Over the last years, the cost of attracting new customers has risen. 

Marketing is becoming more costly. Consumers are becoming more skeptical, which is why brands and companies have been looking for ways to attract their target customers.

To adapt to consumers’ behaviour, companies are continuously looking for ways to acquire new customers and gain their trust.

Having a good customer acquisition strategy is a critical component of any company. Without it, you’re going to struggle to expand your company in any significant way.

If you’re looking for ways to boost the acquisition of your client, you’re not alone. Reducing consumer acquisition costs and proving the ROI of marketing activities are two of the most frequently cited marketing goals for companies.

But before we deep dive into the world of customer acquisition, do note that an acquisition channel that works for one company may not work for another. Moreover, finding out which channel is the most sustainable for getting new customers in is one of the most challenging aspects of scaling any company so don’t give up and keep on looking for a customer acquisition strategy that will work for you.

In this article, you will learn the fundamentals of customer acquisition, several acquisition channels, and how you can find the right and agile acquisition channel that’s going to stand ever-changing trends.

What is “Customer Acquisition”?

Hubspot defines customer acquisition as the process of bringing new customers or clients to your business. The goal of this process is to create a systematic, sustainable customer acquisition strategy that can evolve with the trends and changes.

Customer acquisition is an essential component of any business. Systematically attracting and converting new customers keeps companies flourishing and thriving.

Customer Acquisition Channels

Content Offers

To be successful in acquiring new customers, you must produce high-value content and use the content to inspire visitors to take action.

Content offers are usually gated content, meaning that the viewers must provide personal information such as name and email address in exchange for in-depth and valuable content. You will typically encounter this in ebooks, guides, whitepapers, among others.

The process of producing content offers is similar to that of the blog but may require more advanced resources.

Email Marketing

After you acquire more details from your gated content offer, you can now create an email list and use that email list to connect to and convert your customers.

Email marketing is a highly successful method to stay in front of your customers and promote quality content, product details, events and discounts. Email is also a perfect way to communicate with your audience, whether it’s sending a happy birthday email or a valuable promotional email.

Email marketing gets to the heart of the individual customer since it provides a direct line into your consumer’s inbox, unlike social media, search, or content marketing. Thus, you can track consumer behaviour without having to ask too many questions.

Blogging

Blogging is a widely recommended acquisition tool for companies of all sizes. Running a blog helps you to explore various subjects, flaunt your industry expertise, and establish authority among your followers.

Blogging also continuously gives you new ways to connect with your audience, whether through a question they can answer in their comments or a compelling call-to-action.

Search Engine Marketing

Leveraging SEO as a customer acquisition tool is relatively easy, and it’s very cost-effective. 

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the organic aspect of search engine marketing. SEO complements content marketing efforts by optimising your content to make it easier for your target audience to find you when they type a related query in the search bar.

The concept behind SEO is to create indexable content that appears first on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and makes searchers want to click on your content. 

Indexable content means that search engines can read, understand and index them inside the SERP.

Whereas, paid search marketing (pay-per-click or PPC) is ads on Google’s own SERP. Instead of organically optimising your content, PPC allows you to create a search result and pay for it to appear alongside your organic efforts, potentially improving your chances of being searched.

Some resources that can help you boost your content rank and learn more about the behaviours of search engines are Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, and Ahrefs.

Social Media

If your marketing goal is to increase brand recognition, build company personality, and share content that you have published elsewhere such as your blog or video) then organic social media is the most useful consumer acquisition channel.

Posting organically on social media may seem like shouting into a void, and with 3.8 billion active users, it can sure feel that way. The key is accessing the right networks — and this all comes back to a well-defined audience.

Consider using social media management tools like Hootsuite or Buffer to help you curate and post content on your networks.

On the other hand, leveraging paid social media may be a better tactic for your business, depending on your budget and audience type. Paying for social media advertisements and exposure is a surefire way to get content in front of your audience, without having to build up a network of loyal followers.

Whereas sponsored posts on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram get your content in front of the right eyes, Facebook Lead Ads allow you to advertise on social media and gather customer information such as email addresses and names. This information can make the difference between a follower and a lead, so if your business is looking to build its list, this might be the acquisition method for you.

Video

Video is one of the more complicated forms of content to produce, but with higher-quality cameras becoming cheaper and a plethora of freelancers available, creating videos is easier than you think. Video marketing as part of a broader content strategy is more about content than quality, though the latter does help in the long-run.

Video production typically involves script writing, editing, shooting, and animation — all of which you can outsource through freelancers or production agencies. Video tends to be the most expensive of the content types, so be sure to preserve your very best content for video ideas. If you want to visualize a concept for your audience, you can create a Slideshare as an alternative to video.

Conclusion

Customer acquisition is all about getting the right customers to stick around—and helping you get more.

There are a lot of different frameworks that aim to help you find the right channel to follow. Still, essentially you will need to go through a reasonable amount of trial and error, particularly if you do not have any historical data or basis. Otherwise, mixing and experimenting with a variety of market acquisition techniques will also help you learn more about your audience and integrate new tactics into your current strategy.

When you set up your customer acquisition plan the right way, you can expect not only to lower your acquisition cost but also to increase the value of your customer’s lifetime value.

This is a full list of new techniques for the acquisition of customers. You can use it to increase your progress. The easiest way to use these techniques is to try them together. See which one of these works with your startup, and then stick with it.

Which of the customer acquisition strategies has worked for you? Comment below.