Table Of Contents
Introduction
Business leaders are always hungry for new ideas to get more sales from their core customer base.
But a shocking 50% of businesses don’t even have a customer acquisition strategy in place at all.
So 1 out of every 2 companies are just relying on word of mouth and referrals to bring in new customers.
But unfortunately, this is not something anyone can control.
So relying on word of mouth alone to drive the future success of your company is about as risky as trying to strike it rich by gambling your life savings away on a Vegas poker table.
Yikes.
With the rise in advanced cloud-based analytics, companies can now zero in on their marketing data like never before and optimize their customer acquisition strategy by making data driven decisions, as opposed to operating on pure emotion.
….Similar to Michael Scott making important business decisions
So if you’ve landed on this article, you might be asking yourself “What exactly is a customer acquisition strategy anyway?”
Here’s a simple definition: A customer acquisition strategy is an optimized mix of lead generation focused content, advertising, offers, and offline engagement tools to gain new customers.
If that sounds complicated to you, you’re not alone.
We wrote this article with you in mind, so if you’re ready to learn 7 key strategies that can help take your customer acquisition strategy to the next level, keep reading…
Customer Acquisition Cost
Let’s start with the numbers shall we?
An effective customer acquisition strategy is one in which the total value of new customers generated is more than the sales and marketing costs you invested to get those new customers to buy from you.
To determine if this is the case for your business, you need to calculate your customer acquisition cost, also known as the ‘CAC.’
Here’s the simple formula:
And before you reach for your smartphone’s calculator app, we’ve made it simple for you below with our handy-dandy CAC calculator:
So if your CAC is more than the actual value that a new customer brings into your business, your marketing investment is actually hurting you more than it’s helping you.
Reevaluate your customer acquisition strategy using some of the 7 strategies presented below….
Strategy #1 Define Your Target Audience
Let’s face it, everyone is not your customer.
And as heartbreaking as that may sound to some people, it’s a cold fact of marketing.
…Maybe the coldest.
And by targeting everyone as if they all view your business the same way, or as if they all have the same level of intent to buy what you’re selling, you’ll end up wasting a lot of marketing dollars in the process.
So what’s the first step to figure out who your target audience is?
Analyze the buyer’s journey that your prospects are taking before they decide to buy from you.
To help you along the way, our team designed an easy-to-follow buyer’s journey template to give you a clear-eyed view on who you’re selling to.
Access it here:
Once you have your audience defined, it’s much easier to create a content marketing strategy that can drive sales by building the value of your offer.
Strategy #2 Define And Measure Your Key Performance Metrics Consistently
You should always be measuring your:
Cost Per Click (CPC)
“How much does it cost me to get a prospect to click and visit my website?”
Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM)
“How much does it cost me to reach 1000 qualified prospects?”
Cost Per Lead (CPL)
“How much does it cost me to get a qualified sales lead?”
Lead-To-Close Rate (LTCR%)
“Of all the leads that I’m getting, how many of them are converting into a sale on average?”
Landing Page Conversion Rate (CR)
“Of all the visits that are coming to my website, how many of them are taking the action I want them to? (i.e. filling out a lead form, booking an appointment, requesting more information, purchasing your product)”
Sales Revenue Attributed To Marketing
(Total Sales) – (Total Marketing Expenses)
If you’re not tracking your key performance metrics, you won’t be able to gather the information you need to make data-driven decisions to decrease your CAC over time.
Strategy #3: Build A Marketing Funnel
When thinking about your marketing expenses used for customer acquisition, there are two ways to go about it:
A. Throw as much money into as many marketing channels as possible (aka the Shotgun approach)
B. Attract prospects into your marketing funnel and stay in front of them while building trust and credibility in your company until they’re ready to buy. (aka the Omnichannel approach)
(Hint: B is the best strategy by far)
For a more in-depth discussion on how the marketing funnel works, we invite you to read another article from our blog: What Is A Marketing Funnel And How Do I Create One That Works For My Organization?
The main benefit of using an omnichannel marketing funnel approach is that it guides your prospects from simple awareness that you exist, to understanding your unique value, to finally convincing them that what you’re selling is the best option that can meet their needs.
Too often, marketing campaigns attempt to sell their product or service in a single shot advertisement before their prospect is ready to buy, which is why a lot of them fail.
Instead, it is crucial to define your core audience, target them consistently with various forms of online and offline content, and then measure the effectiveness of each marketing channel as it relates to your overall ROI.
Strategy #4 Select Your Marketing Channels
Because everyone is not your target customer, you’ll stretch your marketing budget a lot farther when you invest more time and money into places where a majority of your target audience can be most easily reached.
So for example… if your target audience’s age is 60+, then don’t waste your time building out a strategy to reach them on a Gen Z dominated platform like TikTok.
…And if you’re trying to sell to millennials, a direct mail campaign may not be the best use of your marketing dollars, compared to an Instagram marketing campaign.
Do the research on the demographics and consumption rates of each platform and start with 1 or 2 to start and gradually expand from there.
That way you don’t stretch your budget too thin and can gather enough data per marketing channel to improve your strategy and CAC over time.
Strategy #5 Audit Your Brand Appearance
Establishing trust between your prospects goes a long way in driving consistent sales from your target audience.
One of the best ways to do this?
Make a powerful first impression.
In this day and age, most people are researching your company online before they’re ready to make a buying decision.
To establish a credible brand, here are our top 3 recommendations to get started:
1. Build a modern looking website that loads fast, is optimized for mobile phones, and clearly states your value proposition.
2. Use landing pages to capture traffic from your advertising campaigns and don’t send all your traffic to the homepage.
3. Use consistent and memorable branding and messaging
Let’s cover each in more detail:
Your Website
FACT: Your website has a profound effect on the perceived credibility and quality of your business.
Today, it takes the average consumer roughly 50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds) to form an opinion about your brand based on the design of your website.
And in a quick snap of a finger, they’ll decide to stay and keep browsing, or click off your site and visit your competition.
Especially if it feels like they jumped into a time machine that took them back to 1995…
That’s why one of the most important business investments you can make is improving the design and user experience of your website to establish credibility among your prospects.
Using Landing Pages In Your Marketing Campaigns
The homepage of your site is built to inform, while a landing page is designed to persuade.
So as a result, it’s nearly impossible to persuade a new prospect by making them fish for what they were looking for on your homepage after reading your ad for the first time.
It’s much better to send prospects to a landing page that matches the messaging from the ad they were just looking at.
In fact, Hubspot released a study that showed companies who have 30 or more landing pages get 7x more leads than companies who have 10 or less.
And Dell got more than a 300% lift in conversion when they sent traffic to landing pages vs their homepage.
Consistent Branding And Messaging
It’s much easier for a prospect to recognize and remember your brand when you’ve built brand consistency.
Elements of consistent branding include:
- The colors used in your logo, and marketing collateral
- Messaging that differentiates your brand from other options in the marketplace and reinforces your value proposition.
- Brand voice and copywriting guidelines
- Photo imagery and styles
Strategy #6 Inbound Marketing
Marketo defines this as “a strategy that utilizes many forms of pull marketing – content marketing, blogs, events, SEO, social media and more – to create brand awareness and attract new business.”
Let’s spend a bit more time on some effective uses of content marketing and SEO in the next section to pull prospects into your website and drive some serious increases in revenue.
Video Content Marketing
Video is arguably the best way to capture attention on the internet today.
You don’t even need a Hollywood level budget to produce high quality video content that addresses your prospect’s biggest needs and demonstrates how your product or service can solve their problems.
Even most smartphones have the capability to record HD video – and with a few minor investments in equipment like a phone stabilizer and a microphone, you can get away with your own DIY video production equipment for under $50.
In fact, recent studies have suggested that people remember 20% of what they hear, 30% of what they see, and an astounding 70% of what they see and hear.
This makes video is the perfect combination of audio and video to make your brand memorable and unique.
The market agrees.
In fact, 79% of consumers would rather watch a video to learn about a product than read text on a page.
One of the greatest benefits of video content is that you can post it on social media and also embed it on your website.
It’s one of the greatest tools to boost your social media engagement and increase your SEO at the same time.
Video is best executed when planned within various stages of the marketing funnel, so be sure and check out our resources on that here.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Google receives an astounding 3.5 billion searches per day on average!
Many of these searches are from consumers who are researching a product or service they’re interested in purchasing before they buy.
Google analyzes all the content on your website when deciding how to rank certain websites over others based on their relevance and content authority.
That’s why three of the best action steps you can take to capture the attention of your target audience is first doing keyword research, then creating content off of your core keyword list, and finally building your backlinks to establish authority.
Keyword Research & SEO Content Creation
Keyword research involves finding the average monthly search volume of relevant keywords, phrases, and questions that are most specific to your products and services.
This process is called building your core keyword list.
Some tools that can help you do this are: SEM Rush, Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, and Google’s Traditional Keyword Planner.
When you understand the search volume of your core keywords, you can prioritize the types of blog content and additional page content to create on your website.
Building Backlinks
The secret to building site authority is to get as many websites linking back to your own site as possible.
This is called building your backlinks.
3 of the best ways that can help you start building backlinks is:
1. Writing content that supports points brought up in other blog posts and then asking authors to link back to you. You must create better or more specific content than what the original author is currently linking to.
2. Finding broken links and offering your relevant article as a replacement link for the original author.
3. Create an awesome-looking infographic and offer it to an author to help improve their blog post as long as they agree to link the infographic back to your website.
Doing some basic SEO work is one of the best free strategies that can consistently bring you qualified traffic to your website.
Blogging
Is blogging dead in 2020 and beyond?
Not even close.
Blogs can answer your prospects’ most commonly asked questions that typically come up during the buyer’s journey, and they can also educate them on potential solutions that you offer.
Billions of searches are happening everyday and many of them are asking questions that are directly related to your products and services.
Be there to answer those questions and concerns through blog post content and you’ll immediately increase your credibility and trust from your prospects.
Strategy #7 Outbound Marketing
When a company initiates the conversation and sends its message directly to their audience, that’s known as outbound marketing.
This form of marketing can be viewed in the more traditional sense including TV commercials, radio ads, direct mail, billboards, print advertisements, and cold calls.
And more modern forms of outbound marketing might be email blasts, social media advertising, or search engine advertising.
The biggest problem with traditional outbound marketing is that it is generally harder to track and less profitable than modern forms of outbound marketing, and especially inbound marketing.
That’s why the most effective outbound marketing campaigns are specific to the needs of your audience.
For the purposes of this article, we’d like to cover how to use modern outbound marketing approaches through email, digital advertising, and direct mail to drive a profitable ROI for any business.
Email is one of the most tried and true methods to reach your target audience.
But there’s a difference between using it to send out thousands of non-personalized messages to reach new customers (that’s called spamming by the way) and using it to communicate with your audience on a regular basis.
The biggest challenge with email is that most companies are already using it to get attention, because it’s relatively low cost….
So the downside is that most inboxes are about as crowded as rush hour traffic on a typical Monday morning commute.
So how do you build a high converting email campaign?
Give your audience a reason to stay subscribed to your messaging.
Get their opt-in permission by collecting their email through lead magnets, in-person events, or during the checkout process on your website.
Then keep their attention by providing value.
Once in a while is ok, but try to avoid selling them in every email you send out.
Otherwise you become annoying very fast.
One of the biggest sins of inbox marketing is only sending transactional-based emails and neglecting the opportunity to build and nurture relationships.
Invest into quality content that builds the value of your product or service and watch your open rates skyrocket.
Facebook Messenger Chatbots
Facebook Messenger Chatbots are kinda like the ‘cooler cousin’ of email marketing.
With over 2.6 billion monthly active users, it’s highly likely that your prospects are using Facebook each month to keep in touch with friends and consume various forms of content.
So instead of reaching them on a platform like email that’s been around since the early 1970s, try reaching them on a Facebook messenger chatbot and have a real-time conversation with them over chat, as opposed to a long and drawn out process of going back and forth over email.
Some of the best features of this platform are that you can write pre-scripted message sequences to answer your prospect’s most frequently asked questions and schedule promotional messages in advance to keep in touch with your audience.
Use tools like ManyChat or Chatfuel to help you build your very own Facebook messenger chatbot.
Or you can also choose to stay stuck in the 1970s and build a traditional email campaign while watching the first rendition of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.
Digital Advertising
Social media ads and search engine ads are some of the most cost effective ways to reach a targeted audience and promote your brand.
They can also be the quickest way to burn money if you don’t use the right strategy.
That’s why digital advertising is best used within the concept of a marketing funnel, where at the top of the funnel, you drive interest and awareness with your ads to help your prospects find solutions to their questions and problems.
Then once you’ve driven traffic to your website, retarget with offers and value-building content that encourages them to take action.
An effective campaign starts with doing proper research on your target audience by asking questions like:
Who are they?
What are they googling?
How old are they?
Where do they live?
Where do they work?
What do they like to do?
Then once you have honed in on the audience that makes sense for you, select the ad objective(s) that meet your goals at each stage in the funnel.
Keep in mind that there are over 15 different ad objectives that all have a different role to play in the marketing funnel, so it’s important to select the correct objective to avoid wasted spend.
Conclusion
Developing a profitable customer acquisition strategy is the lifeblood of any growing business.
To do this properly, you first need to understand your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).
From there, define your target audience by analyzing the buyer’s journey and measure your key performance metrics so that you know how to refine your strategy over time.
Once you have your audience and metrics defined, it’s much easier to build a marketing funnel strategy across various channels with a mix of inbound and outbound marketing methods that can consistently fill your funnel with qualified prospects.
If you need help with your customer acquisition strategy, please book a complimentary strategy session with a member of our team.
