No business can thrive without new customers. And in order to get new customers, a company has to have a good customer acquisition strategy.
A customer acquisition strategy needs to be a crucial business component. If you fail to devise one, you will struggle with business growth.
However, the hardest bit regarding this issue is figuring out what channel suits your business best when it comes to bringing in new customers. It is important to find a channel that is affordable and sustainable in the long run.
To make that easier, below you will find a few strategies that will most certainly help you find new customers. These have shown great results for a number of entrepreneurs and they still work like a charm.
But first, define your target audience
The first step you need to execute consists of identifying the right users or potential audiences for your business. You may have a great product that solves particular problems for a certain demographic of consumers, but it will do you no good if those consumers haven’t heard of it.
In other words, it is important to discover who these customers are and focus your customer acquisition efforts (primarily) on them.
You can’t market your brand properly if you don’t have your target customer in mind. This will only limit your reach and expose your business to the wrong people.
So, conduct wholesome market research and try to figure out who and how you should market your product to.
The good old email marketing
Email marketing is still a great marketing weapon that you need to have in your arsenal.
Hence, if you want to reap the rewards of this marketing channel, growing an email list is a must. This list is a base of prospects that you can engage with through lead-generating strategies.
One good way to create this list is by taking advantage of a good lead magnet. This is also called a gated offer. You can give it away as an ebook, white paper, checklist, or cheat sheet, in exchange for a potential customer’s email address.
Just ensure that you are offering a valuable item. If you use a recycled content piece, the chances are that customers won’t fall for it.
You can also offer intriguing surveys, analyses, or tools specifically designed for your audience to get their email address in exchange for some business insights.
Finally, as this list grows longer and longer, you will see that segmenting might come in handy. In this case, you should learn how to send mail merges from Excel. This will allow you to send emails to large numbers of recipients stored in your spreadsheets in a matter of a few clicks.
This way, you will easily select the right people that need to hear about your offer.
Implement a referral program
Implementing a referral program can really help your business’ sales cycle and produce qualified prospects that will boost your sales efforts. A referral program is known to generate better ROI than cold calling or generating brand-new leads from scratch.
On top of that, there are five key benefits that should make you think about implementing a referral program. These include:
- Reduction of your sales budget by focusing on customers who are satisfied with your products and services.
- Increasing your sales cycle by generating leads within the scope of your satisfied customers’ circles of influence.
- Fast generation of more satisfied customers which ensures a continuous cycle of repeat customers and referrals.
- Improvement of sales revenue since qualified leads provide better ROI than unqualified sales leads.
- A better overall ROI from your marketing strategy.
Therefore, it wouldn’t be bad at all to create a well-planned program designed to capture referrals. Develop a program with a clear goal and choose your timing carefully. Do not ask for referrals right after a sale, but instead allow your customers some time to evaluate your products.
However, asking your customers to refer to a large number of people one by one can take too much of their time and result in their unwillingness to do so. So, why not utilize software solutions to help you with your referral program? For instance, having a good contact picker on your referral form will save your customers a lot of time by allowing them to add their friends’ email addresses in just a few minutes.
Blogging
Blogging is another great customer acquisition method that suits businesses of all sizes, industries, and audience types. When you start writing a blog, you have a chance to explore different topics, flex your knowledge in your industry, and build authority among people reading your articles.
Before you start your blog, make sure that you have sustainable resources in place. You can write the blog yourself or have some of your employees do it. You could also hire freelancers or guest writers for this job.
Additionally, having a graphic designer and editor on board can help ensure your content is optimized for both search engines and reader experience.
Finally, nowadays it is quite easy to add a blog to your website. Many CMS solutions have this feature built-in and many offer plug-ins that can implement this feature.
Social media marketing
Social media marketing consists of two methods — paid and organic.
Organic social media is best for boosting brand awareness, developing a company personality, and sharing content published somewhere else, such as blogs and videos.
If other marketing efforts were a fire, social media marketing would be additional gasoline that is meant to spread that fire. Organic social media capitalizes on the virality factor too. It inspires your customers and followers to help you advertise.
Some individuals believe that organic social media is a waste of time (13% of marketers have stated that it is the most overrated marketing method). However, what they don’t know is that it can work great if you develop a good plan for using it.
Ask yourself these questions before you begin:
- What networks will you leverage and which ones will you avoid?
- What is your social brand voice?
- Who shall be tasked with the development and management of content?
These questions may seem a bit difficult, but don’t worry. When you post organically on social media, it may seem like shouting into the wind. However, the most important thing is to access the right networks.
For instance, if your target demographic consists of men, it makes no sense using Pinterest as your main platform, as it is known that not many males use Pinterest.
On the other hand, if your audience is made up of women, you should definitely consider Pinterest, Instagram, and Snapchat.
It is obvious that social media can be used for more than one purpose, so take advantage of it the best you can.
Final thoughts
There is no doubt that you should take care of your current customers. However, if you want growth, you will have to make new friends.
Customer acquisition is the lifeline of any company, no matter the size. Therefore, you cannot afford to ignore marketing your business to new customers.
