ShivaniAcquisition marketing means executing certain strategies to market your products and services to new customers. It typically needs collaboration and an association between marketing and customer service teams.
Acquisition marketing is distinct from other forms of marketing because it explicitly targets those consumers who are aware of your brand and are considering your product purchase. It’s also different in that it actively involves your customer service and success teams.
In this blog, even we will learn about the importance of customer retention in customer acquisition strategy. Still, the key thing to remember here is that your customer service team has the same ability to bring on and keep new customers as your marketing team does and that makes acquisition marketing more extensive than your marketing team.
Sure, your marketing team is responsible for developing and releasing new promotional materials that may spark new customers’ interest. But your customer care team will communicate directly with your current customers — and your existing customers can become one of your best marketers.
Before we discuss retention through your customer service team, let’s talk about some customer acquisition strategies that your marketing team can implement.
Customer Acquisition Strategies
Customer acquisition methods can be broken up into paid and free, inbound and outbound, etc. However, your business’s best methods will depend on your audience, resources, and overall strategy. Below, we will review four commonly used methods of acquiring new customers and some helpful tools.
1. Content Marketing
Content marketing is the most powerful customer acquisition method for every business. Creating new, exciting, and relevant content is a highly effective way to snag your audience’s attention and send them to your website.
When it comes to content marketing, there’s no wrong type of content you can create. Here are some of the most popular types and the resources needed to create them.
2. Blogging
Blogging is one of the highest acquisition methods for businesses of all sizes, industries, and audience types. Running a blog provides you with an opportunity to explore different topics, flex your knowledge in your industry, and build authority among your readers. Blogging also empowers you to engage with your audience, whether through a graphic they can bookmark for later, a question they can answer in the comments, or an enticing call-to-action they can click.
But as we have mentioned above, if you want to start a blog, make sure that you have sustainable resources in place. Your blog writers can be dedicated employees, freelancers, or guest writers. Having a graphic designer and editor on board can help ensure your content is optimized for search engines and reader experience. Lastly, putting a blog on your website is quite simple and easy, depending on your blogging platform.
3. Ebooks, Guides, and Content Offers
Ebooks, guides, and other kinds of gated offers depict a distinctive type of content marketing because they typically include more in-depth and valuable content. To compare, where a blog post may tell customers about five different email subject lines that improve open rates, on the other a guide would need to step back and include the basics of the email marketing approach. See how Ebook and guide can offer more in-depth value content for readers?
That’s why these content types are also gated, meaning that readers must exchange personal information like emails and names to access the content. Content offers play a crucial role when we talk about customer acquisition and the conversion funnel and can support you to get more leads out of your blog and content marketing strategy.
Creating content offers is the same as blogging but might demand more specialized resources. Whereas blog posts usually twirl around a monotonous writing and design process, ebooks, guides, templates, white papers, and other downloadable content hold their purpose and production process. Again, you can create these with in-house or outsourced resources, but be aware that they might require an extra set of eyes and a unique promotional plan. Also, the cost to outsource content creation is always lower than doing it in-house. By doing so, you can create more effective and precise content, yielding higher-quality leads and ultimately boosting acquisition.
4. Video
Video is one of the complex forms of content to build. Still, with higher-quality cameras, it is becoming cheaper, and even freelancers are available, creating videos has become easier than ever. Video marketing is a part of a broader content strategy, and it’s more about content than quality, though the latter does help in the long-run.
Video production usually requires script writing, editing, production, and animation — you can outsource all the things through freelancers or production agencies. Video tends to be the most expensive of the content types, so be sure to preserve your very best video ideas.
If you want to visualize an idea for your audience, you can create a Slideshare alternative to video. Online video makers can be a valuable resource for businesses and individuals who want to create professional-looking videos without having to invest in expensive equipment or software.
Content marketing aims to connect with and convert your audience. Because of this, every piece of content should be relevant to your readers and include a clear call-to-action. Content marketing is also partially content creation and partially content promotion. Keep reading to learn more about combining customer acquisition methods with highly effective promotion tactics to get better results.
5. Social Media
Social media marketing consists of two methods: organic and paid. Organic social media is most useful for boosting brand awareness, developing a company personality, and sharing content you’ve published elsewhere (like your blog or videos). Organic social media also capitalizes on the virality factor, inspiring your customers and followers to help you advertise.
Some companies consider organic social media a waste of time (13% of marketers have reported that it’s the most overrated marketing tactic). It can be if you don’t develop a solid game plan for its use.
- What networks will you use, and which ones are you going to avoid?
- What’s your social brand voice, and who will be tasked with developing and managing content on your marketing team?
- Do you have a crisis plan in place?
If these questions seem intimidating, don’t fret. Publishing organically on social media may appear like shouting into a void, and with 3.8 billion users, it can sure feel that way. The key is getting the right networks — and all this comes back to a well-defined audience.
For example, if you’re targeting an audience composed of men, Pinterest would have little value for you as only 15% of men use Pinterest. If your audience comprises millennials, you should include Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat in your playbook.
Considering using social media management tools like Hootsuite or Buffer to support you to curate and post content on your networks.
On the other hand, taking the benefit of paid social media may be a better tactic for your business, depending on your budget and audience type. You are spending money on social media advertisements and exhibitions, a surefire way to get content in front of your audience without the need to build up a network of loyal followers.
Whereas sponsored posts on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram get your content in front of the right eyes, Facebook Lead Ads allow you to advertise on social media and gather customer information such as email addresses and names. This information can make the difference between a lead and a follower, so if your business requires to build its list, this might be the acquisition approach for you.
6. Search Marketing
There are two sides of the search marketing: organic and paid.
Organic search marketing is also known as search engine optimization (SEO). Like social media, SEO complements content marketing efforts by optimizing your content so your target audience more easily finds it.
Think about it: When you search something on Google, you generally click on one of the first results (if not the very first result), right? SEO’s idea is to create content that shows up high in the search engine results page (SERP) and makes searches want to click on your content.
SEO is far from an exact science, but some proven methods help your content rank better. SEO best practices involve creating indexable content that search engines can read, decipher, and index within a SERP. You can increase your content’s “indexability” (no, I cannot say for certain if that’s a real word) by:
- Putting your main keyword in the post title
- Adding alt text to your images
- Uploading transcripts for video and audio content
- Linking internally within your site
There’s a lot that goes into SEO, but these are a few basics to get you started.
SEO is a popular customer acquisition method for a couple of reasons: It’s relatively easy and cost-effective. SEO and organic growth have also been reported as the #1 inbound marketing priority for companies worldwide. Put in the time to learn SEO strategies, stay up to date with trends, and optimize your blog posts — and you’ll find your content ranking better than before.
On the other hand, paid search marketing (pay-per-click, or PPC) is advertising on Google SERP itself. Instead of organically optimizing your content, PPC enables you to create a search result and pay for it to display alongside organic results, therefore increasing your chances of being found by searchers.
Discover more about search marketing as a customer acquisition practice and furnish your content and ads to deliver the best in search engines by using tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, Open Site Explorer, and Ahrefs.
7. Email Marketing
What do marketers do with all that customer information they collect through other customer acquisition methods? They create an email list, and they leverage that email list to connect with and convert their customers.
Email marketing might appear as an outdated acquisition method. Still, it’s a highly effective way to stay in front of your customers and promote quality content, product information, discounts, and events. Email is also a great way to connect with your audience, whether by sending a happy birthday email or a valuable promotional email.
But what you send isn’t the only important part of email marketing. It’s also helpful to keep an eye on list behaviour. For example, when you get a new subscriber, it’s safe to assume that the consumer is interested in your company and wants to learn more. Certain link clicks in your email can alert you to what your subscribers are most interested in. Furthermore, unsubscribe people can give you insight into how your subscribers view your emails and the content you share.
Email marketing is one of the few ways to monitor consumer behaviour without asking too many questions. It also provides a direct line into your consumer’s inbox (though it’s not guaranteed they’ll open your emails), unlike social media, search, or content marketing. There’s no better acquisition tactic outside direct sales than email marketing that gets to the individual customer’s heart.
We can simply observe how well these customer acquisition methods perform together. For instance, social media marketing can improve SEO-optimized content that incorporates a call-to-action to join an email list. That’s a little long-winded, but you get the gist.
Mixing up and experimenting with various customer acquisition methods can also help you learn more about your audience and introduce new tactics to your current strategy. Regardless of which strategies you choose, always leave room for analysis, improvement, and change — because you never know when customers may stop responding to your methods or leave altogether.
How to Improve Your Customer Acquisition Strategy
Every business wants new consumers to grow and succeed, so whether you have a company of five or 5,000, having a roadmap for customer acquisition is a smart strategy. A powerful customer acquisition strategy should consist of four things: sustainable, flexible, targeted, and diversified.
a) Sustainable
A sustainable customer acquisition strategy is the one that performs in the long run. It means that the investments you make (whether money, time, or human) can be upheld for the foreseeable future.
For instance, if you plan to acquire new customers through a blog, you should have the tools and resources in place to ensure content production lives past one or two posts – effectively bringing in organic traffic for months or years to come. This is why inbound marketing is effective — it creates sustainable traffic and, therefore, a sustainable source of new customers. Consider this in comparison to the ad, which can be an effective way to acquire customers as long as the ads are live.
b) Flexible
Your customer acquisition strategy should also be flexible because marketing and sales and how people respond to them are always changing. While salespeople were once the gatekeepers of information about a product, that’s no longer the case.
Consumers are increasingly sceptical of brand claims, and anything said about a product by its reps. In a recent study, we found that 81% of consumers trust family and friends’ advice over businesses. Creating a customer acquisition strategy that only relies on salespeople would put your company in a tough spot. Keep your strategy pliable, and you’ll always be ready to respond to market trends.
c) Targeted
All consumers aren’t your best consumers, and customer acquisition can result in a crazy waste of resources if not pinpointed toward the right people. Before you invest in any customer acquisition methods, you must define who you’re targeting said methods.
The process alone of defining your buyer persona can help weed out unnecessary or wasted acquisition efforts and alert you to specific needs or desires that some channels may meet. For example, businesses targeting millennials might consider creating videos as part of their content marketing strategy, given that 91% of adults ages 18-29 use YouTube.
A targeted customer acquisition strategy requires taking a step back and figuring out what’s best for your business, resources, and audience. Then, you can expect to see real responses to your customer acquisition efforts.
d) Diversified
Have you ever heard of cross-pollination? When bees spread pollen between various plants, bringing about variations of species that better withstand time and nature. In this case, marketers can be compared to these well-travelled bees.
When you diversify your acquisition strategy and use various acquisition methods, you have a greater chance of reaching new audiences and generating new leads.
I hope you find this article useful and if you have any point to add. Kindly let us know in the comments.
