The best way to gain new customers is to create a clear customer acquisition strategy. Yet, most companies lack such a defined plan in their marketing strategy.
How does acquisition differ from lead scoring? Which are the best strategies? And what pros and cons do these tactics entail for B2B companies?
What is customer acquisition?
Customer acquisition is
“A strategy to bring new customers in on a continuous basis”.
Customer acquisition consists of the entire sales funnel. It includes each aspect of the customer journey: lead generation, activation, customer loyalty, and conversation rate optimization.
A company is constantly finding new customers for its products and services to survive and grow its business.
Why is Customer acquisition important?
Companies exist because of their customers. No business can exist without people willing to pay for a specific brand's products and services.
A successful customer acquisition strategy helps a business win new business, retain loyal customers, and improve its profits. So, customers should always be at the centre of any business. This is what acquisition is all about.
How does customer acquisition relate to lead generation and customer retention?
Customer acquisition is about how to gain new customers. It is the key to creating leads that can become customers. This includes:
Lead generation is the first part of the customer acquisition funnel. It is the process of attracting new prospects via a call to action and making them aware of your business.
Sale is the second part of the customer acquisition funnel. It turns a prospect into a customer when buying your products or services.
Customer acquisition takes place before and during the purchase, whereas customer retention takes place after the purchase.
Customer retention is the effort of keeping customers.
Altogether, this is called the customer lifecycle.
Delivering a great customer experience throughout the entire customer lifecycle help to decrease the costs of customer acquisition.
Yet it’s even more important to acquire quality, long-term customers. Combining customer acquisition and customer retention is the best way to have a profitable business. It will help make more money and profit and let your business grow steadily.
How to create a customer acquisition strategy?
Identifying potential customers can be done in many ways. Yet to create a solid acquisition strategy, any business needs to investigate the following six basics steps:
#STEP1: Identify your Target Audience.
The first step is to understand your business's customer base, both current customers and new target audiences.
Answer the following questions:
What do customers accomplish with your product or service?
What struggles and pain points do your customers experience?
What are your customers’ demographics?
What benefits do customers seek in buying your product(s) or services?
How do customers find information about your product(s) or services?
Why do customers decide not to buy your product(s) or services?
Why do your customers decide to buy your product(s) or services?
Study your competitors.
And analyze market research.
Keeping track of your customer profiles can help you analyze, understand, and expand your customer base, while your business is growing. It also shows you the best customer acquisition channels for your business.
#STEP2: Define Business Goals.
Knowing your ideal customer profiles will help define a business's customer acquisition goals and objectives.
Answer the question:
What are you trying to achieve with your marketing efforts?
Set up revenue expectations for the coming year.
Set goals for the customer acquisition strategy, including customer churn (customers leaving) and current customer growth (new customers).
#STEP3: Choose Acquisition Channels.
To bring in new customers, think about which acquisition channels your business will use to find new customers. And what content types are needed to create these channels.
A customer acquisition channel is
"Any place customers meet a brand for the first time".
Popular customer acquisition channels include Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, SEO, Paid (social) ad, Referrals and Organic Search, among others.
#STEP4: Develop a unique Channel Strategy
When creating a marketing strategy for each acquisition channel, focus on:
What content your audience interacts with.
The content competitors are posting.
What KPIs.
Research the best strategies for each channel to get the most out of your customer acquisition efforts.
Depending on your customer acquisition strategy, you may realize which customer acquisition channels are most helpful for your specific business.
#STEP5: Communicate with your customer database and business target audience.
A fifth, crucial step is to identify the gaps in the customer acquisition process. This can only be done with direct feedback from existing customers.
Communicate with your customers via customer surveys, email contact forms, customer interviews, social media posts and blog posts.
Promote a deal
Ask for feedback
Talk directly with customers.
Create a communication plan to keep communicating with your customers on a regular basis. This will help you identify the value customers expect from your products and services.
#STEP6: Measure and optimize customer acquisition metrics.
Many factors can affect customer acquisition. Therefore, it is important to analyze and measure customer acquisition metrics. Customer acquisition analytics can help you figure out:
Where do customers hear about your products?
Which channels do customers prefer to buy?
Customer location and demographics.
Before you start tracking, figure out which customer acquisition metrics you will monitor. Common metrics include the following:
Customer acquisition costs (CAC)
New customer growth or monthly recurring revenue (MRR)
Customer lifetime value (LTV)
Churn rate (CR)
Customer Retention
Conversion rate or ratio of lifetime value to customer acquisition cost (LTV: CAC)
Customer acquisition metrics are to prove whether your marketing efforts are working or not. This will help your business create a customer strategy that aligns with the overall business goals.
With the right preparation and tactics, your business can attract high-value customers, keep them around longer, and grow more sustainably.
In this way, you can be sure that your business is not missing acquisition channels where potential customers are.
What are the best customer acquisition channels and lead generation strategies?
#Strategy1: Content marketing
Content marketing involves creating business blog posts, guides, infographics, videos, and podcasts to answer questions and solve customers' problems.
#Strategy2: Social Media Marketing
An online presence on social channels for business matters. Which social media is best, depends on the target audience.
#Strategy3: Paid ad
Digital advertising is the process of paying a website or platform to reach its audience via advertisement space. To acquire new customers for a new business, paid advertising is one of the best options.
Paid ads produce results immediately, generating traffic, leads, and sales right after you launch. And can support SEO efforts by helping to find keywords to drive organic search campaigns.
#Strategy4: SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of website content to boost organic search rankings on Google or other search engines. This includes continuous Landing Page Optimization and website improvement.
#Strategy5: Video content marketing
Video content marketing is the process of creating and distributing video content to attract and retain customers.
Video content on video platforms such as YouTube or Vimeo can boost brand awareness. They are one of the best ways to inform prospects about your brand and your products.
#Strategy6: Mobile Marketing
With mobile marketing, your business reaches out to customers on their smartphones through SMS, Facebook Messenger, push notifications, or mobile apps.
#Strategy7: Email marketing engagement
Email marketing is one of the cheapest ways to communicate with your customers. The traffic a business receives from content marketing and SEO can be used to build an email list. New visitors and customers can subscribe to a business newsletter to receive updates about a business's products and services.
#Strategy8: Referrals
Referral programs are an effortless way to improve client acquisition.
#Strategy9: Landing page
Landing pages are a good channel to highlight new products and services.
#Strategy10: Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is working with influencers, who have an active, sizable audience, to promote your brand’s message, products, or services.
What are the pros and cons of each?
Content marketing
pros:
Create brand awareness.
Educate potential customers.
Support your entire customer journey, from lead generation to acquisition and retention.
Improve Return on Investment via business blogging.
Build authority and credibility in your industry.
Build marketing assets for multiple customer segments.
Build trust, loyalty for prospects and customer retention.
Assist your SEO efforts by adding more targeted, indexed pages to your website.
cons:
Content marketing requires time
Content needs to be promoted and distributed
Content must be high quality; otherwise, it can’t stand out.
Social media
pros:
Increase brand awareness.
Interact directly with your target audience.
Promote your products and services to followers.
cons:
experience negative comments and trolls
a business can get banned or removed from the platform
SEO
pros:
Drive quality traffic to your website.
Convert your business leads into customers.
Potential customers are qualified by their search intents
cons:
Ranking high on search engines takes time
Popular terms can get competitive
Return on investment (ROI) can be difficult to measure.
Mobile marketing
pros:
Create automated omnichannel campaigns.
Align with consumer market demand.
Personalize at every stage of the buyer journey.
cons:
Email marketing
pros:
reach your prospects or customers directly
highly personalized and segmented emails
easy to measure.
cons:
It takes time to build a quality email list
It can break email marketing legislation (GDPR, CAN-SPAM)
can be competitive
Video Content Marketing
pros:
good for product demonstration.
engaging videos can capture and retain attention
cons:
resource-intensive to produce high-quality video.
Referral program
pros:
builds customer loyalty
Being referred by a friend.
Improve referred customers' lifetime.
Increase Customers retention rate.
cons:
Can’t force your customers to refer their friends
No guarantees that a referral program will work
Paid ads
pros:
Fast way to get to traffic.
Easy to measure and scale
Specific targeting (geography, age, gender, interests.)
cons:
can be expensive (Pay-per-click (PPC) is expensive).
It costs time and money to figure out what works for a business.
Ad blockers and third-party cookies can block web browsers to show paid ads.
Influencer marketing
pros:
Easy to improve brand awareness
Popular influencers can positively influence your brand
Can generate direct sales via influencer-specific discount codes
cons:
No return on investment is guaranteed
Risk of unwanted brand associations
Limited control over creative or messaging
What are the best customer acquisition strategies and techniques to choose from for a B2B company?
Unfortunately, there is no magic trick to creating the best customer acquisition strategy. So, it is hard to say which customer acquisition strategy works best for any company. In fact, there are many ways to find new clients and keep them.
Therefore, the first step is to find out what marketing method works best for your business. To do so, calculate the Cost of Acquisition per Customer (CAC):
CAC = (Cost of Sales + Cost of Marketing) ÷ New Customers AcquiredFor this, divide all the costs spent on sales and marketing by the number of customers acquired during a period. This will give insight if the customer acquisition channels work for your company.
Secondly, you need to investigate how you can implement these customer acquisition channels consistently. This is how you start creating the best customer acquisition strategy for your business.
Understanding your customer intention, needs and goals are crucial for that. For this, you need to carefully investigate your business resources for:
The specific target audience
Available time
Available marketing team members dedicated to the project
Available Budget
The Company’s commitment
Once all of that is clear, you are ready to create a customer acquisition strategy and start acquiring new customers.
Ready to start acquiring new customers?
As a B2B digital marketing agency, Xplore Digital loves to hear more about your company. Our team of international marketer consultants like to help businesses improve their business. Contact us to create your unique customer acquisition strategy.
