All businesses need customers! However, customer acquisition has become increasingly difficult as the number of options increase. Additionally, customer acquisition has become a lot more expensive – over the past 5 years the cost of acquiring customers has increased by over 50%. All industries are competitive, meaning that your customer acquisition strategy needs to be advanced. We’ve compiled a few ways you can make your customer acquisition strategy stand out.
Customer Acquisition Funnel
Customer acquisition is the process of bringing new customers to your business – it can be explained through the conversion funnel:
There are three main steps in customer acquisition:
- Lead Generation: generating customer interest in your products or services.
- Demonstrated by a customer visiting your website, signing up to your mailing list or sending an enquiry.
- Lead Acquisition: acquiring new leads from lead generation sources.
- A lead referred by another company or customer information being transferred from an alternate source.
- Lead Conversion: customers completing the full conversion process.
- Signing up to your mailing list, paying for a service or purchasing your product.
What is acquisition marketing?
Acquisition Marketing describes implementing strategies to encourage gain new customers for your business. Ideally, these customers will complete the full conversion process and become paying customers. This strategy should be sustainable and adaptable to changing industry trends.
How to acquire new customers:
1. Content Marketing
Content can be used for lead generation. This strategy is most effective when content is engaging – when it matches what your audience wants from you. Consumers are exposed to over 5,000 messages daily – that’s a lot of content. So, your content needs to stand out and be engaging.
Content marketing includes:
- Blog Posts: Blogs can increase your company’s credibility and authority. You can use blog posts to demonstrate your expert knowledge in your field. This should make customers more interested in your company.
- eBooks: offering free downloads of eBooks or other content in exchange for a prospects detail is an excellent way to generate leads. Since these leads have already demonstrated an interested in your offering, they could be converted to purchase.
2. Social Media
You can use social media to increase your brand awareness, build a brand image and brand personality. Social media is another platform where you can use your content to generate leads and direct prospects to your website for more content.
Social media content can either be (1) organic or (2) paid. As a new business especially, you can extend your reach by using sponsored posts.
Choosing the right social media platforms for your company can be difficult. Luckily we’ve broken down a guide for Instagram and Facebook for you to check out.
3. Search Marketing
Primarily, search marketing will help with lead generation – getting your company name out there and establishing customer awareness of your product and service.
Search engine optimisation (SE0) and search engine marketing (SEM) are both crucial to your customer acquisition strategy! You want your website and business to be visible to prospects interested in a product or service similar to yours. With SEO you need to optimise your site and content to gain a high search engine results page (SERP) ranking. For a guide on how to improve your SEO have a look at our blog posts and increasing your page load speed, optimising your website copywriting and how you can get SEO to work for your business.
Alternatively, with SEM you pay to rank number 1 or 2 for particular keywords – beware this can get expensive! If you’re struggling with SEO and getting your website to rank highly organically, have a look at our guide for SEM strategy.
4. Email Marketing
Emails are a great way to convert leads which have been generated or acquired into conversions. You can use email to engage with prospects and prompt purchases. Emails often include new product information, event information and early access to sales – all encouraging conversions and brand loyalty. Check out our blog post on email marketing for your guide to a successful email marketing campaign.
Conclusion
Now that we’ve given you four ways to acquire new customers, it’s time for you to get started on your customer acquisition strategy. You can choose to use one, some or all of these strategies to acquire new customers. We recommend that you use all simultaneously. Happy customer hunting!
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