A lot of startups fail. Not because they did not have a good product, but because they couldn’t scale up fast enough to be profitable. As a new business, there’s a lot of pressure to break even and scale up as quickly as possible. For that, you need to acquire as many customers as you can and generate enough sales to sustain your business.
However, acquiring new customers is not always easy, especially for a new business or an existing one launching a new product. You need to first spread awareness about your brand or product, get people to visit your website, and then get them to make a purchase.
And, depending on the type of product, the conversion cycle can be very short or extremely long. You need to keep prospective customers engaged at every stage of the purchase journey and drive them down the sales funnel.
This might seem very complicated, but actually it all boils down to how well you have designed yourmarketing funneland how many people you can attract at the initial stage. In this post, we will cover the latter and discuss strategies to reach prospective customers and generate leads.
Here are some of the best customer acquisition strategies that you should try if you want to scale our business.
5 Of the Best Customer Acquisition Strategies to Scale Your Business:
SEO and Content Marketing to Get More Organic Traffic
For most businesses, the most important source for acquiring new customers is via their website. The more people who visit your website, the higher the number of conversions.
After all, visiting your website is a crucial step in any prospective customer’s journey. And, organic traffic is the most sustainable way of getting more website visitors that could become potential customers.
Here are some SEO andcontent marketing技术,您可以使用它们来获得更多的有机traffic and acquire new customers.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO plays a very important role in getting more organic traffic for your website. In fact, after quality content, this might be the second-most important aspect for you to consider to get more organic traffic.
There are some small, yet important things that you can do to optimise all of your landing pages and get higher search rankings.
Here are some on-page SEO techniques that can help you get more organic traffic/potential customers:
- Write crisp and relevant meta descriptions that include your primary keywords.
- Maintain a proper keyword density in all of your website and blog content.
- Optimise your headings and title tags to include keywords and their variations.
- Ensure that your URLs also include the primary keyword, the topic covered on the page, or keyword variations.
- Improve page-load speed by optimising images and other technical aspects.
- Use a mobile-responsive website design so that people can access it using any device.
Apart from these, creating high-quality, relevant content is paramount. We will discuss that in the next point.
High-Quality Content
将人们的最重要的事情to your website is content. If you write useful content, relevant to your target audience, then they will start visiting your website.
The purpose of SEO is to take care of the technical aspects and ensure that your pages rank well. However, content is what actually brings potential customers to your website.
Here are some tips to write quality content that attracts more website visitors:
- Start by understanding your audience, what their interests and challenges are, and what would they like to read about.
- Do thorough keyword research and find the most relevant keywords that you can target.
- Decide on your content topics based on these hot and trending keywords.
- Write “how-to” content and other informative types of content with actionable insights that people can actually use.
- Use a skyscraper content strategy and find your competitors’ top-performing content and then write better content on the same topic.
- Write interesting titles that immediately grab your audience’s attention.
Content Upgrades
Another great way to leverage content to drive website traffic is to upgrade your existing content. Content upgrades are a great way to improve your search rankings without investing too much time.
Content upgrades entail updating your content with the latest information as well as optimizing other aspects like keyword use and headlines. Doing this, you can get your existing content to rank better and generate more traffic without creating fresh content.
Local SEO
One of the best ways to get relevant, qualified leads to your website is to leverage local SEO techniques. These can help you rank for local search queries, which usually are high-purchase-intent queries that can easily result in conversions.
Here are some SEO tips to help you rank well for local search queries:
- Use local search keywords.
- List your business in local directories.
- Create separate landing pages for different locations where you have a presence.
- Provide the correct name, address, and contact details on all online sources where your business is listed.
Social Media Marketing to Acquire New Customers
Social media is where your prospective customers spend most of their time and it is the perfect platform for you to find and acquire new customers.
Start by selecting the platforms that your target customers frequent and formulate a social media marketing strategy. You will need to have a targeted social media content strategy and should be regular and consistent in your efforts.
Another way to reach more prospective customers on social media is to partner with influencers to reach their audiences. Influencers can help you reach a much larger audience than you could reach on your own. Moreover, influencers usually have engaged and loyal followers who can easily be converted into customers if an influencer promotes your brand.
You can also use social media tools and features like hashtags, shoppable posts, etc. to get the most out of your initiatives. Wherever possible, add links to your website to drive leads there for conversions.
Paid Marketing for Generating Leads
Paid marketing is a traditional, tried-and-tested customer acquisition strategy that most marketers swear by. If you have a large enough budget and want to see immediate results, then advertising is one of the most effective techniques.
You can leverage both Google Ads and social media advertising to achieve this goal. Google Ads work by showing your ads to relevant people who typed a particular keyword in their search query. This means that your money won’t be wasted on irrelevant leads, but only the ones who are likely to be interested in your business.
Social media advertisements also provide targeting options by analyzing your current audience. Facebook, for example, has the option to create lookalike audiences modelled after your current customers and audience. In this case, your ads will only be shown to people with similar interests, demographics, or online behaviors as your current audience.
Overall, leads generated by targeted advertising might cost more, but are more relevant and have a high likelihood of converting into customers.
Run a Reward or Referral Program
Referral marketingis an important source of getting new leads, and having a formal referral program makes it easier. There’s no one better suited for promoting your brand than your satisfied customers. And, many of them may be happy to do so if only you ask.
However, not all customers will be willing to make an effort without an added incentive, and referral programs provide just that. Referral programs are aimed at getting more leads via customer referrals. In exchange, customers get rewarded for each friend that they refer your brand to.
These incentives could be of different types. Some companies award points for each referral, which can be redeemed against purchases. Some companies offer special privileges, free products, or even extra features or an extension on the customer’s existing subscription.
Dropbox, for example, offers extra cloud storage space for each referral and that, in itself, is equivalent to currency these days.
图片来源:Dropbox
Use Email Marketing to Generate Leads
Email marketingis another commonly-used, yet underrated, customer acquisition strategy that most marketers use. For this to work, you need to first build a subscriber list by compiling email addresses of current and prospective customers. Your website registration forms are very helpful here, as you can collect email addresses of your website visitors and then target them with personalized offers.
Once you have a list of emails, you can send out marketing and promotional emails to target them. As these people have already visited your website, they at least have some interest in your business and so, you may be able to convert them into customers.
You can take your email marketing up a notch by sending automated emails at strategic moments in a buyer’s journey. For example, as soon as someone subscribes to your newsletter, send a welcome email. Or if someone abandons their cart, send a retargeting email with a discount to lure them to purchase.
If done right, email marketing can help you convert a lot of your website visitors into paying customers.
Conclusion
These are some of the most effective customer acquisition strategies used by businesses today. Try these tried and tested techniques and start generating more leads now.
