A business, specifically a startup without customers or customer acquisition strategies, is nearly impossible to survive. It feels like gliding in the air without having a parachute. Because business is for customers, and customers themselves increase business growth. Another big thing to mark is that your business can’t accelerate without searching and making new customers invest in your product.
Increasing your customer network is, again, not a child’s game. Business frequently and actively demands to practice new strategies to attract new customers. You continuously need to scratch your minds on a new approach and perform trial and error methods.
Highlights of Contents
What Is Customer Acquisition?
Customer Acquisition is a list of methods used to acquire new customers by properly advertising products through various platforms and managing that relationship throughout the business.
These strategies are common, but every business needs a different approach to connect to their customers. However, the first step to acquiring new customers is to know who your customers/audience are and how your product is useful to them.
The next step is to know the right path that will lead you to your new customers. And believe me, you cannot guarantee which path may bring more customers to you.
How to Find the Right Acquisition Channel
When you know who is the audience you are targeting, it will be easier for you to reach out to them with proper channels. If you are setting up a new business, you might think exactly like the other experienced businessman who once were new to the stream and believed that customer could be acquired from only three main steps:
- Creating a website
- Email Marketing
- Maintaining connectivity through various channels
But here you are lacking; there’s a lot more you can do besides relaxing on a sofa and waiting for customers to ping. And to help you out, here are some strategies that will help you connect to the right customers.
List of Top 13 Customer Acquisition Strategies for 2020
You can be overwhelmed to hear that there are numerous paths other than I described above, to attract your customers like an Iron attracts a magnet. As discussed above, there are more than these three strategies, and you may not know which might be best suitable for you. Hence, to mark a massive output, you must verify as many techniques as you can.
That said, let’s dig into the topic to find out what you might have been missing out.
1. Know Your Buyer’s Persona
A buyer persona reflects an identity or model of your ideal customer build based on your marketing needs and your existing customer area.
The buyer’s persona will help you with focused marketing. It will provide insights about the exact customer looking for your product/services. However, you may not find this accurate. Sometimes, it may happen that the customer under your buyer persona doesn’t like your product. Regardless, for such cases, you can design two to three different personas as per your need.
2. Publish Your Ebook or Guides
As digital learning is replacing the traditional method of gaining knowledge, it is best to provide ebooks and guides on specific topics related to your product or your product detail itself.
You can leverage the benefit of email marketing and call to action attributes to reach out to your customers. As a startup, you can leverage these strategies as it will be more efficient for you. You can add infographics and unique content to let your customers know about your product and develop an interest in investing in it.
3. Interacting with Your Existing Network
Meeting and interacting with old friends and relatives might lead you to some worthy customers. There are always references to connect with.
Increase your network the same way to get in touch with many customers who may want to invest in your product. Keep in constant touch with them. Ask them about product reviews and feedback. It will help you to upgrade your product as per market needs.
But, yes, in search of new customers, don’t forget that you have existing ones. Because studies have confirmed that the probability of selling a product to existing customers is about 60-70%, while it reduces to 5-20% for new customers.
A break in communication can lessen the interest of existing customers and drive them away. So, keep them updated with your products and ask for regular feedback.
4. Partner with a Company/Affiliate Marketing
Partner with a company that encourages and supports your product. It works well. You can always support each other in tough times and celebrate victory together. It is also known as affiliate marketing.
You both can have a variety of audiences to target from both sides. The plus point to your customers with the partnership is that they can leverage combined services from both sides.
For example, a company delivering digital human resource solutions can partner with a banking institution to offer a combined output of fintech solutions to your audience. With such a partnership, you can attract more customers. Because the one who wants both facilities will ask you rather than finding it separately.
5. Build Free Tools or Services for Limited Offer
It is the human tendency to attract free offers. Customers seek that too. But then you might be wondering why to give freely when they can use it and throw afterward. You can relax because customers who want to invest in such products will anyhow attract towards you.
It will not only help them understand your product, but you can also get a recommendation from them.
6. Create Content for a Website that is Unique
Creating content is the simplest and the best affordable strategy to attract new customers. You don’t need a massive amount of money to invest in this. You don’t need to ask for references from your existing customers because your website can do the same for you.
Develop a website with quite cool graphics and a user interface that provides the best possible information to your customers. Create unique content for your website that delivers accurate data. Almost every company wishes to deliver outstanding content according to their niche and different from others.
7. Republish Old Content with a Hint of Something New
Content marketing is the strategy to create some unique contents to promote the product. But adding up new content may lower down previous contents’ page rankings. Some websites have a long-long history of blogs that goes to the archives. It can be avoided if newer blogs have backlinks to the old ones.
Another way is to update the older contents with a small hint of fresh content and update their data and time and republish them. This way, the rankings will not be lowered and it will boost your organic search.
8. Publish on Other Websites
For a more focused and increased number of organic searches, you can post various blogs on different websites. It is well known as ‘guest posting’. It will increase the amount of relevant traffic to your websites.
But sometimes guest-blogging can be a source of decreasing reputation. Once you are frequent with this, the blog may have more feeling of product promotion than building a healthy relationship with the customers. The content will be more of a large volume and less of good quality. That’s when the trouble starts.
To get over this, you must focus on quality content rather than searching for do-follow links or backlinks. Because anyhow, the right customer will always find you.
9. Search Engine Optimization
Another best use of content marketing is to use keywords that aim to generate your page’s good ranking. If you are new and not an SEO analyst, playing with keywords might be confusing for you. But around 67% of the marketing people think SEO is the most effective marketing strategy. Just remember:
- Try to select some specific high traffic generating keywords
- Use Adwords for a paid campaign
- Try to use some long-tailed keywords because its proper use can help you achieve the exact target.
10. Social Media Marketing
Currently, about 3 billion, which is approximately 50% of the world’s population, actively uses social media.
One of the leading marketing tools, social media marketing, can get you to many familiar and targeted audiences. It uses different social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. to deliver your content, connect with audiences, and drive colossal website traffic.
Facebook is the biggest social network used by more than a billion people in the world.
Using accurate posting and content delivering strategy, you can attract a significant audience within a lesser time duration.
11. Email Marketing
Email marketing refers to sharing commercial messages to various groups of people who are your targeted audience. You can share multiple product/services templates, advertisements, and sales or business requests.
This acquisition method may seem obsolete, but it can still stand out as an effective strategy for your product promotion generating high ROI. According to stats, on every 1$ spend, email marketing can generate an ROI of 42$.
With email marketing tools and software, you can analyze who has received your emails. If not received, you can resend it to a particular group after completely changing the subject to stop spamming all of them.
12. Analytics
Analytics show the progress of any tool or method applied. Without analytics, you cannot guarantee if the technique is right for you, the amount of traffic it generates, and your website’s effectiveness.
You can change the methods and strategies with powerful analytical tools if they are not profiting you, without wasting much time.
13. Maintain Consistency
Consistency throughout the business is equally important as the above strategies. You must ensure to continue performing these practices to engage your existing customers and acquire new customers constantly.
You can count the loss of such customers as it takes a lot of time to build your identity. Customers don’t engage on the very first day. It takes years of hard work to maintain such engagement. And a break to these may result in loss of communication and interest for your product.
Continue marketing through different areas to gain more value for your product. As business is for a lifetime, you must be consistent equally.
Do you know the Digital Marketing Strategies to Increase Online Business?
Ending Notes
All businesses are not the same; neither is their customer target. So various firms can achieve their target by deploying multiple strategies. As a startup, it must be your goal to use every strategy that can help you and continue with the one that generates results. It may happen that after working harder, you still have not achieved what you want to. But then don’t stop, because growing business is not a one day process.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1: What is Customer Acquisition?
A1: The standard definition of Customer Acquisition that you will always come across is the strategy of gaining and engaging New Customers with your business. Every business must entail various tactics to win customers. Also, every business demands a varied set of strategies to gain new customers. And these strategies mainly revolve around three words: Gain, Engage, and Grow.
- Gain: You cannot settle down with a few countable customers. You must increase your customers’ count to make your business famous and useful to more and more people. New customers can help you add more value to your product.
- Engage: It is necessary to keep your customers engaged. That means give them timely product benefits to ensure that they keep on investing in you. Communication is the essence of any relationship, and to keep that relationship continue and flourishing, a regular conversation is essential. And good advice is that don’t forget about your existing customers. Ask them for acknowledgments. It will help you know how much you have to brush your product.
- Grow: The main motive behind you acquiring customers is that they will help you grow. How? They can act as a referral or recommendation to other businesses (their customers). Or you can up-sell and cross-sell your products to them to increase your business.
Q2: How to retain customers for a longer time?
A2: As I already said, in search of new customers, don’t lack in communicating with the existing ones and keep them with you. It is necessary for you to know the LTV- Life-Time Value of your customers. For these, there are some strategies to apply.
- Up-sell: You can promote or persuade your customers to buy some more expensive products or add-ons to the one on the wishlist.
- Cross-sell: You can convince your customers to buy something to supplement or complement the product they already purchased.
- Go for Loyalty programs: Increase your customer to product sell ratio by setting up various schemes for your customers. Any customers will love it if they are incentivized. Provide them with free servicings, free usage offers, discounts, membership possibilities, any other such to let them stick to your products.
- Have regular feedback: Never hesitate to ask for feedback for your customers. They will give you the right idea about how to upgrade your product.
Q3: What are the best possible Customer acquisition strategies to win new customers?
A3: You can try a variety of strategies for your business to win new customers. As a startup, you may not have enough money to use every strategy, but you still have time. You can ask some people to work free for you; they might cut you out a deal. You can have negotiations further. Now the main question, what are the strategies you can use:
1. Paid Marketing
If you have enough budget, paid marketing can lend you a high conversion rate via online marketing. Paid marketing helps you with boosting already posted ads on social media to gather more engagement. It can lead you to more customers than through sales.
Another paid marketing includes remarketing. Regular remarketing of already posted ads can help you engage your customers(who already liked your post) who might have forgotten about the product in the meantime.
2. Offline Marketing
Offline marketing can help gain new customers while staying offline. Offline marketing, in addition to an online one, is a great way to get diversity in business strategies. Offline marketing includes advertising through banners and billboards, referrals, and advertising through events.
3. Social Media Marketing
Social media is a growing trend not only amongst youngsters but businesses too. Almost half of the world’s population is active on social sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. you get to face a broader exposure for your business.
You can go for QA sections on Quora and other related websites for generating traffic just by answering questions about your product with a backlink to your website. Regular posting and collaborating with influencers are also essential parts of social media marketing.
4. Email Marketing
Probably one of the most straightforward and most ROI generating tactics is email marketing. Most business people tend to go for marketing their products through emails. You can share regular updates about your products, new releases, and much more. While other tactics may not directly reach your customers, emails are a great way to share directly to your customers’ inboxes.
One good thing is you can review the email reach through email marketing software. If there are any unopened or unreached mails, you can collectively share the mail to that particular group only without spamming others.
5. Search Engine Marketing
Be it Search Engine optimization, content marketing, or paid campaigns, you can reach out to customers by marking the keywords on your content and increasing your website page’s ranking.
Whether you go for ranking high focused keywords, long-tailed ones, content republishing, and refreshing, you can target an attentive audience and receive a great ROI.
6. Affiliate Marketing
Nonetheless, the above strategies, affiliate marketing is quite different. You can develop a program for your customers to share a partnership with you. These customers can be your influences and well-wishers. Imagine getting high traffic from both the businesses to focus on.
7. Integrate Products
You can have your product integrated with other business products. For example, a mobile selling shop can partner with headphones or phone cover selling ones. You both can provide incentivized products for more customer attraction.
Though every strategy is a lot different from others, I’d advise you to implement every strategy as you may not know, which can be more beneficial.
