Did you know? Over the past six years, the cost of acquiring new customers continues to rise. Yet, even if the marketing budget has increased, customers tend to trust brands less.
You can overcome this with the right strategy to capture customers’ attention, create greater engagement and improve sales conversion.
In this new article, you will learn the basics of customer acquisition to implement a quality strategy.
What is a customer acquisition strategy?
Customer acquisition is the process of acquiring new customers into your business. The goal of this process is to create a consistent and sustainable strategy to attract new customers and increase company revenues.
In marketing terms, the acquisition is about implementing certain strategies to market your products and services to new customers. It usually requires collaboration and alignment between the marketing and customer service teams.
Customer acquisition happens in stages. They can be visualized in the form of a funnel, which describes in detail the different phases a potential customer goes through. These steps are mainly:
Awareness: At this stage, your goal is to make your brand known to your target audience to generate leads. This generally involves focusing on a broad audience that may be interested in your brand or the products you sell, but that not necessarily has a clear purchase intent.
Consideration: Potential customers who move from the top of the funnel to consideration have usually taken an action that demonstrates their interest in a purchase. For example, they may sign up for your newsletter or follow your brand on social networks.
Decision: This is the last step a prospect takes before converting to a customer. At this stage, prospects demonstrate a strong intent to buy, whether it’s adding a product to their cart or creating a user account to get a free trial. You can send them incentives such as discount codes to convert prospects who are close to making a purchase decision.
How do you create your customer acquisition plan?
To create a customer acquisition plan that works, follow these four steps:
Define your ideal customer
First, you need to identify your target audience. If you are targeting multiple audiences, it may be best to design a customized acquisition strategy for each group.
In addition, the most successful customer acquisition campaigns include personalized elements according to the interests, needs, or behavior of individuals. To identify and understand your audience, your brand can use a variety of methods, including:
- Creating a target prospect profile, also known as a persona.
- Conducting market research.
- Analyzing new customer profiles.
- Leveraging third-party data from competitors.
- Understanding social trends to meet customers’ needs.
Define your goals:
To define the goals of your custom acquisition strategy, simply be SMART:
- Specific: Each goal should focus on one outcome.
- Measurable: You can effectively track their progress.
- Achievable: You don’t set impossible goals.
- Relevant: The goal is aligned with your business needs.
- Timely: Choose a time frame to reach your goal.
SMART customer acquisition goals allow you to know exactly what you are trying to achieve and optimize.
Define your acquisition funnel
Creating an acquisition funnel isn’t just about defining the prospect journey. It’s about defining a journey for each type of prospect. The source and actions of the prospect define their customer journey.
Think about the basics: does the customer journey start on a social media platform or with an organic search? This will help you set your starting point and identify where your leads are coming from.
To make it easier, ask yourself the following questions:
- How many people are registered to my Facebook page?
- What criteria best define them?
- What type of content can attract them to my website?
Let’s imagine that someone is visiting your website:
How do I get them to sign up so they enter my sales pipeline?
Every acquisition funnel is different. To create yours, look at when your conversion rates drop. You may have a lot of people interacting with your website, but none of them are converting into customers. Find out why! Look at things like the placement of your CTA on the page and the text it contains, or the content on the page.
Identify your indicators and make optimizations
For an acquisition campaign, there are several performance indicators (KPIs) that are worth tracking:
- The number of visitors (unique or total).
- The number of qualified leads per acquisition lever.
- The bounce rate.
- The average time spent on the website.
- The cost per acquisition.
- The return on investment (ROI).
The main reason to set up KPIs is to have a clear vision of what works and what doesn’t. Optimization must be a continuous process. The ultimate goal is to eliminate the campaigns that are not performing well, strengthen the ones that are, and eliminate any problems identified by the monitoring process. For example, if you find that the website traffic is high but the conversion is low, analyze the quality of the content or the location of the CTA.
Examples of acquisition strategies
1. Emailing
Whether it’s for an e-commerce site or a newly created brand, emailing is a powerful channel in an acquisition strategy. Indeed, users must show their commitment to a brand by accepting to receive regular email communications.
Read also → How does Eminence help you to automate your email marketing campaigns?
For the company that initiates an emailing campaign, the development possibilities are great. Emailing is indeed a way to collect data with an advanced level of precision on a base of leads, prospects, or customers. It is therefore an opportunity to offer them personalized content, but also to improve the communication performance to ultimately attract a qualified audience and enrich the customer portfolio.
2. Social networks
Social networks are ideal platforms to set up relevant acquisition campaigns. They gather a lot of information able to attract a specific audience towards content created specifically for them. Moreover, most social platforms provide access to campaign statistics, allowing advertisers to evaluate their actions and make adjustments.
Read more→ How does Eminence proceed to set up an effective Social Marketing strategy?
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
To use SEO as an acquisition lever, you have to think about optimization. This consists of providing search engines with a technically efficient website and creating content per SEO standards. The site must of course feature the usual expectations of Internet users such as a coherent and logical structure of web pages, a presence of strategic keywords, an optimized loading speed, etc.
Read also → How does Eminence guide you in your SEO strategy?
4. Inbound marketing
Necessary for SEO, content creation is also a great lever to attract new online visitors, and therefore potential future customers. For example, the creation of an e-book can be the central element of an acquisition strategy for a company wishing to make itself known in a niche market. This strategic choice requires investing time to produce quality content.
Read more: → How does Eminence conduct a successful strategic process?
5. Online advertising (SEA)
To set up an acquisition strategy based on the creation of an online ad, it is possible to use Google Ads. This platform is based on an algorithm that analyzes the relevance of the ad, its quality, and the budget invested to make it visible to an appropriate audience. The company displays its products or services to Internet users whose interests are in line with its product or service offer.
Read also: → How does Eminence guide you in your SEO strategy?
Customer acquisition and retention are critical to a company’s success. To implement a successful customer acquisition strategy, you must take into account the needs and expectations of your leads to attract them more easily, and retain them. If you have any further questions, do not hesitate to contact us.
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