Read customer acquisition strategy examples using content marketing, referrals, email, shoppable content, and through social media via TikTok and influencers.
A customer acquisition strategy is the strategic process of how your brand will gain new customers or users. Acquiring new customers is a fundamental goal of any business model, from a saas startup to an ecommerce enterprise, and it can’t be overlooked without serious damage to your brand’s opportunity for growth.
Sending your potential users down the customer acquisition funnel means designing a process that works for your business, your industry, and your clientele. But there are a few general rules to follow when developing a strategy that will yield the best results, regardless of your niche.
Step by Step Guide to Developing the Best Customer Acquisition Strategy
Though brands have endless marketing channels to process customer acquisition and improve the customer experience in the digital age, most successful strategies incorporate several different operations throughout. Remember the key elements as you consider your potential strategies or reevaluate your current ones.
Think about what you’re working with in terms of customer acquisition cost (CAC), the lifetime value of your customers, and how the funnel looks in high-powered brands in your industry. And – consider how you can manage the needs of a growing business in an ever-changing digital world.
Define Your Target Audience Personas
Most often, the first step of a customer acquisition strategy is to define your target audience demographics and learn more about what they want and need and where they congregate.
Customer acquisition only works when you target a user base that actually has a need for your product or service. Unsurprisingly, advertising to the wrong customer base does nothing for your business and only wastes your marketing budget. Your inbound marketing efforts should be customized to meet the pain points, motivations, and desires of paying customers using expertise and industry tools.
Market research should further inform you about your target audience. If you’ve already identified the audience, thanks to your sales team’s efforts, work to learn more about them. Age, income, gender, geographical location, outside interests, and more can all expand your understanding. That understanding then gives you the data you need to successfully market to and acquire those first time users.
Find the Right Channel
With an informed awareness of your target audience should come insight into which acquisition channels will be more profitable for you – and how you can employ them for the highest payoff.
Digital marketing efforts have a wide reach, and the only way to access the full power of the web is to use expert knowledge with data-driven practices. The right channel for your brand won’t be the right channel for every other company. That means that methodizing your use of any given acquisition channel is an essential part of the process.
In some cases, the right approach to this is by a/b testing different marketing channels to obtain enough data to inform your choice. Some brands may see more success with email campaigns while others might find their click through rate significantly increases with pay-per-click, social media, or free webinars.
Whatever your process, setting recognizable and quantitative goals is the only way to ensure you’re making use of your resources wisely. As you experiment, those goals can inform you of whether any given acquisition channel is working the way you need. When it’s not, you have the data to back up the decision to end it and try something new.
Produce High-Quality Content
An effective customer acquisition strategy stretches from the beginning to the end of the process. Starting with learning about your target audience and choosing a channel to inform what kind of content you make and when. Ensuring your potential customers are seeing, enjoying, and engaging with your content throughout the customer journey is where the acquisition strategy really gets moving. This part of the process can also be the most exciting for you as a brand owner or marketing strategist.
The ways we collide with content on a regular basis are both good and bad for emerging brands and businesses with well-known names. Content almost universally fuels our feeds, and anywhere you – or your target audience – look, content appears. That excess of content can be an obstacle for your brand. Yet, if you have access to the right sources or work with an external creative team with expert knowledge, you can use that to stand out in the crowd.
Your content should lift customers’ trust, excitement, and interest in your brand, not just be another mediocre piece of media they see on their feed. That’s where partners like First Media make a difference. With access to a skilled team offering specialized knowledge, high-quality content creation, and proven customer acquisition channels, you never have to push ineffective content.
Give SEO a Go
Even if your acquisition plan relies heavily on paid ads, SEO (search engine optimization) should still be a part of your customer acquisition system. A team with SEO-driven strategies can help you optimize for organic content that gets your brand on the feeds of the users you’re looking for. SEO can push your content to rise in SERPS (search engine results page), improving visibility in organic searches and allowing you to be easily accessed and discovered by the people you want.
That brand visibility and high search engine ranking are integral parts of the customer acquisition funnel. In particular, they aid in the awareness and interest elements of the funnel. As soon as people start seeing your brand, you have your foot in the door to progress down the later stages of the funnel.
Focus on Video Content
Video content is rising in importance and value, and that upswing seems to only escalate with each day. There’s a reason why Meta chose to push Instagram and Facebook towards video apps with options like Facebook Watch and IGTV. Users love to watch videos, and if you can take advantage of the growing obsession with video content, your brand will see continued success.
That said, video content isn’t easy to make. It’s one of the most expensive forms of content for brands to produce, with a time-consuming process that involves more than just scripting, shooting, and editing. Video producers wear a dozen hats, and it’s not easy to find low-cost video options that both put your brand in the spotlight and do so with high-quality content.
Instead of paying for an in-house content team or hiring freelancers to develop video content on the side, more and more brands are turning to agencies that service the complete process, like First Media. Offering original short-form video media, we take the weight of producing highly effective video content off of your brand and execute the process externally. It extends past simple production – our performance marketing strategy leads to brand trust and customer acquisition by ensuring your content is displayed on the series of highly-viewed platforms our business cares for.
Understand Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a critical metric that helps you understand the total revenue you can expect from a customer over the duration of their relationship with your brand. By accurately calculating CLV, you can make more informed decisions about how much to invest in acquiring new customers. High CLV indicates that customers are providing substantial long-term value, justifying higher acquisition costs. To enhance CLV, focus on customer satisfaction, loyalty programs, personalized marketing, and exceptional customer service.
Once They’re in the Door, Learn How to Manage Customer Churn
Customer churn, the rate at which customers stop doing business with you, is an equally important factor to monitor. High churn rates can significantly diminish your business growth and profitability. To reduce churn, it’s important to understand the reasons behind customer attrition. This involves gathering and analyzing customer feedback, identifying pain points in your product or service, and implementing improvements. Retention strategies like engaging content, proactive customer support, regular follow-ups, and exclusive offers can help maintain a loyal customer base and lower churn rates.
Examples of Successful Customer Acquisition Strategies
Following the logic of how you can develop the best customer acquisition strategy, let’s take a look at a few examples of successful strategies in action. You’ll see everything from influencer marketing to new twists on traditional email marketing – and how you can employ each in your world.
#1 Content Marketing
Content marketing is still the name of the game, and any successful marketing strategy incorporates best practices in the world of content advertised to consumers. It can look a number of different ways – but the primary process involved is still to share content to establish brand awareness, industry trust, and simple word-of-mouth, among other objectives.
The grand scope of content marketing means that your customer acquisition process will rely heavily on how effective your content marketing strategy is. That’s why it’s at the top of our list of the most successful customer acquisition methods: because no acquisitional process can function without it.
Unless you’re entirely new to the industry, you’ve likely been working on a content marketing strategy since your business’s inception, but it might be time to view it a little differently. Instead of assessing content marketing as a burden or something you have to do, view it as an exciting opportunity to push what you know your target audience will be interested in, with the end goal that new customers will flock to you based on the content you produce.
#2 Investing in Influencers
By now, you’ve likely resigned yourself to the understanding that influencer marketing is here to stay. Whether or not you agree with it, it’s impossible to ignore its effect on modern marketing – and how much it can lead your business forward if done correctly.
Influencer marketing involves working with influencers, or social media stars with reliable reputations in your niche, to promote your product or service to their interested followers. The truth is, your customers likely trust influencers. That trust allows influencer promotions, endorsements, reviews, etc., to impact your intended audience, potentially leading to customer acquisition where you may have struggled to access those audience members before.
#3 Referrals and Loyalty Programs
Similar to influencer marketing in that it employs the power of people who believe in your brand, referral marketing lets any of your current customers act as mini-influencers by referring others to your product or service. With a range of styles to choose from, you can develop a strategy that matches the values of your business with the power of user-based recommendations.
Referral programs typically offer incentives. Those incentives can be store credit for ecommerce businesses, monetary rewards, gifts, or other offers that will motivate customers to make the referral. Free upgrades, seasonal gifts, raffle entries, store credit, or even donations to a charity of choice – there are hundreds of referral program ideas that can speak to your customers.
#4 Email Marketing
We’re seeing a lineup of new customer acquisition strategies based on modernized tech and the revolutionary digital age. Even so, you shouldn’t discount tried and true methods of acquisition like email lists. Newsletters, white papers, and other valuable content is still effective and appreciated by many potential and returning users.
Email marketing can help you display value, get yourself in people’s inboxes, and start the consideration process as a new business or one offering new products. With email automation, all it takes is the set-up and maintenance time, and you’ve got an operation that can functionally drive acquisition while you focus on other elements.
#5 Social Media
Learning how to use social media effectively isn’t always easy, especially for new brands starting fresh on socials. However, developing a customer acquisition strategy that emphasizes the importance of social media without focusing only on prospects related to it can help you reach the goals you’re striving for. And nowadays, it’s not an option to avoid social media entirely or act on poorly developed social strategies.
Your social media strategy should include owned, earned, and paid media, from PPC content like Facebook ads to organic Instagram and LinkedIn posts from followers and influencers. How you use those venues is up to you – but it should always be informed by your data and expertise.
#6 Shoppable Content
Shoppable content makes customer acquisition easy because it makes it easy on the customer.
Rather than clicking through or heading to external websites, shoppable content allows potential customers to make the transition with just a few clicks through their social feeds or website hits.
New customers look for ease of access, quick decisions, and a streamlined process that lets them get to where they want to be without the hassle. By incorporating shoppable content into your social media, you let potential users seamlessly slide into your vicinity and through the funnel.
Deescalating the customer acquisition funnel from a process that can take weeks means that you get to see the benefits of your strategy that much sooner. As a result, you can easily verify whether it is working as it should.
Take a note on shoppable content from your favorite in-industry brands – what do they do that works? High-power brands have high-power strategists who thoughtfully develop their social media strategy with data-driven processes that you can learn from. Still, that won’t give you all the information you need, and you might find yourself struggling to reach your goal number of customers alone. When that’s the case, partnering with agencies like First Media gives you access to brands, platforms, and content strategies that have already been fully developed.
#7 Taking Advantage of TikTok
Tiktok gets its own spot in our list of customer acquisition strategies because it really is that crucial. As you read earlier, the prevalence of video content means that you can’t ignore it if you want the benefits for customer acquisition (and brand growth in general). And the importance of social media and shoppable content can’t be understated. But why is TikTok such an essential component of all customer acquisition domains? Simply put: because it’s growing, and it just won’t stop.
Last year, Tiktok users spent $2.3 billion on the app, a 77% increase from the previous year. As the most downloaded app (seeing 656 million downloads in 2021), it keeps spreading its reach, and your customer acquisition efforts need to leverage that popularity.
Our success in TikTok – and the subsequent successes of our clients – has been a result of a formulaic strategy that utilizes the app for maximum lead generation, loyal customers, and cost-effective outcomes. See some of our favorite tips for a successful TikTok approach:
Content should be authentic, original, engaging, and tailored to TikTok.
We’ve found that creating a video for Instagram and then repurposing it for TikTok doesn’t work. The content needs to be original to the social media platform. With that in mind, it should also be authentic – audiences are much more open to shoppable content when it comes from the recommendation of a friend or influencer. Brand-authentic content made with the perfect blend of visuals and sound is the best way to spread your message effectively.
Follow TikTok trends for marketing campaigns and daily content.
Every social media platform follows its own fads, but TikTok is particularly dynamic, seeing new trends every week. Successful social media marketing on TikTok means your team needs to follow and anticipate those trends – or you need someone who does. Our team stays ahead of the game to ensure that video content is always appetizing and always offering attractive conversion rates.
Know your audience to appeal to new and existing customers and improve customer retention.
Utilizing appropriate metrics to learn more about your ideal customer and their feed experience can help you produce content that sticks for more earned media. You already know that content is more than creativity – it’s just as data-driven as any other customer acquisition method. So use data to your advantage.
First Media’s Customer Acquisition Expertise
By now, you should better understand why the customer acquisition process is so significant. And how you may develop a strategy that is sure to show tangible, quantifiable results. However, attending to your strategy alone can be difficult when you lack the experience, knowledge, or resources that can help you make profitable choices. Customer acquisition costs can quickly climb when you make ineffectual marketing decisions.
That’s where we come in. Our extensive experience in strategic customer acquisition gives us the know-how to inform our application of your brand throughout the First Media family network. We deliver a streamlined flow-through of data-driven customer prospecting and high conversion landing pages and social content, ending in new customer acquisition you don’t have to stress over. Take a look at our case studies to see our capabilities in action and learn more about partnering with us to expand your customer acquisition strategy.
