In the last few years, the cost of acquiring new customers has reached 60 percent. Today’s marketing is becoming more expensive, buyers are becoming less reliable of brands, and businesses should give up… right?
Well, the first two statements echo some truth, but we can’t say the same about the last one.
Businesses shouldn’t give up — they should simply get better, smarter. The old saying “Work smarter, not harder” may sound extremely annoyingly true at some point.
If you’re looking for ways to boost your customer acquisition, then rest assured. You are not alone. Reducing the expenses of customer acquisition and proving the ROI of marketing efforts are two of the most sought-after marketing goals among companies. But that’s not a problem.
The real issue here is that 65 percent of consumers don’t trust ads, and 71 percent have no faith in sponsored posts on social media. This prominent absence of brand trust has made the sales team and job marketing infinitely more time demanding. What’s worse is that most brands are failing to recognize this issue. They end up throwing more money into “pushy” marketing strategies, eager to win over new customers. But that’s not the right solution.
So, what’s the catch?
Your best point of advantage is to invest in customer service and “pull” marketing tactics. But let’s talk about customer acquisition first.
What Is Customer Acquisition?
Customer acquisition is the process of bringing new clients or customers to your business. The gist of it lays in creating a systematical and sustainable acquisition strategy that can mature with new changes and trends.
Customer acquisition is imperative for companies of any size and age. And, that’s because it allows your business to:
1. Increase revenues to meet costs, pay workers, and reinvest in growth.
2. Demonstrate traction for outside parties such as partners, investors, and influencers.
By systematically attracting and converting new customers, companies can grow, get healthier and wealthier, and attract the right investors.
Customer Acquisition Strategies
We’ve already discussed some of the key challenges that companies face in trying to acquire new customers. A lack of trust in brands being the most prominent. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do to skyrocket your customer acquisition.
1. Define Your Target Audience
Your target market should be a specific, defined segment of buyers that an organization plans to serve with its services and products.
Identifying your target audience is a crucial step in the development of services, products, and the marketing efforts used to promote them.
What’s more, a target market usually contains the end-user of services or products and aims to understand the user so well the service or product fits him and sells itself.
Identify the Key Benefits That Your Brand Provides
Where to start? With the end result in mind. Once you get this right, your ideal target market should reveal itself. Performing a market positioning audit can help you identify and understand customer needs and create solutions that deliver customer satisfaction.
You can also rely on various tech-branding strategies to showcase your brand’s origin, values and goals without which your audience would not agree with you. This will allow you to answer questions like:
- What problem does your service/ product solve?
- What need do you meet?
- And what desire do you fulfill?
Refine Your Target Market
By this point, you should have gained basic know-how about your service and product benefits. From here, you can narrow down the market sector you plan to target.
Here you can define the demographics of your target market. You can segment your targeted market using demographics like location, age, marital, gender or family status, income level, occupation, education level, etc.
Next, research the psychographics of those who stand to benefit the most from your service or product. Psychographics are target audiences’ psychological attributes such as values, attitudes, interests, behavior, and lifestyle. Do this, and you’ve already defined your buyer persona.
2. Use the Right Acquisition Channel
It’s not enough to know who your ideal buyers are. It’s equally essential to know the right channel to use to acquire your potential buyer.
Fortunately, there are several frameworks that can help you identify the best channel to use for your customer acquisition strategies. However, it takes the plane of experimenting to find the right channels.
To make things more bearable, you should set clear goals for yourself and your brand campaign. Even some rough goals will help you better understand whether your tactics are worthy or not.
Once you’ve tested more than three channels, you will be able to compare your progress with someone’s else.
3. Leverage Video Content
There’s no news. Video marketing is booming. 81 percent of brands leverage it, up from 63 percent from last year. The reason? 97 percent of marketers find video content useful to optimize customer understanding of their offerings. While others find it helpful to increase sales and web traffic.
Customers tend to be visual learners, and video content is one of the best ways to inform prospects about your products and your brand. The key to reaching more audiences through video marketing is finding the right balance between informative and interesting videos. You can rely on influencers to create such content, share it on different social media platforms and on your site.
4. Create High-Quality Content Always
Content marketing remains one of the most efficient and timeless customer acquisition strategies there are. It’s self-explanatory: getting people to trust your brand is half the battles, but content marketing helps you win that battle.
Not only that, but content marketing remains thrice as effective and 62 percent less costly than regular outbound marketing. Creating a blog for your business, publishing white papers, and sharing content on social media are all great ways to establish yourself as a reliable expert in your niche.
Consumers want to be more and more informed today. By empowering your audience to make more informed decisions, you will gain their trust and convert them. Sharing informative, valuable, insightful and engaging content will, eventually, help drive your customer acquisition.
