In any business of any age and size, customers play a crucial role. They have the power to massively influence business growth. Therefore, understanding your customers better is vital because only they can gain you more business.
You want more customers, and you are an ambitious marketer or business owner, you should take into account the term customer acquisition, which is the process of bringing new customers to your business. The objective is to keep a constant increase in new customers, generally by marketing.
In reality, the practice is normally tricky for the company, hence this article will give a clear picture of customer acquisition.
What Is Customer Acquisition?
So what exactly is Customer Acquisition? The simple answer is, “Customer Acquisition is about inducing new consumers. More specifically, customer acquisition involves acquiring new customers or existing potential to be future customers for your company”
Targeted customers are the ones that are often ignorant of your goods and services or that have purchased from your rivals. It is a process used to bring in customers from brand awareness to buying decisions down the marketing funnel. Companies should be prepared to plan high acquisition costs and also concentrate on customer retention that aims at nurturing the relationship with current customers since both are essential to business.
Customer Acquisition Process
Your acquisition process starts by determining potential or targeted customers for your brand’s growth. You should figure out who they are, how to acquire them, how to communicate with them, or how to offer them your products.
Identifying suitable buyers for your items would allow you to learn that people are interested in purchasing your products or currently use a similar sort of product from your competitors.
Next, you should look for ways to communicate with them after determining who the target is. You can do research surveys, phone calls, email, or use analytics tools. If a lead seems likely to turn into a prospect, he will often be assigned to a salesperson for further interaction.
The process of customer acquisition entails hard work and commitment. Hence, you need to recruit the right candidates who know the process and execute it properly. They must be able to grasp the needs of a customer and serve a relevant product that is beneficial to the customer.
After making clear of your acquisition process, you need to specify the expenses that will incur to execute the plan. We will have a closer look at this in the next part of the article.
What Is The Cost of Customer Acquisition?
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the expense of introducing the company to a new customer or client, such as marketing expenses, events, and ads. Normally, business owners measure it under a particular campaign or period. CAC plays a key rule because it gives an intrinsic picture of your marketing efforts and enables you to assess your ROI — a yardstick that CEOs, managers, and investors all care about.
CAC commonly equals to total expenditure on the purchasing process (sales and marketing fees) divided by total new customers gained within a given period.
Nevertheless, the calculation is typically much more complicated. To calculate marketing expenses, for instance, you also have to compute everything that goes to marketing, from the actual cost of particular campaigns to the overhead expenses involved in keeping a marketing department.
You can calculate CAC by campaign quarterly, annually, or whichever benefits your business. The number one reason why this figure is so important is that you can assess how much value every new customer needs to bring.
Customer Acquisition Strategies
A strong customer acquisition strategy is an integral part of any business. Indeed, one of the most challenging aspects of any business scaling is to find out the most economically feasible channel for gaining new customers. Below are some strategies that you can take into consideration adopting:
Content Marketing
Content marketing is an effective technique to gain new customers for all kinds of businesses. Building creative, interesting and useful content is an extremely efficient way to attract the attention of your viewer and bring them to your site. In a world of misleading advertisements and diminishing consumer trust, content marketing can offer a hand of friendship. There are some common forms below and the required resources to make them.
1. Blogging
An important tactic is blogging, which is a superb method of acquisition for companies of all sizes, industries and various kinds of viewers. Developing a blog enables you to discover different subjects, stiffen your domain expertise, and create power among your viewers.
Blogging also constantly offers you new opportunities to convince your audience. You can write the blog all by yourself, or if you have enough financial resources, you can hire people to do that for you. Committed staff, freelancers, or guest writers, all can be your blog writers. You can optimize your content for both search engines and viewers’ experience by having a graphic designer and writer on board.
2. Ebooks, Guides, and Other Content Offers
Also, you can take advantage of ebooks, guides, and other content offers in content marketing. Since these kinds of content are generally more in-depth by nature, they require more effort and resources to create.
This is why these kinds of content are also privately owned, because viewers will have to share personal info such as emails and names to unlock it. Besides, content offers are also an essential component of the conversion funnel and customer acquisition, and therefore it can help you acquire more leads for your business.
3. Video
A more complex type of content to make is video. With affordable higher-quality cameras and plenty of freelancers available, creating videos is easier than you might think. Video production entails writing, editing, creating, and animating screenplays, luckily you can outsource all of them to a good explainer video agency.
Video appears to be the most costly form of content marketing, so be certain to protect your best video ideas. Videos can have the power to engage users for longer on your website because video is more captivating than text.
Internet users everywhere enjoy video content, hence the preference for video content results in increasing demand for video. Many marketing professionals count on the power of video content to growing user loyalty and enhance brand credibility.
Social Media Marketing
Another powerful way for businesses of all sizes to reach prospects and customers is social media marketing. It is about taking advantage of social media platforms to communicate with your customers to increase your brand awareness, boost sales, and generate clicks on websites.
This means posting unique content on your social media accounts, responding to your subscribers or followers and reaching them, evaluating your performances, and advertising on social media. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat are currently popular social media platforms.
Before you plunge straight into posting on social media, let’s take a look at the bigger picture. The first thing to consider is your approach to social media. You have to answer three key questions: What are your goals? Which social media platforms do you want to focus on? What type of content do you want to share?
Rather than producing and uploading content spontaneously, here, you will have to prepare the content beforehand. You also have to post quality content that your viewers prefer at the right timing and frequency to make sure that you optimize your control on social media.
The following step is listening to your customers and convincing them. Since your business and social media following grows, people will know about your existence and interact more. They will leave a comment, tag you in their posts, or send a direct message.
Next, you will want to know the performance of your social media marketing strategy, for instance, whether or not you achieve more people last month, the number of positive mentions you obtain in a month or the number of people using your brand’s hashtag on their posts. In these cases, the social media platform is a life-saver. It will help answer these questions.
Search Engine Marketing
To generate web traffic, you should take SEM into account. SEM stands for search engine marketing. This is a specific type of marketing on search engines-paid search. The most commonly known and paid search tool is Google Ads. Over 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine. Therefore, making use of this strategy is an ideal option.
Search engines help increase more visits to websites than any other source. SEM optimizes the power of search engines such as Google to reach potential customers at the right time and place. SEM can place you at the top or bottom of the first page. This is especially important for businesses that have little or no brand recognition, and this will have a tremendous influence on your earnings.
You may also put a narrow scope to concentrate on raising the conversion rate rather than target a wider demographic as you might in a TV ad. For instance, you can pull it or remedy it easily if an ad has a small conversion rate.
But if it is the case for a traditional ad, it might go on until the expiry date of the contract. To alter it, you must get authorization, and it cost a lot of money. Hence, do not miss out on one of the most effective ways to expand your business in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
Email Marketing
Another strategy is email marketing. At least 99% of consumers check their email daily, so email marketing can provide a direct line into your consumer’s inbox. This may appear to be an outmoded tool of acquisition, but it is an extremely effective way of staying in front of your customers and helping to promote unique content, product information, and special offers and events.
One of the primary reasons for the use of email is that social media platforms are unstable, and you never really possess your account. This implies that your posting history might just vanish. You have your email list, though. Nobody can strip those links away from you.
Also, email is a way of reaching your audience directly by sending a happy birthday message or a useful promotional email. Personalization goes a long way in email marketing.
Based on the most recent findings by MarketingSherpa, approximately 60 percent of consumers subscribe to a brand’s list to obtain promotional messages and deals, as opposed to only 20 percent that follows social media brands. Overall, email marketing remains one of the best strategies to attract and retain customers.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is an abbreviation for search engine optimization, which is the method of improving your website to obtain free visits from the search engine results page. Investing in a sensible SEO strategy, as well as using wise tactics and you will surpass your competition.
Search engines would scan or inspect various websites to understand the site’s content better. This can help produce the results that are not only of high quality but are also appropriate to what the searcher is seeking for on the search engine pages. Likewise, the search engines will check the website to assess how convenient it is to browse and read, favoring customer-friendly pages by raising rankings on the search engine results page.
By making certain modifications to the design and content of your website so that your site appears more appealing to a search engine, you can achieve the goal of making the search engine show your website as the top result. With SEO, not only you can boost your leads and sales but your business will also become more valuable as your SEO rankings increase.
Conclusion
Gaining new customers will not be a significant challenge for established companies as they have already had many customers who know their brand. However, it may be a big issue for startups or small brands.
You need to tell the customers that you exist, accompany them throughout the process, show them how considerate you are, or determine to what extent your product fulfills their needs. Therefore, we hope that by having in-depth knowledge about customer acquisition, you would be able to attract new customers and grow your business.
