.
What is post-acquisition marketing?
Post-acquisition marketing is the process of redefining and repositioning the value of your merged or newly acquired brand in the market to attract and retain high-quality potential customers.
This is often more nuanced than the typical marketing because:
- The company you’re merging with has an existing market base, brand identity, and customer expectations.
- These elements don’t just disappear after acquisition. You need to invest a truckload of effort in integrating and deleting before pushing out marketing content.
- Your audience can easily feel undervalued if there’s a shaky balance between continuity and change.
- Your existing marketing team needs to adapt to new tools, structures, and workflows.
- Post-acquisition marketing data, especially during mergers, can be messy, duplicated, or difficult to reconcile.
- Internal friction may also emerge between the marketing and sales teams from both organizations, creating roadblocks during onboarding and alignment.
All these challenges create a disconnect between your brand and your audience, ultimately reducing lead generation and impacting sales performance.
For example, abruptly introducing an entirely new brand identity after a merger or acquisition can confuse your existing audience, disrupt brand loyalty, and lead to inconsistent messaging that weakens trust and engagement. That’s bad news for your lead funnel.
So, post-acquisition marketing doesn’t rush into producing ad videos or drafting billboard copy just for the sake of it. Instead, this type of marketing focuses on developing an approach that:
- Integrates consumer data in order to build a reliable info source
- Re-engages audiences while introducing the brand to new ones without confusion
- Preserves the brand equity of both entities while clearly communicating the new value proposition
- Aligns marketing and sales teams around shared goals, tools, and performance metrics
- Streamlines marketing tech stacks to reduce inefficiencies and overlaps
9 Tips to Ensure a Successful Post-Acquisition Marketing
We gleaned insights from successful acquisitions, like ADNOC absorbing Convestro, PepsiCo acquiring Siete Family Foods, and Rio Tinto’s takeover of Arcadium Lithium. In each case, marketing wasn’t treated as an afterthought. It was one of their first moves forward.
These companies saw post-acquisition marketing as a way not only to attract new leads but also to reassure existing audiences with a clear message: “We’re still delivering the same value—only the name, structure, or scale has changed.”
And that’s exactly how you should see it.
Let’s go explore a few ways to do that.
1. Dig out existing data and refine
Marketing is all about data. The more you know about your audience, the more targeted your campaigns can be. However, post-acquisition, that data is strewn everywhere. In the case of a merger, both organizations bring in large, often inconsistent datasets.
Before launching any campaign, it’s crucial that you audit, consolidate, and clean this information to create a single source of truth.
To do that:
- Have a copy of all the available data from before the acquisition to after. From customer support, sales interactions, and operational systems to marketing analytics data
- Identify overlaps, inconsistencies, and missing fields in customer and lead data
- Use tools like Dedupely or Informatica Data Quality to merge and deduplicate records across CRMs and databases
- Segment your audience based on engagement history, behaviour, and demographics
- Tag legacy vs. new customer data to understand how each group responds post-acquisition
Most importantly, ensure access to this data not only across your marketing team but also within sales.
2. Allocate more budget for marketing
More often than not, marketing is assigned a secondary status, both financially and in terms of value. According to a Career and Salary survey by MW, 46% of companies view marketing as an expense or cost rather than an investment. This explains why a larger budget is allocated to other units, such as sales.
Source: Marketingweek.com
In Shiv Narayanan’s book, Post-Acquisition Marketing: How to create enterprise value in the first 100 days, he emphasized how tweaking the marketing budget of an acquired company—Fleetsync by the North Star Capital—from 4% to 6% resulted in a 300% increase in marketing-generated pipeline over 12 months.
It’s not a myth. Marketing is what gets your new brand image out there. The higher the quality of your messaging, the higher the quality of the leads you attract. High-quality leads have a substantial lifetime value and are more likely to convert into sales.
Post-acquisition, you need to double down on this investment, especially in the first few months to years.
Of course, you can’t just randomly allocate a higher percentage because we said so.
- First, you need to assess the pre-acquisition performance to establish a baseline
- Understand the gaps created by underfunded creative, media, or outreach efforts
- Draw a line between your previous marketing-generated ROI and projections
- Determine how much budget is truly needed to close the gap and meet post-acquisition marketing goals
You also need to create a rigorous accountability structure that questions every dollar sent into the marketing funnel.
- Was spending $25,000 on a billboard more effective, or would a $5000 flyer have achieved the same result?
- Did that LinkedIn campaign bring in qualified leads or just impressions?
- Are we spending on brand awareness when we really need demand generation?
- Which channel brought the lowest customer acquisition cost, and are we doubling down on it?
- Is the creative asset we paid for still driving engagement, or is it outdated?
This ensures every inch of your budget yields the intended value, no matter how little.
3. Audit and align brand messaging across all channels
After Pepsico acquired Siete Family Foods, it released a statement saying, “Pepsico continues to expand better-for-you products for consumers by reducing salt, sugar, and saturated fat from brands through reformulation and acquisition.”
And the CEO reiterated a commitment “to transforming our portfolio to include more positive choices that meet consumer demand for convenient and delicious products.”
While this seemed like a generic statement, Pepsico actually aimed to align both brands’ messaging and show the broader audience that Siete fit seamlessly into its broader vision of health-forward, consumer-conscious offerings.
This narrative immediately reassures both existing customers and stakeholders that the acquisition enhances—not replaces—what they already trust. That’s what post-acquisition marketing is.
To do the same:
- Start by understanding what message each brand was communicating prior to the merger or acquisition. This could involve auditing your existing marketing assets, reviewing past campaigns, or conducting fresh audience research.
- Next, identify overlaps and tensions between both brands’ narratives. Which values align naturally? Which messages conflict or cause confusion? Are there things to delete?
- Then, build a unified messaging framework that blends the strengths of both brands.
Once that’s done, push it through all your marketing channels. Communicate the new narrative in order to show your audience what’s changing, what’s staying the same, and why the current version of your brand is even more valuable.
4. Leverage competitor insights to benchmark your new position
One way to quickly scale your newly acquired business is to see what successful competitors are already doing. This includes their SEO, email, paid, and social media marketing strategies and implementations.
- Analyze competitors’ website traffic using tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to gauge the effectiveness of SEO and paid marketing
- Use Adbeat or Moat to assess competitors’ ad creatives, the channels they use, and spend estimates
- Employ Crayon to monitor marketing and product moves, such as web changes, campaign launches, and messaging updates
- Assess the frequency, content strategy, and segmentation approach of your competitors’ email marketing strategy with Mailcharts
- Utilize social listening and tracking tools like SproutSocial to follow up competitor mentions, sentiments, and trending content
Collate your report and use it as a benchmark to know whether your company is on a bull run or dipping, how far you are from the market norm, and the possible space to leverage for growth. This also informs your marketing strategy, enabling you to make informed decisions and set targets based on current market realities.
5. Understand the financial health of your audience
While the strategic focus during and immediately after an acquisition is firmly on market share and operational synergy, it’s crucial for you to also consider the financial health of your broader ecosystem, which can indirectly impact your marketing success.
For instance, if a significant portion of your acquired customer base is struggling with financial burdens, their engagement and purchasing power might be compromised.
The typical marketing ignores these concerns and focuses on merely pushing out content to attract financially-droughted leads. This can come across as tone-deaf, especially to an audience you’re still trying to win over, and it may ultimately damage your pipeline.
What you should do instead is weave financial awareness into your marketing strategy.
- You need to gauge your customer base’s financial capacity proactively by reviewing your sales and customer data.
- Look out for signs like a drop in subscription counts, an increase in churn, fewer sign-ups, or a surge in downgraded accounts.
- If signs point to financial strain, be proactive. Map out existing customers and audience segments who are affected for a more targeted outreach.
- Share educational resources, flexible payment options, limited time downgrade protection, or even discreetly link to credible debt relief programs.
And here’s the kicker: financially overwhelmed customers are less likely to convert, renew, or upgrade, no matter how clever your campaigns are. Addressing their reality thus shows you’re a customer-first brand and keeps your pipeline warm for when they’re ready to spend again.
Source: Shutterstock
6. Integrate tech stacks to optimize marketing at scale
After an acquisition, you’re most likely going to deal with duplicate tools, mismatched systems, and siloed platforms, which are not ideal for cohesive and scalable marketing. You need to take a stock of these stacks, from CRMs to automation tools, and find which ones you can:
- Retain and integrate
- Exclude from your workflow
- Upgrade for more effectiveness
While reviewing your tool list, you may also discover gaps that your current systems do not address, particularly in content production. The reason is that, post-acquisition, there is an increased demand for more content, which your in-house team is likely unable to handle.
In this case, you can utilize AI-powered platforms to fill these gaps. For instance, AI-voiceover tools can help produce large volumes of audio for your ads, video explainers, and social media clips. AI-powered content tools, such as Business ChatGPT, can help you craft punchy social media taglines and captions.
What’s most important is that any tool you choose should be integrable with your existing stack in order to minimize tab switching.
7. Set a unified and realistic sales budget
A sales budget is a financial plan that outlines the anticipated revenue or the expected number of units of your product to be sold. This is quite different from sales forecasting, which is a tool used to predict revenue rather than plan it.
While a sales budget helps your marketing team align their campaigns and set measurable goals, overly ambitious year-over-year targets can pile on pressure. These targets may feel disconnected from reality and lead to rushed strategies.
Rushed strategies eventually result in wasted spend and a frustrated team. In the end, you’re unable to achieve your marketing and sales goals.
To set an appropriate sales budget:
- Analyze historical sales records. Look at revenue trends, seasonality, product performance, pricing shifts, and conversion rates.
- Factor in market changes. Include new product lines, customer segments, or market regions that came with the deal.
- Set revenue targets based on your team’s capacity. Consider how many leads your marketing can generate, how many deals your sales reps can realistically close, and what resources you have in place.
- Also account for unforeseen but potential limitations like supply chain holdups, staffing issues, and seasonal dips.
Don’t be afraid to plan an ambitious sales budget, but don’t be unrealistic about it and crunch your marketing team up.
8. Prioritize channel-specific performance metrics
You know the hack to marketing already: create content, launch sequential email newsletters, run paid ads, show up on social media, and build authority on podcasts.
However, the one-dollar question remains: how do you plan to verify whether these measures are actually working?
This is where metrics come in. And no, we’re not talking about vanity metrics like likes, impressions, or page views.
We’re talking about performance metrics that tie directly to your business goals, such as conversion rates, cost per acquisition (CPA), average CPM, lead quality, pipeline contribution, and revenue generated per campaign.
For instance, CPM (cost per mille) measures how much you spend per 1,000 impressions. When you compare that with your cost per lead and cost per eventual conversion for each paid ad, you can gauge your cost-to-yield ratio and overall ROI more accurately.
Each marketing channel has its performance KPIs, and it’s important to identify which ones help you estimate your spends.
9. Test, iterate, and communicate wins internally
Finally, combine these tips with your overall brand marketing strategy and run A/B tests across each channel to see what resonates best. Utilize surveys and feedback loops to track audience sentiment and assess the effectiveness of each implementation.
Acquisitions often stir up audiences, so expect a little kickback. Give your marketing efforts enough time, at least a few months, to settle in and gain traction before deciding to pivot, scale up, or pull the plug. Patience and iteration are key to post-acquisition marketing success.
If the initial messaging is not working, make valuable tweaks based on the feedback you got. And encourage your team by magnifying every little win, be it hitting minor milestones or breaking major bottlenecks.
Wrapping up
Post-marketing acquisition is nothing like the usual marketing playbook. You’re definitely going to do all of those content roll-outs and spend on ads. But what matters most is using marketing as a tool to redefine and repropose your brand’s value.
To do that, dig out existing data and integrate it for easy access, allocate more budget for marketing just like any other department in the organization, and align your brand messaging to reflect enhancement rather than replacement.
Also, leverage competitor insights to benchmark your new position after acquisition, understand the financial health of your audience and tailor your messaging accordingly, and integrate tech stacks to optimize marketing.
In addition, set a unified and realistic sales budget, make out useful channel-specific performance metrics, and test, iterate, and communicate every win with your team.
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