For any business, online or offline, ensuring a steady influx of new customers over time is key to meeting growth targets. Of course, that doesn’t mean we should ignore existing customers as retention marketing can be even more valuable than chasing new customers . However, when it comes to new customer acquisition, it’s not just about the number of new customers; it’s about targeting the right customers who will appreciate the product and become loyal customers driving high lifetime values. Let’s dive into 7 tactics to ensure you ace your customer acquisition strategy.
1. Customer Research: Understand and Empathize
Customer research is the foundation of a successful acquisition strategy. It involves collecting data and insights to deeply understand your target audience and empathize with their experience.
Before diving into customer research, it’s crucial to define your purpose. Clearly identify the problem you aim to solve and the data needed for your research. Questions like the scope, required data, impact on business decisions, and relevant variables should guide your purpose. For example, if boosting sales is the goal, understand why customers aren’t buying—whether it’s pricing, features, or other factors.
Key Actions:
- Conduct surveys or interviews online, in-store or via the phone to gather insights.
- Explore demographic data, hobbies, and employment status to create personas for your ideal customer profile.
Create a Research Plan:
Once the problem is defined, build a research plan. Develop surveys or interviews with relevant questions, keeping them concise to respect participants’ time. Address demographic, behavioral, and product-related aspects. Use tools like SurveyMonkey or TypeForm for engaging surveys.
Key Approaches:
- Surveys and Interviews: Gather firsthand insights from your audience.
- User Tests: Analyze website data through A/B tests to determine user preferences.
- Look at Other Case Studies: Study business models and strategies from other companies for inspiration.
Identify the Personas for Your Research:
After defining your purpose and creating a research plan, identify participants who align with your buyer personas. Reach out to those who recently interacted with your brand, including competitors’ customers and recent purchasers. Offering rewards and incentives for completing the surveys can enhance participation.
Best Practices:
- Recruit diverse participants to ensure a balanced perspective.
- Use social media channels and email campaigns to call for participants.
- Offer rewards and incentives for survey or focus group participation.
Leverage Social Media Listening:
Monitor social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for valuable customer insights. Pay attention to complaints and negative feedback to identify areas for improvement. Leverage social media listening tools and review websites to understand customer sentiments.
Effective Strategies:
- Use specific keywords related to your industry and brand for focused insights.
- Learn from competitors’ customer reviews and feedback.
Leverage Polls on Social Media:
Engage users through interactive content like polls on social media platforms. People are more willing to share opinions on social media, and polls are quick, fun, and boost overall engagement.
Success Example:
- Observe how Revolut uses Twitter polls to receive customer insight on the uses of their products.Â
Analyze Your Data:
After collecting data through various methods, organize it in a structured spreadsheet, data visualization tool or dashboard. Analyze the data to identify patterns and trends that align with your research objectives. Visualize the data using graphs and charts to create insightful marketing reports.
Effective Analysis:
- Segment data to understand specific trends.
- Visualize data for clear and comprehensive reporting.
By following these steps, you lay the groundwork for effective customer research, gaining invaluable insights to inform your marketing strategy.
As for how it helps with customer acquisition, knowledge is power when acquiring the right-fit customers. Leverage tools to gather quantitative and qualitative data, connecting the dots between user behavior and their experience on your site. Utilize features such as customer data, feedback, surveys, and interviews to enhance your understanding and fuel strategy. Once you understand your customer’s behavior the world of possibilities will open up. Know when they click and when they skip? You can adjust for that. Want to encourage positive customer behavior? Use rewards to reinforce it.Â
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Boosting Organic Visibility
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the cornerstone that ensures your digital presence isn’t lost in the vast online landscape. It’s the reason why, when you urgently need guidance on fixing a flat tire, Google provides you with a step-by-step guide exactly when you need it the most.
In essence, SEO is a strategic effort to enhance a company’s visibility in organic search results. The ultimate goal is to attract more visitors to the website, thereby increasing the potential for conversions, customers, and revenue. To put it simply, SEO is the key to making sure that when someone searches for your product or service, your website is what they find.
However, the intricacies of SEO go beyond this simplified definition. Search engines, particularly Google, employ sophisticated algorithms that consider various elements when determining the ranking of a webpage. These elements include title tags, keywords, image tags, internal link structure, and inbound links, also known as backlinks. The assessment doesn’t stop at on-page factors; it extends to site structure, design, visitor behavior, and other external, off-site factors that collectively influence the site’s position in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
SEO primarily revolves around two critical aspects: rankings and visibility. Rankings refer to a webpage’s position in the SERP, which can fluctuate due to factors like age, competition, or algorithm changes. Visibility, on the other hand, measures how prominent a domain is in search results, affecting SEO’s main objectives—traffic and domain authority.
Why SEO Matters: Navigating the New Buying Journey
The importance of SEO extends beyond visibility; it strategically positions your brand throughout the entire buyer’s journey. As consumer behavior evolves, Google’s dominance in the search engine market becomes more pronounced. Consumers increasingly rely on search engines; across all generations, people turn to search engines to find answers online.
In the buying process, buyers utilize Google to gather information about their problem, inquire about potential solutions, evaluate alternatives based on reviews or social media, and finally, engage with a company after exhausting all information sources. For businesses, this underscores the crucial opportunity to capture customer attention and consideration by appearing in search results.
Components of an Effective SEO Strategy
A robust SEO strategy involves optimizing three key areas: technical website setup, content, and links.
- Technical Setup: This ensures search engines can find, scan, and index web pages. Factors include website navigation, simple URL structure, page speed, removing dead links, sitemap, robots.txt files, and avoiding duplicate content.
- Content: Content is the heart of SEO, as it satisfies user intent and determines page rankings. Keyword research, on-page optimization, and the inclusion of multimedia elements contribute to effective content optimization.
- Links: Backlinks indicate a website’s authority and popularity. Quality factors include the popularity of linking sites, topic relevance, and overall trust in a domain. Link-building strategies encompass editorial link building, outreach, guest posting, profile links, and competitive analysis.
Monitoring SEO Success: Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Tracking SEO success involves monitoring critical KPIs such as organic traffic growth, keyword rankings, conversions from organic traffic, average time on page, bounce rate, top landing pages, indexed pages, and link growth. These metrics provide insights into the effectiveness of your SEO efforts and guide ongoing optimization strategies.
3. Content Marketing: Engage and Persuade
Content marketing is a strategic process of creating and sharing content to acquire, engage, and persuade individuals into becoming paying customers. Here’s how it contributes to customer acquisition at various stages of the funnel:
Leveraging Content Across the Customer Acquisition Funnel:
Attracting New Prospects with SEO-Optimized Blog Posts:
- Craft SEO-optimized blog posts to enhance visibility and attract new prospects.
- Utilize analytics tools, such as heatmaps, to understand user engagement and optimize content length or format for better click-through rates.
Guiding Consideration with Product-Focused Landing Pages:
- Develop landing pages highlighting key product features and benefits for those in the consideration phase.
- Encourage reader feedback through widgets to identify preferences and areas for improvement.
Facilitating Conversion with Comprehensive ‘Buyer’s Guide’ eBooks:
- Share detailed ‘Buyer’s Guide’ eBooks to assist prospects during the conversion phase.
- Implement feedback mechanisms to gauge the effectiveness of content and identify user preferences.
Nurturing Retention through Informative Webinars:
- Host webinars featuring quick tips and best practices for existing customers to explore new features.
- Diversify content formats and distribution channels, including videos and podcasts, to enhance engagement and ROI.
4. Referral Marketing: Transform Customers into Advocates
Referral marketing is a powerful strategy that transforms satisfied customers into advocates, driving new acquisitions at a fraction of the cost compared to other channels and deliver more valuable customers that spend more, stay longer and refer new customers themselves creating a beneficial referral contagion. And given that our Reward Revolution Research found that 95% of people have referred a friend in the past year, it’s something you shouldn’t ignore, particularly when you consider that our Referral Myth Debunked research found that less than half of respondents knew of a brand before it was referred to them.
Capitalizing on Customer Advocacy:
- Cost-Effective Customer Acquisition:
- Referral marketing offers a cost-effective alternative for acquiring new customers.
- Unlike traditional channels, leveraging existing customers to refer their network can significantly reduce acquisition costs.
Enhanced Customer Quality:
-
- Referred customers often demonstrate better retention rates and increased spending driving higher customer lifetime values.
- The trust established through a recommendation from a known source can lead to longer customer relationships and higher lifetime value.
Overcoming Consumer Indecision:
-
- In industries where customers find it challenging to differentiate between providers, a referral from a trusted source can be a deciding factor.
- Referral marketing helps overcome consumer indecision by providing a personalized recommendation.
We set out the business case for referral marketing here and we’ve highlighted best practice examples of successful referral programs here, but we’d be happy to talk more about this with you.
5. Customer Testimonials: Building Trust with Social Proof
Customer testimonials are reviews and user-generated content that build trust in your brand.
Leverage social proof to increase conversions. Customer testimonials, reviews, and user-generated content act as powerful tools in your acquisition strategy, with studies showing that positive reviews significantly influence purchasing decisions.
6. Use Rewards Across your Entire Customer Journey
Rewards drive action, it’s as simple as that. Whether it’s a reward for a new customer acquisition offering a voucher or gift card if the new customer completes before a set date or a reward linked to a advertising or sponsorship campaign such as a sports sponsorship, offering one not only creates an incentive to convert but where there’s a time limit to qualify, it can create FOMO (the fear of missing out) and drive action here and now.Â
And you shouldn’t only think about rewards for customer acquisition but also how digital rewards can help with customer retention by showing appreciation and recognition to loyal customers.Â
The key to an effective reward strategy is to have access to a wide range of attractive rewards that can show effective and immediate value to potential and actual customers. This means having a catalog of rewards that your audience can choose from, and an effective reward distribution platform that can deliver all types of rewards quickly and easily.Â
7. Extend Beyond your Own Reach with Partner Marketing
Obviously there will be a limit to the number of potential customers you can reach on your own, which is why you need to think about how you can leverage the customer base or marketing reach of other companies. This means partner marketing or affiliate marketing and essentially means you can tap into the customers or marketing skills of another brand or marketer.Â
As well as finding the right partner company or affiliate, you need a partner or affiliate marketing solution to help your partner market on your behalf, track conversions and payout commissions or bounties based on successful conversions.
There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy; success lies in using a combination of customer acquisition methods. Calling on support from a best-in-class marketing platform will help to support each of these channels and empower you to drive growth with a customer-led approach. Make sure to craft a customized acquisition plan that aligns with your business goals and is led by your customers. Reach out and chat with Buyapowa if you’re looking for customer acquisition advice about how to implement referral, reward or partner marketing.Â
