It’s not always about how much you spend.
You can spend a ton and still not achieve your customer acquisition goals.
Customer acquisition is an important part of any business and as such must be taken seriously if the business must succeed.
To successfully get new customers, you have to put a strategy in place.
Customer acquisition strategies are plans businesses employ to reach, engage, and convince consumers to buy your products and services.
According to Smart insights, customer acquisition strategy defines the best mix of media and engagement tools (lead generation and product offer) to gain new customers through targeting them and reaching them through online and offline customer journeys.
How To Create Customer Acquisition Strategies For Your Small Business
1. Define Your Goal
The first thing you need to do when you’re creating an acquisition strategy is to clarify your end goal.
How many new customers do you want your business to acquire in a year?
How much value do you expect them to contribute to your business throughout their lifetime?
For instance, your goal might be to acquire 2500 new customers in 6 months that will contribute N150,000 to your business throughout their lifetime.
2. Define Your Target Audience
To achieve your goal, you need to set a well-defined audience that your product or service.
Who is your product for? what problems does it solve? what class of customers suffer from that problem the most?
A good understanding of who your customers are is critical to the success of your acquisition strategy so be sure to research adequately.
3. Choose The Right Channel
There is a long list of customer acquisition channels that are available to you depending on who your customers are.
The best channel(s) for working-class mothers might not be effective for targeting young graduates.
So, you need to research and experiment until you have between one and three channels you can use to acquire your target customers.
4. Set Up Your Marketing Funnel
A marketing funnel is a visualization of the steps your customer has to take from the moment they come in touch with you to when they become customers and the respective tool and technique your business can employ at each stage of their journey.
A typical funnel has the following steps:
– Awareness
– Interest
– Consideration
– Intent
– Evaluation
– Conversion
The marketing funnel helps the business to employ the appropriate marketing to take the customer on a journey that ends in them buying.
For instance, an advert for awareness is different from an advert for customers in the interest and consideration stage.
So, outline the steps your customers need to take from the point of the first contact to their conversion and describe the objective for each step as well as the tools and techniques you’d employ to achieve your goals.
5. Market Where Your Customers Are
The next step to creating your acquisition strategy is to determine how you want to market your products or services.
The first thing here is that you must market to customers through the right channels you have identified in step three (3) above.
Then employ a variety of marketing techniques like:
1. Content Marketing
2. Email Marketing
3. Social Media Marketing
4. Referral Marketing
5. Search Engine Marketing
6. TV/Radio Advertising
7. Billboard/Flyer Advertising
8. Cold Calling
Some business owners, employ two or more of these marketing types depending on the type of customers they want to reach and the type of product or service they’re offering.
This is another area where a good knowledge of who you’re targeting comes to play.
For instance, if my business YTR Insurance wants to reach mid-career employees aged between 40 – 50 years, what would be the appropriate marketing to use?
Advertise on social media platforms like TikTok & Instagram or are they more likely to watch ads on TV?
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