Client acquisition is getting harder, more expensive and time consuming…
If you don’t have a client acquisition plan in place for your business right now, your business won’t be around for long… and as you know clients are the reason for your business’s existence.
So you need to have a well thought out and executable client acquisition strategy for your business to acquire new clients, sell more of your products or services, increase revenue and grow your business.
In this guide I’ll show you how to acquire new clients for your business in a easy to read, understand and execute manner.
Although there are several methods to gain new customers, maximizing client acquisition is increasingly challenging in this competitive market.
You may offer incredible products or services, but your growth proportion relies primarily on a single core element – your ability to win more consumers.
I’m not talking one-time buyers, but long-term clientele, repeat customers who make regular purchases or subscriptions.
These loyal consumers are why you have a thriving business; your business won’t exist without them.
For this, it’s essential to understand the importance of client acquisition and how to build an efficient acquisition strategy.
Knowing these components will help capture clients’ attention, generate higher engagement, and increase sales conversion.
In this guide I’ll will cover the following subjects:
- What is customer acquisition? (This point is, particularly for beginner business owners. So, if you’re a seasoned marketer, you can jump to the next point).
- What’s the importance of customer acquisition?
- Benefits of Client acquisition
- The customer acquisition process
- Strategies for an effective client acquisition campaign
- Customer acquisition metrics to measure
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV Or CLTV)
- And much more…
Let’s get started with the definition of client acquisition
What is customer acquisition?
Client acquisition is a marketing method that uses various techniques to draw new customers to your business.
It helps you expand your customer base.
This process involves walking consumers down the sales or customer acquisition funnel from the first point of awareness to the final conversion spot.
Thus, acquiring new business helps convert leads, increase sales, and expand your business.
When the acquisition proceeding gets finalized, you can start working on the next stage – re-acquisition and customer retention.
Why is client acquisition so important?
Customer acquisition is the driving force of business growth.
Whether you’re selling products or offering services, acquiring new consumers is crucial to increasing profits, revenue, and overall business growth.
It is for this justification that inbound marketing is thriving.
This marketing initiative entails persuading high-profile consumers to become paying clients.
As a result, a robust customer acquisition strategy allows companies to grow their clients’ database and income through various consumer loyalty programs.
These programs help reduce customer acquisition costs (CAC) and enhance return on investments (ROIs).
As stated earlier, gaining new users is challenging, and the CAC increased 60% over the years.
Please consider the following statistics:
- Acquiring new buyers costs 7x more than retaining existing customers.
- You have a 60-70% higher chance to sell to existing clients.
- You only have a 5-20% chance to seal a deal when selling to new customers
- 44% of brands focus more on gaining new clients than retention.
With those numbers and marketers focusing more on acquiring new clients, customer acquisition becomes critical.
Therefore, a viable acquisition strategy that aligns with industry trends and improves customer experience (CX) is vital to attract new clients.
Benefits of customer acquisition
There are several benefits for prioritizing consumer acquisition, but I will highlight only a few. Companies develop marketing strategies aimed at acquiring new customers.
Why?
Without new buyers, your brand will gradually disappear. For this, 45% of marketers prioritize getting more clients.
Therefore, some of the advantages that client acquisition bring include:
- Increased awareness for your brand
- More sales and optimal profit margin
- Opportunities for business growth
- Warrant to convert new customers consistently
The purpose of attracting new buyers to any business is to drive sales and support a healthy pipeline of consistent income.
And one of the best ways to regularly increase your profit margin is to get new clients to your business.
New customers are highly engaged and come with purchasing power that will help you build healthy financial projections.
So, if your objective is to expand your business several folds, custom acquisition is beneficial and extremely important.
The customer acquisition process
For a successful customer acquisition marketing campaign, you should develop a defined guideline to manage your workflow and streamline the acquisition process.
With your approach or roadmap, you can evaluate portions of your yardstick to determine what’s working and those that don’t.
You can tweak, adjust weak spots, and optimize them for better results. Hence, let us consider the customer acquisition process and best practices.
But if you need help with your acquisition process, you can reach out to me!
1. Determine your audience
Let’s be honest; a defined audience propels business growth.
So, you need people to pay for your services or buy what you’re offering. But first, you must find these people to understand their needs, interests, and wants to serve them better.
That way, you will make better marketing decisions and provide the most appropriate products or services to improve their experience.
For instance, your target market may spread across the board with varying needs.
This finding means you have multiple target audiences to serve. It would be unproductive to sell them a single offer.
First, segment your audience according to interests and needs to get them on board.
Then, target them with various sale acquisition campaigns applicable and personalized to each group.
Remember, personalized marketing account for the most successful client acquisition campaigns. That’s because customization makes consumers feel unique and valued.
As a result, personalized marketing:
- Builds brand affinity
- Increase user engagement
- Boost conversions
- Improve customer retention
- Generate high ROIs
How to define your target audience
Determining your target audience is the most productive way to guarantee success for your business.
Even though there exist several methods to decide on your ideal prospects, below are actionable tips that produce results:
- Evaluate your client base
- Conduct market research
- Examine your competitors
- Determine industry trends
- Create customer personas (These are profiles of prospects who will eventually become your loyal clients. They are fictional characters with traits of your perfect customers)
- Use Google Analytics to gather data about users visits and behavior to your site and landing page.
- Spy on social media Analytics to understand trends and consumers needs
Getting in-depth knowledge of your target audience is crucial. The information enables you to define the best marketing strategy and success plan to implement.
2. Develop an acquisition strategy for better conversion
Now that you’ve defined your audience and understand their needs, what’s next?
Use the information to create a productive marketing strategy and action plan. Your marketing strategy is a sequence of strategic activities that lead to your ultimate goal.
These activities go through a series of procedures to meet your target.
Consequently, a successful acquisition plan lets you reach your goal. It enables you to transform your target audience into repeat users and paying customers.
However, your acquisition marketing strategy and execution plan must consider the customer journey stages to success. This aspect is critical because it establishes how to communicate effectively with prospective customers.
The customer journey or sales acquisition funnel helps you determine what types of content to publish.
For example, consumers at the top funnel don’t need content designed for the middle and bottom-funnel audiences.
Why?
Because they are at different levels or phases of the buyer journey.
Image source: 123RegBlog
So, how you message your audience and deliver content can negatively or positively impact your growth proportion.
Your messaging must cover all stages of the funnel to meet customer needs in each segment.
But you must first understand potential customers and their journey to provide personalized marketing materials for a better user experience (UX).
Understanding the customer acquisition funnel
Remember that client acquisition is not lead generation.
Intelligent marketers picture a consumer journey through the customer acquisition funnel from a business setting.
Please, see the screenshot above.
Thus, consumers go through each step of the sale funnel categorized into three primary stages:
- Awareness (TOFU): They become aware of your business and show interest in your products or services as leads. (This stage of the funnel is where lead generation takes place).
- Consideration
(MOFU): They consider switching to your product by evaluating it and making comparisons with other alternative products. (The middle of the funnel is about lead acquisition). - Purchase,
conversion, action (BOFU): After examining your offer, they decide to pay for your services and become customers. (The bottom funnel is where the lead conversion activities happen).
So, client acquisition is the complete activity from the first point of awareness to the end, comprising all funnel stages.
How to create and optimize your acquisition strategy
When developing your customer acquisition marketing strategy, focus on these three factors:
- The types of content that fascinate your target audience
- What types of content your competitors are posting on social
- Create your system according to your acquisition KPIs report
You may not need to be on Instagram based on research findings and your marketing strategy.
That’s because your ideal customer is either on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook. Your first spot should be LinkedIn if you’re targeting professionals and executive business owners.
But if you want to attract adult teens, Instagram and TikTok are where you should focus your attention.
So, it’s best to analyze each networking platform to pinpoint your audience. Research each acquisition channel and use the data to inform your client acquisition campaign.
Moreover, to make the most of your marketing strategy, your plan should include:
- A cross-channel marketing strategy. It is a digital marketing tactic that uses
paid, owned, earned media, and other digital systems to maximize ROIs.
Cross-channel is a beneficial way of crafting a solid acquisition strategy to
create omnichannel customer journeys respecting your goals. - It shouldalso include a messaging framework that outlines your brand’s positioning and the underlying value and campaign. It ensures your content aligns with your core value proposition.
- An assessment program that specifies your key performance indicators (KPIs) such as, but is not limited to customer lifetime value (CLV), monthly recurring revenue (MRR), customer acquisition costs (CAC), churn rate, cost per acquisition (CPA), and more
3. Establish your objectives
Although this article is about client acquisition, your goal may vary.
So, you need to establish your campaign objectives to help guide your effort toward your result. Given this, define your client acquisition strategy objectives to meet your bottom line.
It will help you reduce customer churn and increase consumer growth.
With all essential elements put together, including a durable marketing plan, you can maximize your effort and generate significant ROIs.
How to establish your objectives
Although your client acquisition objective may differ, the following steps will get you on the right track:
- Your aims must be distinct
- They should be measurable and attainable
- Ensure your goals are relevant to your brand vision and target audience
- Your objective should be time-sensitive
- Document your goals in your action plan
4. Initiate your customer acquisition campaign
With all vital elements in place, it’s time to start your acquisition initiative.
As you launch your campaign, visitors will click to examine your offer, signup for your lists, read your blogs, and perform other activities.
Team members responsible for tracking and monitoring should measure all key performance indicators.
But if you’re a one-person operator, you can monitor your metrics and start gathering valuable information using marketing automation software apps.
Before this article, I will discuss the measuring aspect of your acquisition performance metrics. So stick with us to understand how to measure your KPIs.
Acquiring new buyers to grow your customer database is your primary objective, and you don’t want to lose them.
You want to retain your clients, increase customer lifetime value (CLV), and maximize profits.
For this, you need to employ marketing automation to help drive new consumers and improve sales. Research reveals that marketing automation generates over 450% leads and boosts conversions by 77%.
Therefore, optimizing your acquisition campaign with marketing automation is a win for your business.
That’s why 88% of marketers use more than one automation tool to build automated workflows and create campaigns based on customer data to drive results.
So, select the best automation tool and automate your tasks to bring repeat buyers and encourage retention.
5. Measure KPIs to determine your performance
You need to understand your acquisition marketing KPIs to know where your customers are coming from and how to keep them coming.
The acquisition metrics engage all channels that bring people to your website and landing pages.
Thus, a tool like Google Analytics will give you helpful information to see platforms that refer consumers to your business. It allows you to make informed re-targeting marketing decisions.
Also, Google Analytics provides information about consumer behavior and what content is performing on your site.
It offers valuable insights into what channels and content are converting to meet your strategy for customer acquisition goals.
You will see which channels to focus on, what content to produce more of or eliminate, and where to tweak for better results.
In other words, analytics gives you a precise idea of what to optimize for better results and what to discard.
For instance, you may have high organic and referral traffic coming to your landing page.
But if your landing page is not converting as expected (producing low conversion rates), it means you have to optimize your landing page to improve conversion.
Tweak the title and content, reposition your call-to-action button, and run tests to
compare performance.
Best customer acquisition strategies
Let’s look at how to improve your client acquisition.
Irrespective of the nature and size of your business, acquiring new buyers is a critical part of a successful brand.
It gives prospects and potential investors a sense of credibility – encouraging more traction and improving sales.
So, how can you improve client acquisition?
What are the best customer acquisition strategies to acquire more clients?
I’m sharing seven of the best techniques for customer acquisition that you can start applying to gain more buyers.
1. Use multiple applicable acquisition channels
In the section above, we discussed that defining your target audience involves knowing them and understanding their needs.
But that’s not enough as it is essential to know which acquisition channels are most appropriate for gaining new leads.
The infographic shows a dozen acquisition channels you can use to gain new customers.
But how can you determine which one will work for you?
Use analytics to identify the best converting channels to use for your campaign.
Since fewer brands stress the essence of measuring marketing performance, leveraging analytics gives you an edge over the competition.
You can survey each acquisition channel and pinpoint those that serve your business interest with the proper tools.
Ultimately, you don’t have to be on all platforms.
Therefore, start experimenting by testing different marketing channels to find the most applicable ones to help you add more customers to your pipeline.
2. Produce informative blog content frequently
Now that you have your acquisition channels all set, it would help if you produced informative blog content that adds value to your readers.
As you may know, content fuels acquisition marketing on all platforms, including social media, blogs & websites, landing pages, and more.
All these endeavors can’t get results without compelling copies. It makes content marketing a stable client acquisition strategy.
But the content you publish must be helpful to your audience to grab readers’ attention and generate clicks.
That way, you build trust with your readers, establish brand authority, and become an industry through-leader.
The only way to build credibility and increase your buyer database is by creating persuasive content.
Interestingly, online shoppers are looking for brands they can trust. According to a study, over 80% of consumers say brand trust is their top buying consideration.
Additionally, the research indicates that 76% of buyers only give attention to ads from businesses they trust.
That’s in contrast to only 48% attention for brands they don’t find credible.
Given this, content has become a valuable customer acquisition asset.
That’s because it helps companies and individual marketers build trust around their products or services with their audience.
Consequently, center your attention on these core areas for effective content marketing strategy:
- Optimizeyour content for humans and search engines. (I will provide more insights on SEO in a moment below).
- Update your older blog posts and republish them on your site and third-party websites. Examine your blog archives to find content that needs improvements. Update and republish the content for better visibility, improved search ranking, and effectively drive customer acquisition.
- Produce persuasive content upgrades and offers to grow your leads and nurture them to become acquired clients. You can create ebooks, checklists, templates, and other incentives.
3. Match your content with buyers’ journey
Creating content that matches the buyer’s journey is critical for acquiring new leads.
That’s why I talk about it often in this guide. Therefore, align your content strategy with
the customer journey to gain more clients.
As prospects go through the sales funnel toward becoming customers, their intention for visiting your site changes with time.
Similarly, the type of content that meets their interest also change.
Let me illustrate:
If a searcher performs his first search of a product on Google, he is not looking for convincing information to make a buying decision.
Instead, the user is searching for information to solve a problem. At this stage of his journey, he needs content designed for the TOFU to attract him to your brand.
When he finds the solution, the user moves down the middle of the funnel, and he searches for blog content that shows him why your product or service is worth his time.
Here’s where you engage him with your brand value proposition.
After examining the exceptional values of your brand, he moves further down to the bottom funnel.
At this point, you delight him with live chats, case studies, whitepapers, and more convincing content types.
Please read this article to know the types of content to create for every customer
journey stage.
Consequently, ensure your content matches the customer’s journey with compelling CTA for an effective content marketing strategy.
4. Give priority to SEO
Creating blog content is part of the acquisition strategy.
But if your target readers can’t find your articles online, it becomes a wasted effort.
So, to make people see your materials and engage with them, you should make them visible.
That’s where prioritizing SEO comes to play.
You have to work on SEO to increase content visibility on search results.
But lead generation starts at the awareness stage in the client acquisition funnel.
That is where you make people aware of your business and get them to show interest.
And the best way to do that is to make your content appear on SERPs when they search for relevant terms.
It means optimizing your blog content for search engines to make it more visible online and help readers discover your content.
Pro SEO tips
- Do keyword research to find the best search terms (use tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz)
- Study Google first page results for your focus keyword (you will find web pages that rank for your target keyword and device ways to out-rank them)
- Add relevant keywords to your posts
- Mark all On-page SEO checklist
- Build external links from top sites to your content
- Create better resource content than your competitors
- Optimize your content to align with users’ search intent.
- Optimize your site for mobile users
Speaking of mobile optimization, mobile devices without tablets account for 54% of website traffic globally in the 4th quarter of 2021.
Graphic source: Statista
That’s accounting to a report by Statista. So, focusing on SEO is a crucial step towards acquiring more customers.
5. Collaborate with influencers
Why is influencer collaboration so important when acquiring customers for your business?
Because they already have the clients you want to bring to your company and control them.
So, collaborating with influencers is a win for your business; that’s why 63% of marketers plan to increase their influencer marketing budget.
Indeed, 90% of respondents view influencer marketing as a productive marketing asset.
That’s because you can make $5.20 ROI for every $1 you invest in influencer marketing campaigns.
The best part, you don’t need to work with mega influencers.
Find micro-influencers in your industry and partner with them. They produce better average engagement at 3.86% – beating mega influencers who manage to pull a mere 1.21%.
Your aim for partnering with influencers is to build your customer base with new clients through stimulus referral.
And since influencers control their audience purchasing decisions, they will help you acquire new clients and boost customer retention.
6. Optimized your landing pages
Landing pages are efficient acquisition drivers and one of the best customer acquisition strategies you can’t ignore.
They direct potential buyers to a particular product or service and urge them to convert.
With excellent copywriting, a landing page provides you the opportunity to increase conversion rates and grow your customer base.
But you must optimize your landing page to enhance its effectiveness to improve conversion.
Pro tips for optimizing your landing page
The following pointers will help you optimize your landing pages drive more leads, and convert new customers:
- Know your campaign objective: It enables you to center your landing pages on a single offer.
- Write irresistible headlines: Your headline should be bold, highlight the value, and simple to grab attention.
- Create persuasive streams of texts: Make your landing page copy convincing enough to get people clicking.
- Include applicable high-quality visuals where necessary: Use relevant images to make your message more appealing and stand out.
- Underline your product or service value proposition: Present a unique and outstanding value proposition to get consumers lining up to buy from you.
- Optimize your form fields: Don’t ask for lengthy contact details from prospective customers. People are more generous in providing their email addresses than giving you other contact information. So, optimize your form with a single form field or double lines for name and email address.
- Use CTAs to encourage users to take action: Contrast the CTA button color with the background color, and use the right size to make it stand out.
Although optimizing your pages is ideal for landing new buyers, you should experiment with various versions of your pages to pick the best-performing one.
And also, A/B tests your campaign to find the winning one.
7. Email marketing—resend unopened emails
Email marketing is one of the best marketing strategies to engage prospects, nurture leads, and convert them to customers.
It helps you keep your product or service top of mind regardless of your business model.
Moreover, email lets you establish business relationships with leads, existing clients, and past customers.
It creates an avenue to speak directly with consumers via their inboxes.
This marketing tactic enables you to increase customer retention and acquire new clients with the proper messaging.
But not all recipients will open your emails.
Given this, to make your email acquisition campaign more efficient, retarget those who didn’t open your emails.
How?
By resending unopen emails to them.
Tweak your subject line, edit your preheader if it’s not catchy enough, retain the original message, and resent it to subscribers who didn’t open your previous email.
It helps you increase open email rates, generate leads, and gain new customers.
Another way to guarantee success with email marketing is to use reliable email software to automate your campaigns.
But before that, use a response rate calculator to predict your open rate. It allows you to plan your email campaign with excellent ROIs.
Customer acquisition metrics or KPIs to measure
I mentioned some KPIs to focus on earlier above. But let’s consider a few of them to know why and how to measure them:
Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)
The cost of customer acquisition KPI is essential because it helps increase ROIs.
It determines your profitability by quantifying the sales and marketing expenses divided by the number of new clients.
For example, if you invest $100,000 annually in sales and another $100,000 on marketing and gain 40 new customers, your cost of acquisition is $5,000.
Here’s the CAC calculator formula:
Sales investment or expenses, $100,000 + marketing expenses $100,000 = $200,000/40 new customers = $5,000. ($100,000 + $100,000 = $200,000/40 = $5,000).
Image source
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV or CLTV)
Evaluating CLV is crucial since it lets you balance your long vs. short-term objectives.
Hence, CLTV urges you to make informed decisions by educating you on reducing time
acquiring clients with low values.
You calculate CLV by adding the total proceeds you made from a client during the duration of his dealings with your business.
Such measurement can help you predict profitability by capturing the amount of recurring revenue to expect from new clients during the time of their relationship with your business.
Also, this metric enables you to identify targets for growth.
How to calculate CLTV:
Multiply the average number of sales x the total of recurring sales x the client’s average lifespan with your business. (number of sales $5,000 x repeat sales 12 months x customer lifespan 5years = $300,000)
Custom Churn Rate
Measuring customer churn metrics is essential as it indicates the loss of buyers, which ties directly to lost income.
Losing a significant number of customers (high churn) negatively impacts your bottom line and business growth.
So, you need to know your churn rate to ensure you’re not on the losing end because it’s expensive to replace lost customers than acquire new ones.
Calculating churn rate:
Divide the number of clients you lost within the month by the number of customers you had at the start of the month.
To illustrate, let’s say you started the month with 100 clients and lost 4-clients within the month; your churn rate is 4%. (4 lost customers during the month / 100 clients you started with = 4% churn).
Click-through Rates (CTRs)
The CTR metric is critical as well. It is the ratio of visitors to your landing page or website who clicked a hyperlink from one of your campaigns.
In other words, CTR calculates the number of times people who saw your campaign clicked it.
CTRs are ideal for measuring the effectiveness of your acquisition campaign effort.
Remember, your campaign effort include the emails you sent to subscribers, ad copy, social media campaign, and more.
These marketing efforts promote your business, products, or services.
How to calculate CTRs:
Here’s the formula; the number of clicks divided by the total number of impressions.
Clicks ÷ impressions = CTR.
To illustrate, if you get 10 clicks from 1000 impressions, your CTR is 10%. (10 clicks / 1000 impressions = 10%).
Other acquisition metrics to evaluate include:
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
- Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
- Customer Retention Rate
- Traffic Sources and others
Are you ready to acquire new clients for business growth?
Client acquisition is a powerful way to ensure business growth. The more customers you acquire, the higher your chances to increase sales and revenue.
But it’s essential to sift through your strategies before executing your plan.
If you’re struggling to get more customers, I can help you. I work with individual marketers and small & mid-sized businesses, helping them acquire more clients organically.
Nonetheless, conduct market research, reverse-engineer your competitors, and set measurable metrics. Then develop your acquisition techniques and experiment to see what works. Do you have more insights and tactics to add to this article?