Customer Acquisition Strategy – 9 of the Best You Can Leverage in 2022
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Digital Marketing
The hard truth about customer acquisition strategy is that trust in businesses has been eroding over time. HubSpot recently reported that 55% of consumers don’t trust the brands they buy from as much as they previously did. 65% of consumers don’t trust advertisements, and 71% have no faith in sponsored posts on social media.
This clear lack of brand trust has made the job of marketing and sales teams infinitely more challenging. What’s worse is that most companies are failing to recognize the problem. They end up throwing more money into “push” marketing tactics, particularly on social media, hoping they will help them win over new customers.
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But that’s never the right solution.
Then what is?
Your best point of leverage is to invest in “pull” marketing tactics and customer service. But before we dive deeper into some of these evergreen tactics, let’s talk about customer acquisition first.
Pro Tip: Find platforms where your audience is active and post content there to catch their attention. Else, you may not benefit much from your customer acquisition strategies.
Disclosure: This content has a few affiliate links, which means if you click on them, I will get a commission (without any extra cost to you).
Table of Contents
What is Customer Acquisition?
The process by which you bring new clients or customers to your business is customer acquisition. The goal, for any company, is to create sustainable and systematic acquisition strategies that keep up with industry trends.
Regardless of the size of your business, this is a very important aspect of running a business besides helping you turn a profit. It also acts as evidence of traction for your business to the outside world of partners, investors, influencers, and prospects.
But what’s the catch?
Mind you, customer acquisition shouldn’t be confused with lead generation. In the world of business, we often visualize the customer journey in the form a funnel, as shown below.
Marketing Funnel Customer Acquisition StrategiesImage via Marketing Funnel
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As part of their journey through the customer acquisition funnel consumers:
Gain awareness about your brand and interest in your offerings
Add your products or services to the list of alternatives they’re considering, and
Decide to become a paying customer of your business
Lead generation makes up the top part of the sales funnel. Lead acquisition is the middle section. And lead conversion is all the way at the bottom. Customer acquisition, however, is the entire end-to-end process that involves all of these stages.Customer Acquisition Strategies
The Best Customer Acquisition Strategy
We’ve already touched upon some of the key challenges that brands face in trying to acquire new customers. A lack of trust in brands is key. But that’s not to say that there’s nothing you can do to improve your customer acquisition.
So, what can you do to improve your customer acquisition?
Here’s a list of some evergreen customer acquisition strategies that you can leverage to ensure you’re always gaining new customers.
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1. Define Your Target Audience
The first and foremost step you need to execute is to identify the right users or potential audience for your company. Chances are your product is the perfect solution to a problem a certain demographic of consumers are facing. It’s only a matter of discovering who they are and focusing your customer acquisition efforts, primarily, on them.
If you don’t have a target customer in mind, it’s likely you are limiting yourself from marketing your brand effectively. Unless your offerings meet a universal need, you’re better off finding a niche market for yourself.
So, how can you find your target customers?
Conduct complete market research and try to figure out who and how you should market your product to win over new customers. For instance, according to Invesp, SaaS companies can double their paying customers by simply offering a free trial without asking them for their credit card info.
Invesp Customer Acquisition StrategiesImage via Invesp
Such knowledge can only be gained by doing your due diligence of market research. It forms the foundation without which any of your other customer acquisition strategies wouldn’t work.
2. Use the Right Acquisition Channel
Building upon what we discussed above, it’s not enough to know who your ideal customers are. It’s equally important to know the right channel to use to acquire said potential customers.
Now, there are a number of different frameworks that can help you identify the best channel to use for your customer acquisition strategies. But for the most part, it takes a lot of experimenting to find the right channel.
To make things easier for yourself, you should set clear goals for yourself and your campaign. Even having rough goals will help you understand whether your tactics are working or not. Once you’ve tested different channels, you will be able to compare individual successes relative to each other.
If you need help with channel alignment or picking the right KPIs, you should get in touch Selling Revolution. They build selling systems that can help you get more quality leads.
Want a pro tip?
If you exist in a hyper-competitive market like real estate, harness the power of paid channels to increase your lead volume. An experienced Google AdWords agency can help you acquire better leads than organic channels like Google Search.
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3. Leverage Video Content
Video marketing is on the rise. 81% of businesses leverage it, up from 63% from last year. That’s because 97% of marketers have found video content useful to increase customer understanding of their offerings. Another 76% have found it helpful to increase web traffic and sales.
People tend to be visual learners and videos are one of the best ways to inform prospects about your brand and your products. You should try to find a good balance between informative and interesting videos. Leverage influencers to create such videos, share on social media, and on your website.
What’s more, you ask?
Explainer videos and customer testimonials are another good way to go about this. Not only are they engaging but also provide users the information they need to make that final purchase decision.
Companies like Okta have benefited a lot from customer acquisition strategies like video marketing.
Okta Customer Acquisition StrategiesImage via Okta
4. Do Giveaways
Often, customers need more than just words or promises to convince them to pay for your products and services. Some of the more persistent consumers won’t even be swayed by influencer or word-of-mouth marketing.
In order to win over these consumers as loyal customers, you should consider doing giveaways. Offering them a chance to experience your products, first hand, is a great way to give them that extra push they need to seriously consider you as an option.
The easiest way to implement such customer acquisition strategies is to run giveaway campaigns on social media.
So, how can you launch giveaways?
To create a giveaway, you can use tools like VYPER. It lets you create stunning landing pages for your giveaways using its drag-and-drop page builder.
All you have to do is select one of their templates and customize it. Once traffic starts coming to the page, it provides you all the details that were entered in the forms as well. Thus, helping you ramp up your lead generation efforts.
Here’s what Forever21, the women’s fashion apparel brand, does in order to drive users through the sales funnel. This way they even to gauge the market, if any, for any new styles they want to try selling.
Forever21 instagram Customer Acquisition StrategiesImage via Instagram
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5. Create High-Quality Content Regularly
Content marketing is easily one of the most effective and evergreen customer acquisition strategies there are. Let’s think of it this way: it helps you establish your thought-leadership in your industry or niche. Getting consumers to trust your brand is half the battle and content marketing helps you win that battle.
From a lead generation perspective, content marketing is thrice as effective and 62% less expensive than typical outbound marketing. Starting a blog for your business, sharing content on social media, and publishing white papers are all great ways to establish yourself as a trustworthy expert in your industry.
Consumers are more and more informed these days. By empowering your prospects to make informed purchase decisions, you’ll gain their trust and in all likelihood convert them. Creating valuable, informative, insightful, and engaging content will, ultimately, help drive your customer acquisition.
But coming up with high-quality content regularly, especially for social media, can be a challenge.
So, what can you do?
You can leverage tools like ProWritingAid. This tool helps you write or rewrite your content with ease. All you need to do is key in a few words that describe your content and the tool will create the article for you. Alternatively, you can paste the text from your content and the tool will rewrite it for you.
6. Focus on SEO
After you’ve established your online presence by producing insightful content, you need to work on SEO. Doing so will help improve the rankings of that very content on search engines. Thereby making your content more visible and discoverable by your target audience.
Improving search rankings and your brand’s visibility has a lot to do with the first stage of the customer acquisition funnel. Some of the more basic SEO tactics include using industry-related keywords, backlinks from authority websites, etc.
Another effective SEO tactic you can use to gain more customers is to optimize your site for mobile devices. Close to 50% of the internet traffic last year came from mobile devices.
Providing prospects with an excellent mobile experience can prove to be the trick in converting customers, especially for social media platforms.
So, how can you manage your website’s SEO?
For this, I recommend using Semrush. This all-around SEO tool provides everything you need for your website’s SEO.
Starting from keyword research to on-page SEO and competitor research, this tool has got it all. It even helps you track your keyword rankings and has a built-in link-building tool through which you can build backlinks for your website.
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7. Run a Referral Program
Referral programs often serve as the basis of many acquisition strategies to find new customers, especially when you’re a fledgling company. You can offer current users incentives like extra features or discounts to incentivize them to refer your services to others. And you can also offer these new customers similar discounts to give them an extra nudge to leverage your services.
So, how can you launch your referral program?
To create and run a referral program, you can use InviteReferrals. This easy-to-use tool lets you create a referral program for your website, app, and social media platforms and can help you track its progress with ease.
It provides detailed analytics that can help you filter your traffic based on different channels. From shares to sales, you can track it all using this tool.
Dropbox runs a pretty sweet referral program where they offer users an extra 500mb of storage when they invite a friend to sign up. The deal is sweetened by the fact that your friends also get an extra 500mb of storage. They maximize the value to be gained from the referral by offering both parties something.Dropbox Customer Acquisition StrategiesImage via Dropbox
8. Create Optimized Landing Pages
Among other customer acquisition strategies, optimizing your landing pages is definitely one of the most effective ones. Landing pages help direct consumers to your product or service. An effective landing page doesn’t just offer up valuable information but also includes a compelling call-to-action that facilitates conversions.
What’s more, you ask?
Running an A/B test can help you optimize your landing pages and improve them drastically. It goes back to knowing what your customers expect from you. You need to be able to anticipate their needs and then deliver on those.
You can use tools like Unbounce to create and test your landing page designs. Using its simple drag-and-drop page builder, you can seamlessly create your landing page without the need to know to code. It also allows you to create sticky bars and popups that can help you convert visitors with ease.
Try pages with no navigation bars, ones that do, try different fonts, CTAs, and elements. This is an iterative process and you should keep experimenting to figure out what is helping win more customers.
Unbounce Customer Acquisition Strategies
Image via Unbounce
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9. Improve Website and Email Engagement
While this may be a tactic that’s as old as the internet, it’s still one of the most effective customer acquisition strategies there is. It helps you stay in front of your target audience, promote your content, discounts, and product information. It’s also the easiest way you can connect with and acquire new customers.
A great way to go about this is to send customized emails to people depending on which stage of the customer acquisition process they are. So, someone in the first two steps is probably better suited for content that might initiate that customer engagement.
What about the others?
Ones in that have you in their consideration pool would be more interested in emails with product information. This enables them to make a more informed purchase decision. Similarly, people in the final stages can be tempted into making that purchase with a promotional email that offers them a discount.
Amazon, for one, does a good job of this. They’re always sending out customized emails to their audience. Be it to remind them about the items on their wish list or an abandoned cart. Or perhaps something like this when you’ve just made a purchase.
Amazon Customer Acquisition Strategies
Image via Amazon
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FAQs
Q1. What are customer acquisition strategies?
A. The best customer acquisition strategy involves ways to reach, engage, and convince consumers to buy your products and services. Some of the most effective customer acquisition efforts include:
Choose the right acquisition channels.
Leverage videos.
Host giveaways.
Run a referral program.
Improve website and email engagement.
Leverage influencers.
Offer affiliate discounts.
Q2. How do you acquire customers?
A. You can acquire customers using:
Social media marketing
Video promotions
Giveaways
Content marketing
SEO
Referral program
Landing pages
Email marketing
Q3. What should you include when creating a customer acquisition strategy?
A. When creating a customer acquisition strategy, you should consider:
Audience demographics of your ideal customers
Your business goals
Products and services you want to sell
Discounts or giveaways you can afford
Marketing budget
Q4. How do you find your first 100 customers?
A. To get your first 100 customers, you should:
Ask your friends and family to see if they need the products or services you’re selling.
Ask people to spread the word about your business.
Design and print business cards. Give them to potential clients you may visit during events and other networking sessions.
Create social media accounts for your business.
Set up an online store on Shopify, Instagram Shops, and your own ecommerce website.
Offer referral discounts to encourage customers to help you get more orders.
Q5. What is a good customer acquisition cost?
A. Customer acquisition cost varies based on your industry and the strategies you use to market your business.
The best way to evaluate if your customer acquisition cost (CAC) is good is to compare it with customer lifetime value (LTV). 3:1 is considered an ideal ratio for LTV:CAC.
The value of a customer should be three times the cost of acquiring them.
Q6. What is a customer acquisition process?
A. The customer acquisition process is the process of bringing in new customers. It includes everything from generating brand awareness to creating demand and persuading prospects to make purchase decisions.
Q7. How can I advertise without spending money?
A. You can advertise your business without spending money in the following ways:
List your business on Google My Business and other local business directories.
Create social media accounts for your business and start posting about your products and services.
Build a website using WordPress or other free website builders.
Start a blog on topics related to your business. Include keywords in the title, headings, and content of your blog posts.
Promote customer referrals.
Send emails to tell people about your new products or services.
Q8. Why is a customer acquisition strategy important?
A. The main aim of any business is to find and acquire customers and start making money. That’s why a customer acquisition strategy is very important for every business.
It can help you create a roadmap to reach, attract, engage, and convert prospects and encourage existing customers to bring you more customers.
Q9. What are the best practices for customer retention?
A. The best practices for customer retention include:
Deliver good customer experiences.
Sell high-quality products.
Deliver orders on time.
Offer great support.
Listen to feedback and respond positively.
Offer discounts to loyal customers.
Ready to Get Started Acquiring New Customers?
There’s no magical formula that can guarantee your business a steady flow of new customers. While customer acquisition efforts like market research are a must, you need to build from there. It’s an experimental process, trying to figure out which strategies are best suited for your business.
For the most part, though, the nine listed above are evergreen and are guaranteed to work for any business when done right.
What are your thoughts on these customer acquisition strategies? Let us know in the comment section.