12 Customer Acquisition Strategies to Find New Prospective Customers

What is the point in owning a well-planned business if your prospective customers are unaware of it? All your effort in converting an idea to a full-fledged business will find meaning only if you can acquire customers who are likely to buy from you. Otherwise, it’s a big zero. Yes, it's really challenging to gain new customers for your business. You’re left with no alternative but to make an all-out effort to generate prospective customers across multiple channels. Identify your target audience and define your business goals surrounding them. Then, choose effective customer acquisition strategies to achieve those goals. 

Identify Your Target Audience

Quality should get priority over quantity. This is a rule of thumb for every aspect of your life. Before proceeding with customer acquisition tactics, first, you must know who your customers are. As every single customer comes to your business in exchange for an acquisition cost, it's wise to spend on only the potential customers who really need your services or products. So, find out the demographics of your target customers to make the best use of your customer acquisition cost (CAC).

Fix Your Goals

You can't move forward without having definite goals. Once you know who your customers are, it becomes easier to define your goals and objectives and adopt effective strategies to achieve them. Understandably, increasing your revenues through more customer acquisition is the primary goal. These types of vague goals aren't enough for you to succeed as a business owner. 

Measure your customer acquisition metrics and determine if the return on Investment (ROI) is in line with the customer acquisition cost (CAC). You can use an enterprise ecommerce solution to keep track of these metrics easily. Fix some precise goals and choose proven customer acquisition strategies that align with your business growth goals. 

Choose the Right Customer Acquisition Strategies 

Social Media

With the ever-growing number of social media users, you will miss out on countless potential buyers without ensuring a strong presence across social media platforms. An internet user has an average of 5 accounts on social media and they spend about two and a half-hour time browsing and chatting on their personal profiles. Moreover, you don't need to burn a hole in your pocket, since opening an account is free on popular social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linked In, Snapchat, YouTube, and so on. Make the best use of social media with effective marketing tactics. 

Traditional Advertising 

Digital marketing has seen a great spike in recent years but traditional ads are still appealing to a large audience. Print media like newspapers, magazines, billboards, banners, festoons, posters, etc haven't lost their relevance in the marketing arena. Moreover, you can produce TV ads and radio ads to use multiple customer acquisition channels and diversify your sales funnel to a great extent. 

Video Content

A short video contains more information than that of a long paragraph. And it looks visually appealing whereas the same information written in the text looks boring. Video content is more engaging and hooks customers for a longer period of time. This is very crucial in present times since the attention span of internet users is decreasing alarmingly. With proper scripts, execution, and editing you can create high-quality video advertisements that can be shared across all social media platforms, especially on YouTube. 

Giveaways &  Promotional Offers

Running giveaway campaigns is a proven strategy to promote new brands and products. Offer your products for free so that customers can evaluate the quality of your products. But don't run such campaigns very often as it may harm your business in the long run. You can also run a contest and give promotional offers to engage both new and existing customers. 

Content Marketing

Content marketing is less expensive and more effective than other forms of outbound marketing. Writing informative and helpful content and publishing them as blogs, social media posts, forum posts are some of the standard practices of content marketing. High-quality content will help significantly to generate leads, gain people’s trust, and convert visitors to your customers. 

SEO Tactics

The implementation of best SEO practices has no alternative. You must ensure that people are finding you on search engines when they search with keywords related to your business. Without ranking on Google, it's quite impossible to drive substantial traffic and increase sales. Hence, focus on applying standard SEO tactics to optimize your website and gain new customers for your business. 

Referral Program

Prospective customers are more likely to believe the word of mouth of their friends, family members, and acquaintances than the marketing materials circulated by a company. You can encourage your existing customers to refer a friend in exchange for incentives. Customers acquired through referrals come with higher conversion rates. 

Paid Marketing

If you need to acquire new customers rapidly and can afford to invest more in customer acquisition, paid marketing is the solution. Run paid ads targeting the right audience in keeping with effective strategies. One of the best advantages of paid marketing is that you can choose exactly who will be exposed to your advertisements. Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, and Google Ads are the biggest paid traffic providers out there. Advertising platforms mainly charge for the number of impressions they deliver. Keep close attention to the cost so that it doesn't bring loss to your business.  

Landing Pages

Even a well-optimized website isn't enough to generate enough leads. That's where landing pages come into play. Landing pages are designed to capture the contact information of potential customers to facilitate your lead collection process. Usually, landing pages comprise eye-catchy headlines, easy-to-fill forms, and clear CTA buttons. 

Email Marketing

Build an email list consisting of the email addresses of potential customers. When you have enough leads, go for email marketing. Send automated targeted emails to your contacts using email marketing services. Not everyone will open your email. Almost 50% of your emails will be considered spam. If your email open rate ranges somewhere between 15-25%, it can be labeled a successful email marketing campaign. 

Influencer Partnership

If you’re not on a tight budget, involve influencers in your marketing strategy to acquire new customers. Choose an influencer with significant fan followings who works closely with your niche. Thus, your business will get exposed to the influencer’s fans and followers. This will contribute to creating brand awareness. 

Events & Conferences

Customers actually want to engage with your business physically rather than only reading about it. Hosting an event and attending a conference are two major ways to introduce your business to new customers and engage them more with your business. An online live broadcast or webinar allows business owners to interact with new customers at a low cost. You can use these channels to gain new customers and make more profit from selling to them. 

It's important to retain acquired customers because customer retention cost is way less than the acquisition cost. Customer acquisition strategies will render more profit if the new customers purchase from you again. A 5% increase in retention results in a 25-95% increase in revenue. You can gain new customers for your business by complying with the strategies we discussed here. Focus on customer retention rates to make significant profits.

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