If you’re in the business industry we’re sure you’ve heard of customer acquisition but just in case you might be a newer start up let us clarify it for you. It is the process of finding and guiding customer to buy from your business in a way that is measurable and repeatable. This happens in 6 stages: awareness, interest, consideration, intent, evaluation and finally purchase. Awareness and interest fall under the umbrella of leads. Consideration, intent and evaluation fall under prospect. Those who purchase are then your customers. To get started you need to calculate your customer acquisition cost (CAC). This is done by dividing the total cost of marketing spend by the number of new customers attained. There are certain industry averages that you can find on any Google search to get an idea of what yours should be. You must take steps before you get started to understand what your ideal customer is. If you don’t know ask yourself these questions. What you do customers accomplish with your service? What are their demographics? What benefit(s) does your product/service offer? Where do your customers source their information from? (This question will help you decide which channels your marketing strategies will be focused on.) Why would they not buy your product? When does the ideal customer make purchases? Now that you have an idea of how to identify your target market you must identify your business goals and decide which strategies you can use to obtain new customers. Here is a short list of some types of strategies you can consider.
1. Influencer advertising/marketing
2. Content marketing. UGC (sourced content) marketing/advertising
3. Social media advertising/marketing
4. Email marketing
5. SEO
6. Traditional paid advertising
7. Referral programs
This quick guide is a way to help you get started with your customer acquisition for your business but isn’t a fully comprehensive guide. It’s important that your brand do the research in order to decide what the best plan may be. Once you have a strategy and have implemented it we’re sure you will get the results desired. However, getting new customers is only half of the battle. Keeping them is the other half. Customer retention is just as important. We will write another article in the near future on ways to ensure that once you have grabbed your audience’s attention, you keep them.
