Don’t Just Survive, Thrive: A Guide to Smarter Customer Acquisition Strategies

Just like you can’t survive without oxygen and your tall Starbucks Blonde Vanilla latte (one shot espresso, three pumps syrup, non-fat milk), your business won’t survive without customers. In the modern digital age, holding onto existing customers isn’t enough. You have to attract new ones to drive revenue growth.

Attracting and obtaining new customers isn’t as simple as bombarding them with generic messaging about how awesome your brand is, hoping they’ll buy your products and services. There’s so much noise in the market, you won’t stand out and they’ll move on to the next solution provider.

Just like espresso boosts the power of your latte, you can increase organic revenue growth with customer acquisition strategies. These help you attract more leads and convert them into customers.

Use this handy guide to master the art of customer acquisition to ensure your business thrives.

What Is a Customer Acquisition Strategy?

Customer acquisition is the process of attracting prospects, nurturing them until they’re ready to buy, and converting them into paying customers.

Effective marketing strategies for customer acquisition help brands to:

• Engage the leads most likely to buy 
• Improve marketing ROI 
• Spur sales and revenue

However, with spending on digital customer acquisition methods higher than ever before, brands must be more clever with their strategies to stand out from the crowd.

Use these actionable tips to ensure your business doesn’t just survive, but thrives with revenue growth, in today’s digital landscape.

Understanding Your Target Audience

Blindly throwing generic campaign after generic campaign at the wall hoping some leads will stick and convert gets you nowhere. To successfully attract prospects, you must get to know them more deeply.

Building detailed buyer personas is your best plan of attack. These detailed, fictitious representations of your ideal customers give you a better understanding of their needs, desires, pain points, and goals. With buyer personas in your back pocket, you can tailor your marketing efforts to individual prospects, better aligning with their likely real world actions.

Also, be sure to conduct market research and leverage data in your CRM to uncover key trends. Then, segment potential customers accordingly. This ensures you’re sending relevant content to the appropriate contacts.

Make the Most of Digital Channels

Using one or two digital channels to reach your target audience is about as effective as trying to engage Gen Z on MySpace. The only person you’re likely to attract is Tom.

To optimize your customer acquisition efforts, take a multi-channel marketing approach. Leverage social media, search engine optimization (SEO), email, and content marketing to meet buyers where they are, when they need you.

Craft personalized, valuable content that your ideal customers find helpful. Post these to your website and share links on your social sites and in email newsletters. Also, be sure to read and interact with people in the comment section regularly. This helps to build an online community around your brand. Plus, if you segment your email list, you’ll always be sending pertinent content to the right people.

Lastly, ensure your website is optimized for the search engine’s algorithms through SEO best practices to increase organic traffic to your site.

Paid Advertising Campaigns

While the “build it and they will come” approach works for 1980s baseball movies, the same can’t be said for marketing. Just because you have a website, doesn’t guarantee anyone will visit it.

Pay-per-click (PPC) ads can help drive more leads to your site. PPC ads generally appear on search engine results pages or within other sites that you visit. To increase your chance of success, try running banner and display ads across social media in tandem with your PPC campaigns.

Using your buyer personas, identify the best ads and channels for your target audience. Develop compelling copy and add images that speak directly to the people you want to attract. You can also run retargeting campaigns to re-engage potential customers who have already visited your site.

Make sure you track ad performance to see what’s working and what needs to be improved. This will help you refine future campaigns for better ROI and more qualified leads.

Referral and Affiliate Programs

You trust your mom and BFF above everyone else, right? Well, so do your customers. According to McKinsey, word-of-mouth is the primary motivator behind 20% to 50% of all purchasing decisions.

Customer referral programs can harness the power of word-of-mouth marketing by rewarding existing customers for each lead they send your way. You can also partner with like-minded affiliates. Find social media influencers, bloggers, and other content creators who embody your brand’s personality, mission, and values. This allows you to tap into the affiliate’s audience, expanding your reach.

Ask affiliates to share honest—hopefully positive!—reviews of your products or services. They can also encourage their audience to visit a landing page where they can receive a discount on your offerings.

Customer Retention and Upselling

Attracting new customers can cost five to seven times more than retaining existing ones. For brands short on cash, upselling strategies could be powerful growth hacks.

A few upselling and cross-selling strategies to try include:

• Personalized product recommendations
• Add-to-cart opportunities
• Bundling
• Thank you page offers

With these techniques, you can encourage existing customers to make more purchases and improve revenue growth from an existing revenue stream.

Tracking and Analytics

Your customer acquisition campaigns are only as effective as their results. To maximize ROI, it’s crucial to understand what’s working and what’s not.

Implement analytics tools to track the success of each campaign. Use key metrics, including click-through rates, conversions, cost per lead, and others to see how your campaigns stack up. Leverage this data to help fine-tune future strategies.

Customer Acquisition Strategies Help Brands Thrive

Customer acquisition plays a pivotal part in your business’s sustainable success. Just like your Starbucks Blonde Vanilla latte is only as delicious as its ingredients, customer acquisition is only as effective as your methodologies.

Build buyer personas, use multiple channels, launch affiliate programs, and leverage upselling to attract more customers while retaining existing ones. This guarantees your customer acquisition results are stronger than any drink Starbucks dishes out.