It is the use of the right customer acquisition strategies that enable companies to grow. This is more so when it comes to targeted customer acquisition that enables even the startups to acquire new customers in a cost efficient manner. The important rule for companies to remember is that it often costs more to acquire new customers than to retain them. The acquisition benefits needs to be quantified fully and effective ways of attracting, satisfying and retaining customers found.
The purpose of this article is to give you a quick guide that will help you set up a plan for customer acquisition. The guide contains the crucial steps you have to take during the process.
- Have a plan and hire the right people
Regardless of how your target customer acquisition plan is, the first thing you need to do is to have a solid plan. Although the plans do change over time, having a solid plan will keep you from going overboard. Your plan should give details of your target audience, platforms you will be using, metrics for measuring success, timelines as well as the required manpower. A good plan will give details of the goals you want to achieve and why. Will you be outsourcing the work or hiring an in-house team?
Once your plan is in place, the next step is hiring the right team. Although you can assign customer acquisition duties to your existing staffs, it always pays more to hire a team that is qualified to handle customer acquisition tasks. You need someone who fully understands the acquisition process. All your existing staffs should also know what is required of them during the process. For example, in case of a problem in the process, your staffs should be quick to swiftly fix it. Customer complaints must also be handled properly.
- Define your audience
Now that you have the right team working for you, the next thing you have to do is to define your audience. Whom are you targeting? In this case, you will have two clients to focus on; the current audience and the ideal audience.
The current audience is the customers you already have. The goal here is to improve customer retention. You don’t want your current audience to feel ignored then leave you for your competitors. You need to make them feel valued and appeal to their needs. The social media will help you keep an eye on your customers.
Your ideal audience is the one you want to reach out to. Your primary goal will be presenting yourself as an influential expert in the industry. You need to build credibility so that they can have trust in you.
- Find the right analyzing and optimizing tools
With the knowledge of who you want to reach out to, you also need to learn how best to reach out to. You also want to be engaged in customer acquisition management to make sure that you are taking the right efforts. For this, you will need to get the right analytics and analyzing tools. These will help you know how your website is performing as well as what your current and ideal audiences are interacting with your products.
One of the best tools for task management for marketers is the Ignitur. This is a tool that was designed based on a decade of experience in online marketing. It is an Internet management tool that was designed to increase productivity and to eliminate the guesswork by giving guidance. It is ideal for data mining, project management and reporting. Ignitur will help with a range of things including SEO, social media management and ecommerce management.
- Create a landing page
To recruit new customers online, you will need a landing page. This is the location where you send traffic. A common mistake people make is that of assuming that the landing page is the just the homepage. What they fail to understand is that your landing page is any page on your website that visitors get to first. However, there is one page that you will be sending your visitors to and this will serve as your main landing page.
All landing pages are unique. However, there are certain elements that your landing page needs to have:
- Compelling images
- Amazing call-to-action
- Social proof and/or endorsement
- Attention grabbing headlines
- Strong value proposition (benefits to the visitors)
To create a more effective landing page, you should consider including demo videos, using directional cues, use numbered lists in place of plain bullets, keep keywords in mind so as to attract organic traffic, don’t use big words, pay attention to color psychology and use visual blocking.
- Improve your viral loop
The best way to improve your viral loop is to make use of social media. This makes it easy for your visitors to share your activities with their friends thereby increasing brand visibility. The more shares your content get, the more authority you will have in the industry and the easier it will be for you to acquire customers. Perfecting your viral loop leads to autopilot marketing which also amplifies your marketing efforts.
- Identify the right platform
The marketing platform you choose to use will influence your rate of customer acquisition significantly. For example, if you are targeting a younger audience, you will need to use platforms that the audience frequent such as Instagram and Tumblr. If your target is women, you should consider Pinterest because women are 5 times more likely to use the platform than the men.
To pick the right platform, start by understanding your target audience. What do they prefer? You can then use the answer to this question to determine which platform best appeals to them. You want to be where most of your audiences are.
The above are just some of the important steps you need to take when it comes to customer acquisition. Considering most of the strategies are dynamic, you have to keep learning and looking for better ways to increase conversion. Your best weapon in customer acquisition is to keep adapting to the ever changing needs of your audience.
