What Steps are Involved in a Customer Acquisition Strategy?

Steps in a Customer Acquisition Strategy

Customer acquisition is a crucial step toward growing your business. Because with new customers, you get new sales, and with new sales, your business can thrive. Did you know that more than 40% of businesses focus on customer acquisition?

But how do you create a customer acquisition strategy? Here are some steps that you can take for an effective customer acquisition plan:

Define Your Target Audience

The first step to creating an effective customer acquisition strategy is to define the target audience for your business. You spent hours perfecting your product/service to create the right solution for a problem, but now, you’ve got to market it to the right people for your customer acquisition plan to work.

It’s just about identifying who they are (age, location, occupation, title, gender, etc) and then focusing your efforts to acquire them.

However, if you don’t know your target audience, you will be limiting the effectiveness of your customer acquisition marketing. Unless, of course, you are offering a universal solution.

To determine your target audience here’s what you can do:

  • Understand the problem you’re solving
  • Conduct market research to understand whose problem you are solving
  • Maybe you can start with a free trial to understand who is interested in your solution

Finding the Right Acquisition Channels

After identifying the target audience, it’s time to determine the right acquisition channels. You want to be where your target audience is. This may include content marketing, SEO optimization, digital advertising, and even traditional advertising (including TV, flyers, billboards, etc).

How do you find the right acquisition channels for your customer acquisition strategy? By conducting market research and studying statistics. You may also try A/B testing on different platforms to determine which one is offering you a better ROI.

For example, in a survey, 41% of respondents said they would want to use social media channels for B2B marketing and customer acquisition.

Use The Customer Acquisition Funnel

Creating and using a customer acquisition funnel is crucial to building an effective customer acquisition strategy. The funnel is wide at the top, think of it as spreading your net to catch maximum fish. As we move down along the funnel, it gets narrower, so as to refine the customers acquired at the beginning stage.

As potential customers move along the funnel, lower-quality leads to filter out along the way, and in the end, you only have high-quality leads that ultimately lead to sales.

Typically, there are 6 stages in the funnel:

  • Awareness
  • Interest
  • Consideration
  • Intent
  • Evaluation
  • Purchase

Awareness

Your brand might be new or most of your target audience might not be aware of it. So, the first step in the funnel is to spread awareness about your brand so the maximum number of people from your target audience comes to know of it. Think of it as one of your first interactions with your brand.

✋ Warning

Follow this guide to find customers with the right purchase intent, or your targeted customers that are very close to making a decision about purchasing your products or services.

Interest

Once you have the attention of your target audience, it’s time to retain them by developing interest in your brand. How do you do that? It’s simple. By Educating your potential customers. This is one of the best ways to distinguish your brand from the rest.

You don’t necessarily have to educate them about your products, but you can also spread knowledge of the niche. You can even try addressing their emotions with a clever message that resonates with them.

Did you know? According to a survey, 55% of the respondents considered blog posts and articles to be high-value content pieces to drive potential customers through the sales funnel.

Related: Increase Your Brand Potential: How to Measure and Strategies

Consideration

Once you have grabbed the interest of your potential customers they will be more interested in considering your product/service. However, you’re not the only brand out there, so you have to do something to earn their consideration.

To do so, you can offer downloadable content such as an ebook or a free trial upon registration. This will lead them to become more familiar with your brand and its services/products.

Intent

The next thing is intent. Potential customers will move further down the funnel and move closer to the purchase decision. For example, you can offer a product/service demo, stimulating them to add it to the shopping cart.

Evaluation

Once your brand has taken prospects to this stage, they will seriously start considering your product/service. This is when they will weigh all the details such as benefits, costs, etc. They might also consider going to a similar brand or may not do anything.

Purchase

This is when your potential customer converts into a customer, the completion of a transaction. Now, after the sale, you may indulge in upsell, cross-sell, or may offer customer loyalty.

Final Thoughts

The worst thing you can do in customer acquisition marketing is stalking your potential customers. You can indulge in the identity market, which respects potential customers as equal partners in the brand relationship.