How to Build the Foundation of a Killer Customer Acquisition Strategy

Customer acquisition is the single most important component of growing your business. After all, if you’re not getting new customers, you’re really not going to be able to really grow, are you? But HOW do you get new customers is the real question. Maybe you’ve been growing steadily over the past couple of years and hit a plateau. Maybe your industry has shifted and you’re not sure how to respond. Maybe everything moving towards digital has left your sales team at a standstill, unsure of the next steps to take. This is where a customer acquisition strategy comes into play.

Building the foundation of a solid customer acquisition strategy requires you to have a deep dive into your brand, target audience, and overall customer experience. Are you ready to get started?

How to Fine-tune Your Customer Acquisition Strategy

Marketers and business leaders alike have a responsibility to build an effective and evergreen customer acquisition strategy. In 2021, the cost to acquire a new customer is nearly 50% more expensive than before. If you want to maximize your budget and use resources well, fine-tuning your customer acquisition strategy is of the utmost importance.

When it comes to building a customer acquisition strategy that’s unique to your business, there’s room for creativity. Different strategies often include tactics like:

• Content marketing
• Email marketing
• Use of video and digital media
• Referral programs
• Customer giveaways
• Website optimization

Although these strategies can all yield great results, it’s important to focus on which ones, in particular, will actually attract your ideal customers. Before you can really understand which tactics to start executing, you must first build a foundation for your brand, or the inner ring of the flywheel, and get to know your customers at a deeper level.

Strengthen Your Foundation

Having a strong brand foundation not only helps your team members, but it also helps new and existing customers. The more recognizable you are, the more people can appreciate how your product or service stands out. Two of the ways you can strengthen your foundation are to build a brand standards guide and utilize a content style guide.

Brand standards guide

A brand standards guide provides the answer to a very important question: what is your company’s core visual style? To develop a strong standards guide, include things like approved logo usage, fonts, brand colors, and logo applications. Having these elements trademarked can provide future protection and help you avoid costly damages.

The overall goal of a brand standards guide is to ensure that your company looks the same everywhere a customer might interact with it, from a social media post, to your website, to a flyer and beyond.

Content style guide

On the other hand, a content style guide is a standard for your company’s messaging and sets the stage for any published content that your team produces. A strong content style guide should include elements relating to your brand story, CTAs (calls to action), tone of blog posts, and so much more. Written and spoken content plays an important role in attracting new customers to your services, so it’s important that every message sounds like it comes from one source.

Your content style guide will ensure that every single message your customer hears is consistent and impactful.

Get to (Really) Know Your Audience

As you can now understand, a strong customer acquisition strategy starts by developing internal roadmaps for your style and brand. The next step is external, and relates to getting more familiar with your target audience. Not everyone will fit the kind of customer you’re trying to reach. Afterall, if you’re trying to talk to everyone, your message won’t resonate with anyone. That’s why it’s so important to get crystal clear on the individuals you want to serve.

Current customers vs. ideal customers

Comparing current versus ideal customers relates to a company’s goals for growth. Sales and marketing teams can continue to develop relationships with current customers. If a business wants to expand, the team in charge of lead generation may need to focus more on ideal customers.

To compare and contrast the two sets of demographics, businesses can build current and ideal customer personas to learn more about these groups.

Creating Ideal Customer Personas

According to Hubspot, a persona is “a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.” This information unlocks a wealth of information about the customer you want to acquire. An ideal customer persona may include items like demographics information, behavioral patterns, where they find information to make purchases, and what motivates them to buy.

To acquire customers through the creation of personas, you must understand who the customer is, how to reach them, and what they most want to do or change.

What is audience segmentation?

Audience segmentation is a popular marketing strategy that divides your current and ideal customers into specific subgroups based on certain characteristics. Segmenting allows you to provide detailed or personal messages to a certain type of customer. As you could likely guess, having strong ideal customer personas in place gives marketers more information when creating audience segments.

Determining your audience size

Determining audience size also allows a business to fine-tune its acquisition strategy at an even more granular level. Many modern businesses serve a very specific need, which means that mass marketing on a grand scale isn’t a responsible use of money or resources. When you know your audience size, you can target your advertising and outreach efforts in a more precise and cost-effective way.

Building your audience

To build your company’s audience, inbound marketing is an excellent place to start. This marketing strategy involves creating content that draws customers in and gives them the opportunity to engage. Whether you choose to do this through a blog, social media platform, email newsletter, or all of the above, you have a chance to educate and engage.

Building your audience should also be about serving your customers with the most relevant and helpful content. When you offer this as a courtesy, future customers are more likely to be drawn to your message. With strong inbound marketing strategies, you can nurture future customers until they’re ready to make a buying decision.

Craft a Website to Drive Customers, Engagement, and Conversion

What is one of the ways that your customers first learn about your business? In today’s business landscape, this often comes down to your website. A website today is like your front office years ago. Immediately upon arrival, customers need to know why they’re there, what steps you want them to take next, and feel engaged and invited in. If their experience is unclear or awkward, they will leave immediately. In the modern world, there’s no better way to leave a strong first impression with a new customer than by delivering a professional, helpful, and engaging website experience.

Below are some of the elements you should pay close attention to as you craft each page of your company website.

Growth-Driven Design

When companies are in their infancy, it’s easy for business leaders to adopt an economical, DIY mindset. But to truly grow, website design should be professional and convincing. Good website design answers the following questions:

• Is the site responsive, fast, and easy to see on mobile devices?
• Does the site provide a visual hierarchy that directs users to the right information?
• Is the site designed with a conversion experience in mind?

If the answer to any of these questions is ‘no,’ it may be difficult for your website to rank on search engines or to attract and engage new customers.

User experience

User experience is a combination of visual and practical elements. Not only should your website be pleasing to the eye, but it should be easy to use and navigate. You can achieve better user experience by increasing site speed, using contact forms, implementing buttons and CTAs, and using streamlined categories or headings.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO focuses on optimizing certain website pages so that they rank better in search results and earn higher quality traffic. How does on-page SEO play into customer acquisition?

If people have a need or a pain point that they want to solve, and your company offers the solution, you want to ensure that those people can easily find you. On-page SEO improves the rate at which people searching for key terms land on your page. Although this is an organic result, it often has a substantial return.

Content management and pillar pages

Implementing a content management system allows you to continually create new and relevant content on a predictable schedule. As customers come to expect and rely on the expertise of your business, content management helps you deliver on those promises.

Pillar pages, which are long-form pages covering all topics in a certain category, focus on specific keywords. Pillar pages can help you build more content in a way that answers important customer questions all at once.

Web hosting

Choosing the right web host can have more of an impact than many people realize. Site speed and security are both important factors to things like on-page SEO. Additionally, the right web host can ensure that your site is backed by strong and reliable servers, which helps avoid outages and downtime.

Provide an Awesome Customer Experience

Providing an incredible customer experience is another key step in your customer acquisition foundation and is about delivering what your customers truly want. Before you start feeling overwhelmed, just know that it’s very difficult to please every person all of the time. This further drives home the importance of your ideal customer personas. As you get to know your customers at a deeper level, you will know what’s most important to them and can deliver better, more tailored experiences at every step.

Good customer service is good business

Delivering strong customer service can make or break a measurable customer acquisition strategy. In fact, 89 percent of companies compete with one another on the basis of customer service alone. Based on this statistic, it’s vital that your company devotes time, training, and resources to providing the best customer service possible.

Delivering your product

When you deliver a product, it’s crucial that your brand promise is carried out through the delivery of the service you offer. What does that mean exactly? Customers may come to expect a certain level of detail, innovation, or creativity. Just think of what people have come to expect from Apple!

Your product releases should not only align with your brand’s internal standards, but the delivery should always match up with the excellence your customers expect. When a company is true to these promises for current customers, attracting new prospects becomes even easier.

Keeping your customers delighted

Customer delight is what naturally happens when you surprise a customer or offer something unexpected. Essentially, it means going above and beyond to deliver big results. When your business succeeds at delighting the customer base, it’s more likely that you’ll continue to attract new customers through word of mouth and general recognition.

Getting customer feedback

Gathering feedback is extremely valuable for a realistic perspective on how your business is measuring up to customer expectations. You can ask customers about their experience with marketing materials, sales team members, or when using a product. Companies that have a proactive strategy for customer feedback are often known for their transparency and trustworthiness.

Choosing the right customer service tools for your business

Choosing the right customer service tools for your business can be an effective part of your acquisition strategy. The right tools can boost company adoption and provide helpful integrations that make an entire operation run more smoothly. Below are a few ideas for tools you can implement to improve customer service and further your customer acquisition strategy.

• Hubspot Service Module
• Help desk and chat support
• Internal team communication technology
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Focus on customer retention

Customer retention is when the new customers you’ve attracted become loyal patrons of your business over time. To honor and better serve your customers, try a few popular retention strategies to keep your clients coming back time and again.

• Create a brand advocate program
• Offer referral incentives for new business
• Regularly survey and poll your customers
• Engage in social listening

Growing a Business Doesn’t Have to Be Difficult

Customer acquisition is essential for growing your business, and it starts with a good foundation. If you want to revamp your customer acquisition strategy from the ground up, consider working with a team of experts who can help strengthen your brand standards, set up a content style guide, improve your website, set up a CRM tool and highlight areas of opportunities in your customer service experience.

Striventa’s Business Growth Foundation is the perfect start for business leaders looking to remove impediments to growth. And if you’re worried about maintaining your company’s vision and mission, there’s no need to fear. During your free business discovery session, you’ll have a chance to share all about your team goals and mindset.

Request your free discovery session today to get started on the next chapter of your business journey!

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