Unlike many of the other steps in starting a business, customer acquisition remains important at each phase. You’ll never be able to say that you are completely done with acquiring customers, even if you’re in your 10th year of operation (at least not if you want to scale and stay profitable).
It’s also one of the biggest pain points for businesses. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling the best product or offering an essential service, it’s not a given that you’ll have enough customers to help your business stay profitable. You actively need to create awareness and motivate your target audience to buy your products continuously. To help you, we’ve summarized all the basics you need to know about customer acquisition and included the most common strategies that you can use.
How Does the Customer Acquisition Funnel Work?
Online customer acquisition services refers to getting potential customers to buy your products or pay for your services. In short, it’s how your business gets new customers. This is done by implementing a stage-by-stage process that you can repeat – the customer acquisition funnel.
With the help of the customer acquisition funnel, you can better visualize your potential customer’s journey. Typically, there are three primary stages that you need to pay attention to: awareness (top of the funnel), consideration (middle of the funnel), and purchase (bottom of the funnel).
Your first step is to create awareness about your brand and its offerings among your target audience. This will include targeting people who don’t necessarily have any clear intention to buy your products. In other words, your content will speak to a bigger audience.
Once prospective customers have completed some sort of action, like subscribing to your newsletter, they’ve “graduated” from the top of the funnel and moved to the middle of the funnel. This means that they’re now giving your product or service more consideration. Your job is now to motivate them to complete an actual purchase.
Though, let’s be honest, simply signing up for a newsletter is still a long shot from making a first purchase. There are stronger actions, like adding a product to a shopping cart, that shows much clearer buying intent. Once prospects have completed such a type of action, they’ve reached the bottom of the funnel. It’s the last stage before becoming a customer. At this stage, brands typically use incentives like promo codes or free shipping to clinch the sale.
If you take only one thing from this explanation of the customer acquisition funnel is that it should never be your goal to push a sale every single time. It might sound counter-intuitive when your goal is to drive more new sales, but depending on where your prospective customer is in the funnel, sharing, for example, a simple blog post with valuable content is more than enough for now.
Creating a Strategy for Customer Acquisition
1. Identify your target audience and goals
Identifying your target audience or ideal customer is actually one of the first steps that you should’ve completed when you started your business. So, you’re supposed to have this information already.
The reason why this information matters again when creating a customer acquisition strategy is that it will help you to create content that they will find engaging. What are your customers’ pain points? Where do they usually go when they’re searching for information? What are their demographics? These are just some of the questions you should ask yourself when (starting a business) and creating a customer acquisition strategy.
Armed with better insight into who you’re actually targeting, you can identify your aims. Sure, it’s to get more customers, but what else? Make it more specific.
For example, at what rate do you want to acquire new customers? Is your main goal to create more awareness about your brand? Do you perhaps want to introduce a new product? If your goal is clear, it will be easier for you to communicate the right message.
2. Select your channels or method
To get new customers, your brand needs to be active on the channels that its target audience uses frequently. From Facebook to referral programs, there are a number of channels and customer acquisition methods that you should explore to keep your target audience engaged at every stage of the purchase journey.
Depending on which channels you choose, you’ll also need to adjust your content and strategy. For example, paid advertising on social media channels need captivating visuals, while blog posts for SEO purposes are all about the right keywords and not so much the visuals.
3. Create a strategy for the different channels
When you’re creating a strategy, look at what type of content your ideal customers find more engaging. For instance, do they interact more with long-form blog posts or short videos? What type of content do your competitors typically post? For your strategy to be effective, it needs to be built around the content that your target audience actually wants to see.
4. Decide on a budget
Without a budget, it’s very easy to spend a small fortune on marketing. If you’re completely new to this, it’s better to begin with a modest budget and increase it once you start to see results.
If it’s not your first marketing campaign and you were smart and kept the analytics, you can use this information to work out your customer acquisition cost (more about this later) and use this number as a guide. By knowing how much you need to spend on getting a new customer, you’ll be better equipped to work out your marketing budget.
5. Measure and adjust
As there are many different factors that can impact the process, it’s crucial that you measure and analyze the results. Without this data, you’ll have no idea of knowing where to make changes, let alone if your efforts are actually working in the first place.
So, you’ll want to keep track of a couple of metrics such as your customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, and new customer growth. Online businesses that are selling subscriptions will also want to measure its churn rate. With this information, you can work out at which rate customers are canceling their subscriptions. For instance, if you find that female customers are converting more and responding better to Instagram posts, you’ll want to free up some of your budget so that you can spend more on this channel.
Long gone are those bazar days where hordes of people used to pile up to buy essentials, today everything from a small screw to a tractor can be ordered online.
The importance of digital marketing lies in the fact that it provides multiple innovative solutions.
And, businesses will continue to capitalize on this trend the next year.
So, let us look at how digital marketing will help businesses in 2021.
Online Channels & ResourcesFew years back, online marketing was perceived to be a game for the bigger brands and corporates, but with the recent additions of the important channels and their enhancement to promote local business has resulted in the ever-increased usage of online mediums by businesses.
SEO results of google search have started favouring local businesses more than ever.
Improve efficiency of media spends with Wipro's customer acquisition accelerator services and solutions by capturing digital behavior of customers to generate offers and advertising
