15 of the Best Ways to Acquire New Customers in Your Marketing & Ad Campaigns
What is the cost of acquiring a new customer?
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the total sales and marketing cost required to earn a new customer over a designated period. This is important because it assigns real value to your marketing efforts and allows you to measure your ROI.
Displayed as a formula, it looks like this:
1. Content marketing
Content is the foundation of advertising, because once you’ve published content (blog posts, ebooks, guides, videos, etc.) email, social media, etc. can promote it. It also generates about 3x as many leads as other marketing methods, and costs 62% less:
Consistently publishing new content — and refreshing the old — keeps your brand relevant and shows prospects that you’re actively engaged with your industry. This is crucial in a world full of false advertising and plummeting customer trust.
2. Highly targeted advertising
If you’re not generating the number of new customers you want — or enough qualified customers — define and redefine your target audience down to the finest details:
- Where do they live?
- How old are they?
- What do they do for a living?
- What is their family makeup like?
- What do they like and dislike?
- What problems do they have and how can your product or service help?
Market segmentation can help:
3. Developing business partnerships
Not everyone in your industry is a competitor. Chances are, there are several complementary businesses in your niche as well, with similar customer bases.
Take SaaS companies and integrations, for example. Integrations make it possible for software to speak to each other and send data back and forth. Without this capability, collecting and sharing lead data would be much harder — and you could be losing business as a result.
Example
Your SaaS company integrates with MailChimp (email marketing) and Salesforce (CRM) because both are two of the most popular solutions in their respective industries. The problem is you don’t integrate with Zoho (another CRM solution). You learn through surveys that 40% of your prospects use MailChimp with Zoho and only 15% use Salesforce. Here, you could be losing potential customers simply for the fact that prospects prefer Zoho as their CRM.
This isn’t to say you can’t also integrate with Salesforce. But integrating (developing a business partnership) with Zoho could go a long way in attracting more customers.
4. Create a lead generating site
Your website might look professional and offer a ton of useful information for visitors, but does it generate new leads and acquire new customers?
It’s essential that, in addition to your website, you also have dedicated post-click landing pages to capture contact information and fill the top of your sales funnel.
Often, your post-click landing page is the first and last thing people see connected to your business. Since you have less than five seconds to grasp their attention, make it stand out by following post-click landing page best practices.
An attention-grabbing headline, prominent form, and contrasting CTA button are just a few examples to follow. This Iterable post-click landing page demonstrates all three:
5. Focus on benefits over features
Listing features can help sell your product to a certain extent, but it’s important you don’t overlook the customer experience. Highlighting your product’s benefits is a more direct way to relate to your customers and show them what they’ll gain by selecting your company over another. This SOCi post-click landing page actually does both — highlights how the platform can help customers, and then lists its features underneath:
6. Be present on social media
If you’re not present on social media, you’re missing out on a huge market that your competitors are likely already taking advantage of.
7. Make your brand known on forums
Being on question-based forums like Quora is huge. By answering questions and talking about your product, you can make yourself known as an industry leader and attract new prospective customers.
8. Offer deals and promotions
People love discounts because they save money and feel like they’re getting access to something exclusive and limited. Some ideas for offering deals and promotions include:
9. Run giveaways
If people aren’t buying your product, consider giving them something for free. That doesn’t mean give away thousands of products, but running monthly or weekly giveaways can certainly work to your benefit. Giving someone the feeling that they “won” something is a powerful way to make them choose your product over a competitor’s.
10. Showcase testimonials
One of the best ways to acquire new customers is to highlight existing ones. When you have proof that customers have a particularly positive experience, ask them to provide a testimonial in return.
11. Keep track of the competition
Actively monitoring competitor’s marketing tactics, backlinks and traffic, web design, social mentions, products or services, etc. is the best way to stay ahead of the game.
12. Host an event
An increasing number of consumers like to actually experience brands, not just read about them online or get spammed by their ads. So much so that 89% of companies compete primarily on the basis of customer experience, versus only 36% in 2010.
13. Ask for referrals
What better way to attract new customers than to use existing ones? But instead of relying on existing customers to evangelize your brand on their own, encourage them with a referral program.
14. Make sure your SEO is up to date
SEO complements content marketing efforts by optimizing content and making it easier for your target audience to find it. Rank high in SERPs and persuading people to click through is the ultimate goal here.
15. A/B test everything
A/B testing is crucial in determining which strategies and campaign components produce the highest numbers of conversions.
Now that you acquired them, how do you retain them?
Keeping a steady flow of returning customers is equally as important. Here are a few reasons to focus on customer retention just as much as acquisition:
- The cost of acquiring new customers vs retaining them is 5 times more
- Increasing customer retention by 5% can increase revenue by 25-95%
- The probability of selling to existing customers and new customers is 60-70% and 5-20%, respectively
- 90% of satisfied consumers will purchase again
Comments