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Acquisition is the tip of your marketing spear. It involves drawing new customers to your business through various channels like online ads, email marketing and referral marketing.
Acquisition marketing involves a very specific mindset. Rather than re-selling to people who you know are already interested in your brand, you’re selling to people who may not even have heard of you. This means they might not be as forgiving of mishaps and that you’ll have less time to hook their attention.
In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into six acquisition strategies to grow your business and drive it forward. Obviously, no two companies are exactly alike, and you need to figure out which of these strategies to put most of your emphasis (and money) into as a marketing department.
1. Brand Everything
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Your brand can be one of your most powerful acquisition tools if you get it right. This is why services like signage printing and business card making are in such high demand.
A brand is a business’ identity: it’s the impression that broader consumer audiences get when they think about your product/service or your company. Obviously, you’ll want this impression to be a good one. You also want the most number of people possible to know about your brand.
Although we live in 2024, putting your brand on physical objects is still one of the most effective ways to build brand awareness. Creating branded collateral like business cards, pens, water bottles, calendars and more puts your business in the minds of those who see these things, whether consciously or subconsciously.
As a company, it’s your job to create opportunities to get these branded objects into the hands of customers and potential customers. Most of the time, you’ll need to give them away for free, either during events or as a gift to go with their purchases. Look at this as an investment, rather than an expense: the cost of producing these items should be factored into your branding and customer acquisition costs.
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As technology advances, avenues for branding have expanded to include the digital. Social media, paid ads and company websites are all opportunities for companies to spread brand awareness.
Social media in particular is a powerful tool. Most people are on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, which allows social media-savvy companies to reach a broad audience. The interactive nature of these platforms also allows companies to communicate directly with their customers, which not only allows businesses to disseminate information but also to gauge audience sentiment and adjust their branding strategies accordingly.
Social media also allows businesses to partner with influencers, who are individuals with a broad following. By having these people endorse their products, companies like yours can have easy access to their audiences and build brand trust among them.
2. Use Word-Of-Mouth
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When it comes to convincing people to buy from you rather than your competitors, trust is absolutely crucial. While you can use ads, promotional emails, discounts and more to great effect, nothing beats an endorsement from friends and family.
Referral marketing is one of the oldest and most effective forms of marketing around. It allows you to make use of your existing customers as a means to acquire new ones. If you can get the snowball effect going, this can be a very cost-effective way to attract new buyers.
When doing word-of-mouth marketing, a potential strategy is to focus a good chunk of your resources on your best customers. Marketing heavily to people who already love your brand turns them into evangelists, who can then take care of selling your product to others. And make sure you’re always carrying plenty of business cards with you (a vital investment in your personal branding).
The first rule to referral marketing is to simply sell a good, consistent product. If you provide a quality solution to a customer’s needs, they will naturally recommend it to friends and family who encounter the same problem. This only works if you can consistently manufacture products to a certain standard, which makes quality control essential.
Another way to get the word-of-mouth effect going is to provide some sort of incentive. This is usually financial: often, you’ll see businesses like gyms offer referral discounts. Restaurants do this a lot, too.
Word-of-mouth incentives don’t need to be financial, either. If you check out the App Store or Google Play, you’ll find lots of games that offer in-game rewards for referrals, while subscription-based apps sometimes offer free subscriptions for a certain length of time. Food shops like bubble tea stores sometimes offer freebies in exchange for referrals.
3. Don’t Neglect SEO
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Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a crucial, and often underlooked, aspect of customer acquisition. As the same suggests, it encompasses all activities that have the goal of helping your website and web pages rank higher on search engines like Google.
SEO is an incredibly specific area of marketing, so it’s best to get a specialist to handle it. This is because it requires a very different way of thinking. In tasks like Google ad design and social media copy, marketers only need to think about how their human audience will perceive them.
With SEO, however, marketers need to take both people and search engine algorithms into account. This necessitates some non-intuitive strategies like internal linking and inserting keywords as many times as possible.
SEO involves on-page, off-page and technical SEO. SEO professionals need to be proficient in all three to be effective.
Like most other fields of marketing, SEO is always evolving, so it’s crucial to stay on top of the latest updates. For example, Google’s recent E-E-A-T, which places the emphasis back on expertise and authenticity vs. AI-generated and generic content, has rocked the SEO world and forced many companies to overhaul their entire SEO strategy.
As a company, it’s vital to base your SEO strategy on the latest advancements in the field. Plenty of strategies that worked in the past are no longer effective, and SEO marketers need to be adapting at all times.
4. Run Online Ads
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If you’re a marketer in 2024, you’ll understand how important it is to use an omnichannel approach to marketing. Sticking to one or two avenues limits your audience and the effectiveness of the message you’re trying to get across, and ultimately keeps your business from reaching its true potential.
Online advertising allows you to reach people who might not otherwise have heard of your brand through platforms they use on a daily basis. It involves using visual or text ads to both build brand awareness and increase clicks on your website/downloads of your app and, ultimately, sales.
One of the tried and tested strategies for effective online ads is including first-time customer discounts as part of your messaging. People respond to extrinsic drivers like price, and offering them a good deal is one of the best ways to get them hooked.
When you run online ads, there are several key terms to keep in mind, including impressions, click-through rates and conversions.
Impressions describe the number of times people have viewed your ad. You might also have access to data for the overall number of impressions and the number of impressions from unique viewers. To boost impressions, consider adjusting your targeting settings or increasing your budget.
Your click-through rate is the percentage of impressions that turn into clicks. To boost click-through rates, improve your ads visually or in terms of messaging. You can also make your call to action clearer or catchier.
Finally, conversions are the number of visitors who eventually make a purchase. For a customer acquisition ad, this should be the ultimate goal. To boost conversions, try improving your on-site or in-app UX and UI, offering more attractive discounts, adding more products to your offering and more.
Online ads are a textbook way to acquire new customers. In the age of digital marketing, it’s one of the main drivers for growth in a lot of businesses.
5. Market Through Emails
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While many people would place email marketing under CRM, they can be incredibly useful when it comes to hooking new customers, too. This is because not all people who give you their contact information are already buyers.
For email marketing to be an effective acquisition tool, it follows that you need to get a potential customer’s email address early on in the customer journey.
This is easier if you’re an app-based company or a software as a service (SaaS) company: all you need to do is include a popup the first time a user opens your app/website asking for their contact details.
Due to the fact that you can play around with layouts and that they allow you to insert a greater amount of content than most other marketing avenues, there’s no shortage of benefits to email marketing.
Marketing emails are incredibly flexible. Here’s just some of what they can do:
- Inform customers about discounts
- Send certain customers special discount codes
- Position your business as a thought leader with informational content
- Collect information through surveys
- Remind lapsing customers to buy from you with specially designed email flows
- …and much more
Even though email marketing allows you a greater word count than online ads or push notifications, you still want to be succinct enough to grab potential customers’ attention. Attention spans may be longer for emails, but they’re not unlimited.
Your email subject line is key to grabbing your readers’ attention. Make sure to include your key message and a call to action: as you write it, assume that your reader won’t even open your email and that the subject line is all they’ll see.
6. Fuel Your Strategies Using Data
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Whether or not you’re a numbers person, data is key to optimising your marketing strategies for success. It’s easy to think of numbers as sterile and impractical, but you should remember that each percentage point represents living, breathing people.
Data should underline all other strategies. For instance, SEO strategies should be evaluated based on the traffic they drive to a website and how high they rank on search engines. You can do this by utilising tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush.
Your branding choices should also be based on data you’ve collected from your customers. A brand doesn’t exist in a vacuum: it exists to create value for a certain audience, and the only way to optimise this effect is to understand what that audience looks for in a brand. Do market research by running surveys, hosting focus group discussions, interviewing your customers individually, etc.
One of the areas of marketing where data can most intuitively and effectively be used is acquisition ads. This is because data like impressions, clicks, downloads and more are readily available to marketers via platforms like Google Analytics and AppsFlyer.
To optimise your ads, calculate the conversion rate for every step of the process to find where the bottlenecks are. Once you’ve figured out the impression-to-click rate, click-to-download rate and download-to-purchase rate, it will be easy to figure out where you can improve.
Knowing the stats on specific ads also tells you which ones are performing worst so that you can cut them and focus your marketing budget on your better ads.
When doing email marketing, knowing the open rate and click-through rate allows you to assess the effectiveness of particular email campaigns. They also tell you where new improvements need to be made.
For instance, a poor open rate might mean you need to improve your email’s subject line. A poor click-through or conversion rate, on the other hand, might mean you need to make your content more concise or improve the call to action.
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Acquisition marketing is the key to growth. While it’s helpful to re-target existing customers and get them to buy again, you need to win those customers in the first place.
The key to a strong acquisition strategy is understanding your customers. Everything, from your branding to your online ads, should be done with a specific audience in mind, as different people have different factors that influence their purchasing decisions.
In this article, we’ve gone through six key methods to drive your acquisition marketing forward and grow your business. Start incorporating them into your marketing efforts today and watch your sales skyrocket.
