How To Develop An Effective Customer Acquisition Strategy
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What Is Customer Acquisition?
Customer Acquisition
Customer acquisition is the process of attracting leads and turning them into paying customers. It involves identifying who is most likely to be interested in your product or service, introducing them to your business, and then persuading them to make a purchase.
How To Develop Your Customer Acquisition Strategy
Now that we understand customer acquisition and how we measure it, let's look into developing an effective customer acquisition strategy. Here is a simple 7-step framework to build your own:1.) Identify Your Ideal Customer
![CoSchedules "creating your ideal customer profile" which has get the details, build connections, follow your customers, find out they you buy, and ask your current customers.](https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/2023/03/Blog_How-To-Develop-An-Effective-Customer-Acquisition-Strategy_inline-1.png?w=3840&q=75)
- Who do we serve?
- Where do they spend time?
- What are their goals?
- What pain points do they have?
- What role do we play in their lives?
2.) Define Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
Every business should have a clear USP — a distinguishing characteristic, feature, or benefit that sets it apart from competitors. To determine yours, follow these three steps:- Analyze your competition: Look at what other businesses in your niche offer and how they market their products or services. Search their reviews, social media comments, and platforms like Reddit to find candid customer feedback.
- Identify your strength(s): Ask yourself why your product or service is better than others. This could be your expertise, special production processes, quality standards, or top-notch customer service. Whatever you choose, make sure that your competitors cannot match your specific strength. Potential customers should be able to readily identify that you offer a unique feature, a lower price, faster delivery, or something else of value.
- Distill your message: From your list of strengths, craft a concise USP. This one-sentence statement will reinforce why a customer should choose your business over another. Keep your USP specific and benefit-focused. A broadly-applicable statement may sound safe, but it won't motivate action. Instead, hone in on your ideal customer persona and explain how you can support them.
3.) Create A Data-Driven Approach
Marketing without data is like driving with your eyes closed — essentially guessing in the dark. Without measuring your efforts' success, you won't know how to adjust your customer acquisition strategy to push further growth. Fortunately, there are plenty of analytics tools available today. Most digital channels have built-in data analytics capabilities, and you can supplement these with third-party solutions depending on your specific customer acquisition strategy. For example, Facebook advertisers should take advantage of the native Facebook pixel. Shopify merchants may want to use Google Analytics and an attribution platform like TripleWhale. And SEO campaigns call for Google Search Console and a tool like Ahrefs or Moz to track rankings. These data providers can help you better understand the performance of your customer acquisition efforts and track everything from campaigns and budgets to website visits, leads, sales, and customer behavior. But simply gathering data is not enough. When implementing your analytics platforms, deciding which metrics are most relevant to you and your business goals is important. Beyond blended CAC, which averages your customer acquisition costs across all marketing channels, you may also want to track:- Total website visits
- Conversion rates
- Leads generated
- Return on ad spend (ROAS)
- Channel-specific CAC
4.) Explore Multiple Channels
![CoSchedule showing how sms, search, facebook. email and instagram are all connected.](https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/2023/03/Blog_How-To-Develop-An-Effective-Customer-Acquisition-Strategy_inline-1-copy.png?w=3840&q=75)
- Search engine optimization (SEO): Optimize your website performance and content to improve your visibility in search results. Build a keyword cluster, write helpful and engaging posts, and acquire white hat backlinks from relevant websites. As Google and other search engines determine that you have topical authority, your rankings and search traffic will improve.
- Paid advertising: Use targeted ads to reach a specific audience, drive website visits, and expedite the customer acquisition process. Social networks allow you to narrow your target audience based on demographics and perceived interests. Search ads are great for appearing in front of people already searching for a product or service like yours. And display ads can help to remind potential customers of unfinished purchases.
- Social media marketing: Leverage social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok to introduce users to your brand, nurture leads, and convert customers. Visual content such as lifestyle imagery, short-form videos, and influencer collaborations can help you attract attention and establish an organic presence.
- Content marketing: Create valuable content about your products or services, the problems they solve, or the industries they serve. Publish blog posts, eBooks, infographics, videos, and podcasts, and distribute them widely. The goal here is to build trust, credibility, and brand loyalty, which can lead to lower customer acquisition costs in the long run.
- Email marketing: Offer exclusive deals, discounts, or content in exchange for opt-ins to your email list. Then, send personalized emails to prospects and customers with information about upcoming promotions, new products, or industry updates. With the right copy and design, email campaigns can help you convert leads into customers at an economical CAC. But don’t forget to follow email security best practices to avoid the spam filter and protect your email list from cyber threats.
5.) Build Strong Partnerships
One of the most overlooked strategies for customer acquisition is to leverage the power of partnerships. This involves teaming up with other businesses, influencers, or even your own customers to access their networks and increase your reach. Here are a few simple ways to build partnerships:- Strategic alliances: Collaborate with another business in your industry that serves a similar target audience. You can share resources, co-brand products, or cross-promote each other's services to tap into each other's trusted customer bases.
- Joint ventures: Instead of simply aligning incentives, create an entirely new business in partnership with another company. Joint ventures are used to create new services, expand into new markets, or share distribution channels. This can help businesses leverage each other's strengths, pool resources, and share common risks and rewards.
- Referral programs: Reward existing customers for referring their friends and family to your business. You can accomplish this through rewards, discounts, merchandise, exclusive events, and more. Because these referrals come from trusted sources, they often result in higher conversion rates and lower customer acquisition costs.
- Affiliate networks: Partner with influencers, marketers, and other businesses who will promote your products or services in exchange for a percentage of each sale. Affiliates can generate substantial revenue when adequately incentivized. So don't be afraid to offer as generous of a commission as your margins allow.
6.) Provide Exceptional Customer Service
![CoSchedule presents the four metrics to monitor customer service quality which include customer satisfaction, not promoter score, first reply time, and average resolution time.](https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/2023/03/Blog_How-To-Develop-An-Effective-Customer-Acquisition-Strategy_inline-1-copy-2.png?w=3840&q=75)
7.) Iterate And Improve
Customer acquisition is never complete — it's an ongoing process of experimentation, tracking, and iteration. Even once you crack the code on one marketing channel, the next challenges are scaling and eventually jumping to another. And just when you might feel like an expert, the industry evolves. The only way to stay ahead of the curve and your competition is to continuously iterate and improve your customer acquisition strategy. Regularly implement A/B tests to confirm assumptions, explore new features or opportunities, and measure the impact of changes. Then, analyze the results to learn what's working and what isn't, and use those insights to inform your next round of tests. Taking incremental steps forward can help you respond to changing market conditions and maximize the performance of your customer acquisition efforts.Customer Acquisition Vs. Customer Retention
Customer acquisition is about attracting new customers, whereas customer retention focuses on keeping these existing customers loyal to the business. But acquisition marketing and retention marketing are not mutually exclusive — the two go hand-in-hand. The more effective your retention marketing is, the more you can spend on acquisition marketing. Reducing churn and increasing the repeat purchase rate drives up customer lifetime value. And in turn, higher lifetime value can be used to justify higher customer acquisition costs.![The comparison of customer retention vs customer acquisition and the effects of both and what they do for marketing.](https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/2023/05/retention-marketing.jpg?w=3840&q=75)