No matter what stage you’re at with your business, the process of Customer Acquisition is not only very important but never ending. As a result there’s no predictability when it comes to sales and business owners are often on their toes trying to figure out whether they’ll be able to acquire the customers they want or not. If you want your business to be profitable and sustainable for the long run, it is very important to take into consideration your customer acquisition strategy. It takes a lot of work and there’s a huge process that goes behind it to make sure that you attract viable customers towards your brand.
What Is Customer Acquisition?
To put it simply, Customer Acquisition means finding and retaining customers for your brand. The main goal here is to take them from the Awareness stage of the Customer Acquisition Funnel to the bottom of the Funnel which is the stage where the customer has purchased your product. The endgame here is to make sure that the customer comes back to your brand and makes repeat purchases.
Now with the rise of Digital Marketing, it’s easier than ever to keep a track record of how your business attracts customers as well as testing different marketing strategies to see which one sticks and makes your customers stay with the brand.
Customer Acquisition Strategies To Drive Sales
Here are some of the Customer Acquisition strategies that you can use to attract customers towards your business. We’ll go over these one by one.
- Paid Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Referral Program
- Search Engine Optimization
- Influencer Marketing
PAID MARKETING
Online Marketing is one of the surefire ways to get your name out there and drive higher conversions. By using Paid ads and defining your target audience and demographic, you can easily attract a much wider audience towards your brand. Paid traffic gives you greater exposure quickly and is ideal for start up businesses. You can use Google Ads and Facebook Ads (which are very widely used) to target any particular niche. These useful tools can really put your name out there and drive customers to your brand at a faster pace. Display Advertising is also a very effective strategy to drive traffic to your business or website.
So now that you have a general idea of what Paid Marketing is, let’s go over the Benefits and Drawbacks.
Benefits:
- Able to gain an audience rapidly because of greater exposure.
- Able to attract a specific targeted audience and specific niche with the use of Facebook Ads and Google Ads.
Drawbacks:
- They can be quite expensive.
- Running paid ads isn’t as easy to learn as one might think. It might be difficult to navigate for those who are just starting.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Social Media is all the rage these days and is an organic way through which you can build a consumer base. You can use Social Media platforms to connect with your audience. Increase awareness of your brand and drive traffic to your website. The major social media platforms (at this moment in time) that you can capitalize on to kickstart. Your Marketing campaigns are Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Snapchat.
Benefits:
- You can reach a wide audience.
- You can build a personal connection with your audience that can ultimately lead to customer retention and loyalty.
Drawbacks:
- You are open to negative feedback. This can really affect your brand image and give it a bad reputation.
- You will have to spend a lot of time on your campaigns. It is very time consuming because you have to consistently be creating new content, engaging with your audience and posting content on the regular.
EMAIL MARKETING
Lead generation is very important for customer acquisition. Lead generation involves nurturing potential customers and retargeting them with ads to eventually convert them into potential customers. Collecting emails of potential customers is seen as one of the biggest ways to generate leads for your brand. According to Campaign Monitor, 59% of marketers observed the most ROI from Email Marketing. Once you have built an email list, you can start sending automated emails with specifically targeted messages to the list through Email Marketing services such as Omnisend and Klaviyo.
Benefits:
- You can market your brand to customers over a longer period of time. Because of email automation you can continue engaging the customer and recommending new products.
- It is cost effective as opposed to other forms of marketing. There are no advertising costs or media space costs.
Drawbacks:
- Your emails could be categorised under spam by people who don’t want to receive your emails. When creating your Email Marketing campaign, make sure you’re targeting the right people who are actually wanting to receive your emails.
REFERRAL PROGRAM
Many companies have now started using Affiliate Marketing to acquire new customers. One of the ways you can get started with an Affiliate Marketing campaign is through a referral program. Word of mouth referrals have proven to be an effective strategy in acquiring new customers. You can start a referral program where your existing customers are given a reward each time they purchase something from your company. There are so many apps that actually encourage customers to refer to their friends and people they know through marketing emails, discounts, and incentives for both the customer and their friends.
Benefits:
- It allows you to attract new clients and have a higher impact.
- Repeat purchases as customers know they’ll get a small perk or benefit if they keep referring to other people. This will help increase the revenue of the brand too.
Drawbacks:
- If your customers aren’t that enthusiastic and ecstatic about your products and aren’t satisfied with your services, then they have no incentive to refer your products to someone else. If that’s the case then a Referral Program might not be the right Acquisition strategy for you.
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
When you want to find something, the first thing you do is search it on Google. If you want to gain more customers, make sure that when someone is looking up products related to your brand it shows up at the very top of the search results. This is what’s referred to as Search Engine Optimization. Doing keyword research and crafting a content strategy for your website pages and blogs that help them rank higher in the search results can really help you bring potential customers to your website.
Benefits:
- Free of cost.
- SEO becomes the source of Evergreen traffic. Your website will continue to rank higher on web pages because if months or years have passed, provided it’s fully optimized and has all the effective keywords.
Drawbacks:
- If you are meaning to show up on the Google search results organically then it could take a bit of a while because Google needs to be sure that you are an authentic and reliable site.
- Some specific niches and keywords are very competitive and it can be difficult for all of them to rank on the first page. There are several tools such as Ahrefs and Ubersuggest that can help you weed out the competition for several keywords and help you find out less competitive and alternative keywords that can put you ahead of the game.
INFLUENCER MARKETING
Influencer Marketing another widely used form of marketing to bring the right people towards your brand. A lot of companies reach out to popular YouTubers and Instagram Influencers to help promote their brands. Some things to keep in mind are the fact that you should reach out to Influencers that have an active and engaging. Audience and also make sure that the content that these Influencers are producing are something that reflects the overall identity of the brand.
Benefits:
- Increasing brand awareness because your products exposed to thousands of followers.
- It helps build trust because if an Influencer is talking positively about your brand, then the customer is likely to trust their judgement and ultimately buy your product.
Drawbacks:
- If you find yourself working with the wrong kind of Influencer, it can really hinder your brand image and this will ultimately impact sales negatively.
- It’s hard to track and monitor the performance of your campaign.
CONCLUSION:
Customer Acquisition is not a simple process. It takes time, efforts and dedication. Your customers (current and potential) hold the key to ensuring that your business remains successful for both the long run and short run. Similarly following these tips and a well thought out plan regarding your Customer Acquisition strategy. Those customers will flow in next to no time.