How to Enhance Your Customer Acquisition Strategy
When it comes to customer acquisition strategy, very few businesses will employ the same tactics. Though many fields have identical customer demographics, the most successful organizations execute unique customer acquisition strategies that continuously generate their best leads at optimal volume while also landing successful customer conversions at a rate that enables company growth.
If you’ve been wondering how to improve upon your customer acquisition strategy for your business, you’ve come to the right place. We’ve created a guide to get you started on the path of developing an acquisition strategy that effectively garners the customer conversions you need to finally catapult your business to the next level.
What is a Customer Acquisition Funnel?
A customer acquisition funnel is the process of attracting new customers to your business through clear, intentional steps, ultimately resulting in their buy-in of your product or service.
These steps include utilizing diverse platforms by which a potential customer may come into contact with your business, enjoy your content, and purchase your product, as well as broad marketing initiatives that allow your brand identity to shine through any popular medium of our day and targeted campaigns and data-driven pipelines that ensure you’re reaching the right crowd and snagging leads that matter.
It’s easier said than done, though – many businesses fall prey to mimicking prescriptive or generic marketing models of adjacent companies and competitors. If you do this, you fail to account for your particular brand serving your particular audience.
Markets shift daily in the ever-changing world of business, and no two businesses are ever the same (that succeed). You must work within your brand identity and team’s strength, show off your brand’s value to your customer, and create your ideal funneling process to ensure you’re not losing out on easy customer conversions ready for the taking.
Customer Acquisition vs. Lead Generation
These two concepts are intertwined but not quite the same. In fact, lead generation is often mistaken as a complete customer acquisition funnel, but it doesn’t necessarily account for the quality of your leads.
You’re not paying thousands of dollars a month to simply increase meaningless visits to your website. It’s about getting the attention of those who already want your service (whether they know it or not) and closing the deal!
This is where a full customer acquisition process is so much more intensive and valuable than simple lead generation. With the right campaign strategy, your team will have multiple opportunities to win over a single customer for an initial purchase – and perhaps even transform them into a lifetime customer.
Everything you need to know about Customer Acquisition. Read the guide now.
How to Create a Customer Acquisition Strategy
The old way of understanding the buyer’s journey was awareness, then consideration, and finally, decision. However, modern practices are illuminating the success of a flywheel customer acquisition model.
The flywheel principles are:
1. Attract:
Find where consumers are looking for your brand or product, and launch campaigns to attract your carefully selected demographic on these mediums. Some of these include social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram or search engines like Google. You have to anticipate what your ideal customer is already searching for and what sort of keywords or phrases they are using on these mediums in order to intentionally target your campaigns to the right people. If you’re unclear about the service you provide in your Facebook ad campaigns, for instance, then you likely won’t attract those who might actually need you and therefore miss out on what otherwise would have been sales.
2. Engage:
Quality. Content. Don’t spoil your chance to bat with a meaningful lead by providing vague, valueless content. You need to be an authority in your field, more than your competitors, if possible. A potential customer is searching the web because they lack something. Provide it. Fulfill the void for them. In fact, your content should already benefit your customer with no purchase necessary!
The good news is that quality leads will recognize your authority, and it will lead to conversions. Knowledge is valuable, and it should all the more justify why your product or service is the right solution for them. If your content comes up short in value for your ideal customer, then you’ve struck out.
It’s also just as important to make sure the user experience is seamless, not clunky, annoying, and confusing. Whatever platform your business uses, your website, landing pages, call-to-actions, sales pages, etc., everything must be user-friendly, or else you’ll lose sales on an otherwise avoidable technicality. When it comes down to it, your engagement needs to lead to conversions, otherwise, it’s an empty number.
3. Delight:
Once you have a new customer, it isn’t enough that they’ve purchased your product – you need to have resources for post-purchase to reinforce your relationship with that customer, which will hopefully convert a first-time purchaser to a life-long customer.
The best brands create ambassadors out of happy customers who become advocates for your brand, ultimately becoming a marketing tactic in themselves! The best part is that their advocacy could be free and recurring should you play your cards right.
As you are defining these pieces of your company’s overall marketing strategy, it is paramount that each of your tactics can be tracked so that they can be replicated, replaced, and even scaled. This is why keeping all of your customer acquisition in CRM (customer relationship management) tools is vital. If you aren’t executing best practices here, your competitors will certainly pass you by.
Best Tools for Customer Acquisition
A flywheel customer acquisition funnel is only as good as its tools and strategies, and it’s up to you to decide how these tools best fit for your unique brand.
- Social Media: The most direct way to reach a large yet targeted audience in this day and age. Platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn might be great for attracting new leads and promoting your content. Similarly, quicker and lighter feeds such as Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram allow you to display your content to a wide array of users without requiring them to first follow your account to see it.
- Content Marketing: Creating unique and authoritative content is integral to attracting and retaining customers. Blog posts, website content, social media, and any other form of engagement with your customers should be intentionally crafted and placed in front of your desired audience.
- Email Marketing: One of the best ways to proliferate your content is through email marketing. Statistically speaking, re-engagement is one of the most successful sales strategies and is up to 3 times as effective as appealing to a new customer. A curated and segmented email list allows you to employ both of these strategies, making A/B testing easy.
- Pay-Per-Click Advertising: PPC advertising allows your business to set a budget, target an audience, and easily build upon your campaigns. Becoming a master of specific ad platforms can be one of the most profitable customer acquisition strategies. Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or other sponsored social posts are an incredible way to find users actively searching for your product or service, so don’t neglect this tool because you just might stumble on a gold mine.
- Search Engine Optimization: SEO is a key practice to bolster inbound traffic to your website via organic searches. While organic search will exist with or without using SEO best practices, you’ll fall far behind your competitors without a well-optimized site. Creating web content capitalizing on hot keywords and phrases your customers use in their Google searches will do well to get your web pages a higher SERP ranking, which is one among plenty of other SEO tactics you’ll have to utilize to get ahead of your competition on Google.
- Referrals and Incentive Programs: Using referral programs, discounts, and deals that can be marketed multiple times to different audience segments is a great way to solidify your marketing flywheel. Giving existing customers an incentive to find new users creates a dynamic experience for both users while building brand loyalty. Similarly, the cost of acquisition is often much cheaper when using promotions or referrals to retain or delight customers.
- Provide an Awesome Customer Experience: The human element of customer acquisition will always play a significant role in your company’s performance. If your intentions and strategies are good, but your product and customer experience are difficult, users will shy away from you quickly. Unless there is no competition in your niche, you always need to be thinking of how your customer experience rates vs. your competitors. The goal is to leave customers feeling valued and that their needs were met appropriately.
- Reputation Management: Reputation management is how your company monitors and reacts to public opinion on your products and services. In the digital age of business, a bad reputation can damage your brand significantly. Influencing public reputation on review sites, social media, and internal feedback channels is extremely valuable. You can bolster your reputation with friendly custom engagement, quick responses, honesty, and measured results.
- Tracking Success: Understanding the effects of your efforts to grow your customer acquisition strategy is crucial. You can do this by using proper tools and automation such as Hubspot, Google Analytics, and other data suites. The goal is to be informed and objective with your data and use it to either reinforce good instincts or cull bad ones. Once you’ve taken your customer acquisition flywheel from a guessing game to a fine-tuned machine, it can make all the difference in the world.
Build a Bulletproof Customer Acquisition Strategy
At Striventa, we pride ourselves on helping businesses attract the right customers. This means analyzing and optimizing your customer acquisition strategy from top to bottom. Have our team of experienced marketing specialists audit your company’s current strategy and identify any weak links dampening your overall customer conversions.
Looking for a scalable customer acquisition strategy that works for the long term? Reach out to us today! We’d love to have a one-on-one session with you.