Best customer acquisition tips and strategies to learn

Chances are that you are competing with at least 29 other businesses to acquire patronage, and depending on your niche, it could be much more. The business terrain, whether it’s a small business, an enterprise, or a freelance business, is fiercely competitive, so you have to deploy a smart customer acquisition strategy to gain patronage and loyalty.

Your customer acquisition strategy is critical to your business success because without a customer base, you cannot raise revenue, and without revenue, you cannot sustain the business.

So how do you define customer acquisition strategies, and what are some examples of acquisition strategies? Let’s find out.

What is customer acquisition?

When you launch a business, you don’t rely on luck and fate to attract clients, especially in this era when the competition is stiff. No matter how great your offerings are, it’s only a part of the process; you’d still need to be intentional about regularly acquiring new clients to achieve success.

Customer acquisition is essentially the process of gaining new customers for a business. It involves identifying potential customers, reaching out to them, and convincing them to purchase your products or services.

Once you've identified someone who might be interested in what you're offering, you convince them to patronize you and make the sale.

Businesses use many different strategies and tactics for customer acquisition, depending on their industry, target audience, and budget. Some examples include advertising on social media, attending trade shows, sending out direct mail, or offering special promotions or discounts.

Ultimately, customer acquisition aims to bring in new customers and grow your business. It's an important part of any company's overall sales and marketing strategy.

Every business that means business has customer acquisition strategies in place no matter how large they’ve grown. From Amazon to Instagram and even Tesla, they all have active customer acquisition strategies.

Defining the customer acquisition process

Customer acquisition takes a well-planned and structured process indicating different processes from awareness to retention. Let’s check it out.

Step 1:

Define your target audience: Before you start attracting new customers, you need to define who your ideal customer is. This involves identifying their demographics, psychographics, and behavior patterns. By doing so, you can tailor your marketing messages and tactics to resonate with your target audience.

Step 2: 

Generate awareness: Once you have identified your target audience, the next step is to generate awareness about your business or product. This involves creating a marketing campaign that showcases the benefits and features of your product, and how it can solve your target audience's pain points.

Step 3:

Capture leads: Generating awareness is just the first step. To convert potential customers into actual customers, you need to capture their information. This is where lead capture tactics come into play. This can be done through various channels such as social media, email marketing, or your website.

Step 4: 

Nurture leads: Once you have captured leads, the next step is to nurture them. This involves building a relationship with your leads through targeted messaging and personalized content. The goal is to keep them engaged with your brand and eventually convert them into paying customers.

Step 5: 

Convert leads into customers: The next step in the customer acquisition process is to convert leads into customers. This involves creating a compelling offer that motivates your leads to take action. This could be a discount, a free trial, or a limited-time offer.

Step 6: 

Retention: Now you’ve attracted people to patronize your business, your ultimate goal should be retaining them. You must craft convincing strategies and ensure that your delivery and customer service are top-notch to make your clients repeat buyers.

Customer acquisition strategies

The customer acquisition strategy you adopt should be informed by the type of business you operate and the profile of your target audience. However, a mix of two or more strategies often produces preferable outcomes. Whether you’re a startup, an independent professional, or an established business, these strategies can be useful. Let’s dive in.

Content marketing

Recently, marketing has been mostly about content– delivering the right and relevant content to a specific audience. Contents in this regard include blog posts, articles, pictures, videos, social media posts, etc. You must be able to identify the type of content your target audience appreciates and strive to meet their interests with the aim of driving profitable customer action.

Here are some pros and cons of content marketing;

Pros:

• Cost-effective: Compared to other customer acquisition strategies, such as paid advertising, content marketing can be relatively inexpensive to implement.

• Builds trust and credibility: By consistently providing valuable content, content marketing can help establish your brand as a thought leader and trusted source of information in your industry.

• Long-term results: While content marketing may take time to produce results, the content you create can continue to attract and engage customers long after it's published, providing long-term benefits for your business.

• Improves search engine rankings: Creating high-quality content can help improve your search engine rankings, making it easier for potential customers to find your business online.

Cons:

• Time-consuming: Creating high-quality content takes time, resources, and effort. It can be challenging to produce enough content to keep your audience engaged, especially if you have a small team.

• Requires a long-term commitment: Content marketing is not a quick fix. It takes time to build an audience and see results, and it requires a long-term commitment to consistently produce high-quality content.

• Results are not guaranteed: While content marketing can be an effective customer acquisition strategy, there's no guarantee that it will work for every business. Your content needs to resonate with your audience to be effective, and it can be challenging to predict what will resonate with them.

• Can be difficult to measure: It can be challenging to measure the ROI of content marketing, especially if you're not tracking the right metrics or have unclear goals. Measuring the success of your content marketing efforts requires careful planning and tracking.

Social media marketing

In this day and time, if you don’t have a social media strategy, then you may not just be ready for business. Recent statistics have revealed that over 55% of the world’s population is on various social media platforms, and in America, it’s over 70% making it an indispensable channel for user acquisition. Notwithstanding your target audience profile, you just may find them on one or more social media platforms as it is generally a versatile channel for different demographics and interests.

Here are some pros and cons of social media marketing as a customer acquisition strategy:

Pros:

• Huge audience reach: Social media platforms have billions of active users, which provides businesses with a vast audience to target for customer acquisition.

• Targeted advertising: Social media platforms allow businesses to target their advertising to specific demographics, interests, and behaviors, ensuring that their ads reach the right audience for customer acquisition.

• Cost-effective: Social media marketing can be much cheaper than traditional advertising methods, such as TV, radio, or print ads, making it a cost-effective way to acquire customers.

• Builds brand awareness: By consistently promoting their products or services on social media platforms, businesses can build brand awareness and improve their visibility to potential customers.

Cons:

• Requires ongoing effort: Social media marketing is not a one-time effort; it requires ongoing effort to maintain a consistent presence on social media platforms and engage with customers.

• Overcrowded market: Due to the popularity of social media marketing as a customer acquisition strategy, businesses are competing with many other companies for attention, making it harder to stand out from the crowd.

• Risk of negative feedback: Social media platforms allow customers to share their opinions and experiences, both positive and negative, with a wide audience. This means that businesses are exposed to the risk of negative feedback.

Email marketing

Email marketing has been one of the oldest and most trusted forms of marketing since the digital and internet revolution. Every day over 340 billion emails are sent daily, and over 4 billion people have at least one email address. The possibility of reaching 100% of your target audience via email is very high. However, you must build a subscriber list to promote your products and services.

Pros 

• Cost-effective: Email marketing can be relatively low-cost, especially for small businesses with limited marketing budgets compared to many other customer acquisition channels.

• Targeted: Email marketing allows businesses to send personalized and relevant messages to specific groups of customers, increasing the likelihood of conversion.

• Measurable: Email marketing metrics, such as open rates and click-through rates, can be easily tracked and analyzed to evaluate the campaign's effectiveness and make data-driven decisions for improvement.

• Scalable: Email marketing can be scaled to reach a large audience quickly, making it an efficient way to grow a customer base.

• Builds relationships: Consistently sending valuable and informative content to subscribers can help build trust and loyalty with the audience, making them more likely to become customers.

Cons

• Spam filters: Email marketing messages can get caught in spam filters, preventing them from reaching the intended audience.

• Unsubscribes: Some subscribers may choose to unsubscribe from the email list, reducing the potential audience size.

Paid advertising

Paid advertising can be an effective customer acquisition strategy for businesses looking to attract new customers. This strategy involves paying for the placement of ads in various media channels, such as search engines, social media platforms, and other digital and traditional marketing channels. Here are some pros and cons of paid advertising as a customer acquisition strategy:

Pros:

• Immediate visibility: Paid advertising provides immediate visibility to potential customers, as ads can appear at the top of search engine results pages or on social media feeds.

• Targeted audience: Paid advertising allows businesses to target specific audiences based on demographics, interests, and behaviors, ensuring that ads are shown to people who are most likely to be interested in the product or service being offered.

• Measurable results: Paid advertising provides measurable results, with businesses able to track the number of clicks, impressions, and conversions generated by each ad campaign.

• Flexibility: Paid advertising allows businesses to adjust their advertising campaigns as needed, with the ability to tweak ad copy, target new audiences, or adjust bidding strategies based on performance data.

Cons:

• Cost: Paid advertising can be expensive, especially for small businesses with limited budgets. Businesses must factor in the cost of ad placement, as well as the cost of creative development and ongoing management of ad campaigns.

• Competition: With so many businesses using paid advertising to reach customers, the competition for ad placement can be intense, leading to higher costs and more complex bidding strategies.

• Ad fraud: Paid advertising can be vulnerable to fraud, with some advertisers using fake clicks or impressions to inflate the performance of their campaigns.

Referral programs

Referral programs are a type of marketing strategy that encourages existing customers to refer new customers to a business. Typically, these programs offer rewards or incentives to customers who refer new businesses and sometimes offer incentives to new customers as well. Referral programs can be very effective in acquiring new customers because they rely on the word-of-mouth recommendations of satisfied customers.

Pros:

• A cost-effective way to acquire new customers

• Builds customer loyalty and engagement

• This can result in higher customer lifetime value, as referred customers may be more likely to become loyal, long-term customers

• Can increase customer trust and confidence in the business, as they are more likely to trust recommendations from friends or family

Cons:

• Referral may not work for all businesses or industries

• It can be difficult to track and measure the success of the program

• It can be vulnerable to fraud or abuse if not carefully monitored and managed.

To conclude

Overall, the best customer acquisition strategy will depend on a business's unique goals, target audience, and budget. It's important to carefully consider the pros and cons of each strategy before deciding which one to pursue.