Acquiring customers involves creating a sustainable acquisition plan that can evolve. These five tips will get you started on your customer acquisition journey, helping you develop a process for getting potential customers through the door and convincing them to buy from you:
- Understand who your customers are
- Define a customer acquisition strategy
- Communicate with your customers
- Build a customer acquisition toolkit
- Measure and improve your strategy
1. Understand who your customers are
The first step toward customer acquisition is to understand your customer base—both your current and target audiences.
This will help you achieve product-market fit faster and set realistic marketing goals. With this understanding, your customer acquisition efforts can make better use of precious resources like time and money.
Before you invest in any customer acquisition methods, take time to define who you’re targeting:
Build user personas: a profile of your customers based on psychographics, demographics, interests, and purchase history, so you can focus your efforts on improving the experience for real people and use cases
Identify your ideal customers: pinpoint your highest-value customers' traits and behaviors, and use that knowledge to invest in customer acquisition channels that help you more effectively reach your target audience where they are
Remember that their needs and expectations change as consumers move through the customer acquisition funnel to become buyers. Keeping track of these customer profiles helps you analyze, understand, and expand your customer base at each step.
2. Define a customer acquisition strategy
Creating a clear strategy for finding, attracting, engaging, and converting prospects is crucial to improving customer acquisition.
Customer acquisition includes two main components: discovery and persuasion. Start by finding and attracting potential customers to your business (discovery). Once you’ve got their attention, you need to convince them to buy from you (persuasion). Here are a few tips on how to build a strong customer acquisition roadmap:
Begin with the basics: develop a set strategy for where to generate demand, what you'll spend on these marketing efforts, and how to convert visitors into paying customers.
Choose the right channels: consumers use a variety of channels every day—like websites, email, and social media—so your customer acquisition process must involve different ways to engage them. Develop a unique strategy for each channel and test new customer acquisition methods.
Develop a sustainable strategy: simplify and systematize the process of acquiring new customers. Your methods should be easy to sustain and effective in the long run.
Set up your acquisition strategy correctly, and you can expect to spend your budget more effectively, improve customer lifetime value (CLV), and grow your business steadily over time.
3. Communicate with your customers
When it comes to customer acquisition, it’s easy to follow a routine without examining how practical your approach truly is. And it's even more challenging to find the gaps in your customer acquisition process without direct customer feedback.
Asking your most valuable (or most vulnerable) customers for feedback reduces the communication barrier between you and your target audience. It helps you identify and capitalize on the value customers expect from your products and services.
Create a communication plan to keep conversations going with your customers. Here are a few great ways to stay in touch with your customer base:
Customer surveys: a simple, low-commitment way to gather first impressions and make sure new customers feel empowered to explore your brand and share their experiences with you
Website feedback widgets: gather impromptu feedback that captures your users’ feelings as they navigate your website or interact with your business, while their experience is fresh
Customer interviews: create an intimate forum to collect customer opinions, discover the true value of your business in their eyes, and develop realistic action plans to better meet their needs
Social media posts: centralize unsolicited customer feedback that gives you unfiltered insights into popular customer sentiments, problems, and experiences
By allowing users to share their thoughts, you discover exactly what they loved (or hated) about their experience with you—no guesswork necessary. Use these insights to create a delightful customer acquisition experience that increases your ability to convert and retain them.
4. Build a customer acquisition toolkit
Every business needs an online customer acquisition agency or toolkit. Depending on your goals, consider adding these types of tools to your existing sales and marketing suites:
Customer relationship management (CRM) tools: with sales engagement, reporting, and analytics features, these tools help you analyze your conversion rates and improve your business
Behavior analytics software: tools like heatmaps and session recordings show you how prospects interact with your website, so you can make changes to improve it according to real user behavior
Lead generation tools: grow your email list, get higher conversions, or make more sales
Search engine optimization (SEO) tools: everything you need to optimize your site for organic search and start ranking on search engines
PPC software: create paid ads and equip your content to perform best in SERPs and on partner websites and publishers
Chat tools: enable your salespeople and marketers to chat with potential leads, send customer details to your CRM, manage orders, and accept payments
Customer feedback software: collect direct feedback from your prospects and customers and turn it into actionable insights
Social media tools: from social proof to planning software, these tools help you leverage social media to attract prospects and make more sales
Referral software: automate your referral program, offer customers rewards, and analyze results
Email marketing tools: create, design, and share marketing campaigns with relevant customers and clients directly in their inbox
5. Measure and improve your strategy
Your targeted customer acquisition strategy also involves taking a step back and figuring out what’s best for your business, resources, and audience right now.
Remember to routinely measure your results and track related costs to ensure continuous improvement:
Determine the ROI of your acquisition tactics: regularly review important metrics like customer acquisition cost (CAC), new customer growth, churn rate, and CLV, so you can optimize for the most successful channels and refine your strategy
Make sure your current channels and tactics are working: track each channel’s quantitative and qualitative analytics and update your strategy regularly, and develop a customer retention strategy to maximize your company’s growth