Acquiring new customers drives sustainable business growth and expands your customer base, but over the past few years acquisition has become harder and more expensive. Today’s customers have less trust for marketing and sales tactics, and more choices when it comes to purchasing a product or service from brands.
To captivate and convert high-quality customers, businesses must implement acquisition methods that are strategic and focused.
Below, we have 5 best practices that should be top of mind when you’re creating and refining customer acquisition strategies.
1. Understand the Customer’s Role
The customer has more power in the sales relationship. Today’s customers are not limited to narrow options when they’re searching for a service or product. They have a treasure trove of information at their disposal to help guide their choices: educational content and resources, search engine research, social media posts, online reviews and personal experiences from friends and family.
Marketing and sales teams need to build their customer acquisition strategies around what customers expect from brands who want their business:
- Value that extends beyond a one-time purchasing decision
- A personalized customer experience
- High-quality, responsive customer service
- Convenience and ease of access throughout the buying process
In a competitive market, the onus is on brands to prove their credibility, trustworthiness, relevance and value to customers.
2. Define Customer Personas
Not all customers are created equal — and therefore you should only be marketing your products and services to carefully selected audience segments. If you don’t know who your ideal customer is, you’ll waste time, money and resources on customers with low conversion rates, high attrition rates and a poor lifetime value. All of these factors drive up your customer acquisition costs and cut into your return on investment.
Instead, build detailed customer profiles based on:
- Demographics like age, gender and education level
- Interests
- Buying behaviors
- Pain points that your products or services will resolve
- Estimated lifetime value
After you’ve defined your ideal customer, you’ll be able to analyze what your ideal customers are looking for and where they go to search for products and services. Use audience insights to draw in customers who have a higher chance of converting, making repeat purchases and being a brand advocate.
3. Know the Customer Journey
Know where customers are coming into contact with your brand, and how many meaningful touchpoints they’re hitting along the customer journey. Utilize multi-channel acquisition methods so you can reach customers through different mediums and at different points along the conversion process.
Analyzing performance as part of a multi-channel acquisition strategy can help you determine where your best leads and converting customers are coming from and the messaging that is resonating with them. Use the data to effectively allocate funding to high-performing channels that draw in high-quality leads, increase conversions and lower customer acquisition costs.
4. Marry Marketing and Sales
Today, companies must work harder and smarter to acquire new customers in a competitive field. Customers have a lack of trust in companies and they don’t like being marketed to — it’s no longer beneficial or effective for salespeople to spend all day making cold calls to bring new customers into the business.
Marketing and sales must work together as a unified team to drive awareness and interest to a brand, promote brand credibility and trustworthiness, offer relevant and useful services to the right audience and provide a stellar customer experience and customer service.
Your marketing team should be using inbound marketing strategies that put educational resources, content and branded messaging in front of the audience that you’re trying to reach. Once marketing has identified quality leads, your sales team should step in to nurture these leads and drive conversions and sales.
5. Make Retention an Acquisition Strategy
It is significantly more costly to attract a new customer than it is to keep an existing one.
Customers who are satisfied with their experience are more likely to become repeat customers, and repeat customers require fewer marketing and service costs that detract from your revenue gain. Even just a 5% increase in retention can increase company revenue between 25-95%.
Additionally, happy customers are more likely to become brand advocates, and advocacy will help influence new customers to buy with your brand. The key to high retention is exceptional customer service — ensuring that your customers have a positive experience is critical to set your brand value apart from competitors.
NewGen Marketing Can Help You Acquire New Customers and Grow Sales Revenue
NewGen Marketing specializes in performance-driven marketing and sales. We’ll optimize your marketing plan for the media channels and investments that generate quality leads, conversions and sales for your company. With performance-driven strategies built on data and analysis, you’ll know that every marketing dollar is contributing to your return on investment. At the same time, we’ll streamline customer acquisition strategies to identify, nurture and convert the customers that will boost sales revenue.
When you’re ready to invest in performance-driven marketing and sales that will drive more to your bottom line, then contact us to schedule your free consultation.