It’s not news that most start-ups fail within three to five years. Indeed, it takes a whole lot more to succeed in a business than it takes to set it up. For one, the business has to attract and retain new customers which can be difficult as a new business entity. However, there’s hope for your startup if you implement these 5 customer acquisition strategies for start-ups that we’ll discuss here. Let’s get started!
What is customer acquisition?
Customer acquisition is a process that includes targeting and reeling in prospects for a product or service and converting them into actual customers who patronise the business.
You will need a good customer acquisition strategy if you want to consistently attract new customers to your business. This strategy is essentially a mix of techniques that you implement to attract and convert prospects to customers.
5 customer acquisition strategies for your startup
There is no one actual strategy that suits every business but you can choose one out of several that meets the specific needs of your startup.
1. Audience research
A successful business is one that uses data-driven insights to understand its target audience and continually improve its offerings. You therefore need to collect relevant data about your target audience, analyse it, and apply the insights that you gain from it. With the right data, you can better ensure a product-market fit that will help you get and retain new customers.
The customer targeting process usually involves determining market size, creating buyer personas, and identifying effective channels.
Examples of excellent customer research tools include heatmaps, recordings, surveys, and interviews. You can apply your audience research strategy as a basic step for every other customer acquisition strategy.
Naturally, after defining your target market and researching your competition, you have to develop a marketing plan for both online and offline marketing. Likewise, you need a sales strategy that will be effective in closing deals with prospects and converting them into actual customers.
2. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Your potential customers are often on search engines such as Google and Bing, trying to find answers to questions that relate to their pain points. With a good SEO strategy, you can improve your site so that it is more visible on these search engines and appears before these prospects. What this means is that your site can easily gain more organic traffic and in turn, lead more visitors to your business.
3. Content marketing
You can hardly attract and convert prospects into customers without great content. A good content marketing strategy helps ensure that your target audience will see your content, engage with it, become qualified leads, and ultimately convert into paying customers.
You can typically apply your content marketing strategy in all four stages of the customer acquisition funnel. These stages include awareness, consideration, conversion, and retention. Examples of the use of content marketing include writing and publishing SEO-optimised blog posts, creating and optimising landing pages, and holding livestreams and webinars.
4. Email marketing
This is one of the most effective customer acquisition strategies. You can implement targeted and personalised campaigns to reach your target audience right in their email inboxes. With Email marketing, it is easy to attract new customers, nurture leads, and convert them into paying customers. For example, you can inform them of special sales discounts or get them to return to an abandoned shopping cart.
Get tips on Email marketing best practices to increase conversion rates here
5. Customer reviews and testimonials
As many as 95% of prospective customers check out online reviews before they patronise a product. It therefore follows that having high-quality reviews and social proof in the form of videos and photos can help build trust and increase conversions for a business.
One way to go about this is to do some research on customer experiences on your product, gain their feedback, and then turn them into social proof.
Learn more on lead generation and customer acquisition here
How to choose the best customer acquisition strategy for your startup
Before you decide what customer acquisition strategy is best for your startup, you need to consider the following factors:
- Targeted audience: Tailor your customer acquisition strategy to suit your target audience and their unique needs. In this way, you can ensure long-term customer satisfaction from the beginning.
- Available budget and resources: Your budget can determine whether you’ll do more organic or paid campaigns. If possible, you can apply paid customer acquisition strategies such as Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and Paid social media advertising.
- Specific industry: Certain customer acquisition strategies are more appropriate for specific industries. For example, you may want to do a lot of social media marketing and email marketing if you have an e-commerce business startup.
Learn more on optimising marketing strategies for an enhanced customer experience
Customer acquisition strategies for stages of the customer journey
Awareness stage
- SEO strategies should aim for the first page of Search Engine Results
- Content marketing should involve excellent keyword research and high-quality and relevant content
- Develop easy-to-understand videos
- Implement an excellent social media strategy to reel in the target audience
- Create and implement a customer referrals program that rewards customers with discounts or free subscriptions when they refer your startup to others. However, take precautionary steps such as capping the amount of incentives and verifying them.
Consideration stage
- Use great content marketing to shorten the consideration phase and move prospects to the decision/conversion stage. Make excellent use of listicles, webinars, and case studies.
- Use email newsletters to build a relationship with prospects.
- Again, Email marketing campaigns can be used to nurture leads. You can also upsell and cross-sell to your existing customers.
Decision stage
This is the action stage so do everything to reduce the gap between decision making and actual action. You can facilitate this by providing consultations and discounts.
Learn how to use AI for marketing automation here
Action tips on acquiring customers for start-ups
- Join a startup community and be involved in it. You can get to meet startup founders and opportunities to pitch at startup events.
- Social media is a great tool for reaching out to potential customers. Create relevant accounts, maintain a consistent posting schedule, and engage your audience.
- Writing guest blog posts is one way to get exposure for your startup, drive traffic to your site, and put your product out there.
- Depending on the type of startup, influencers can help you reach out to a ready audience quickly.
- Depending on your budget, you can also run targeted and retargeting ads to reel potential customers into your acquisition and sales funnel.
- Monitoring your strategies and optimising them should definitely be on your to-do list. This way, you can improve your customer acquisition strategies. Some metrics to track include customer acquisition costs (CAC), churn rate, and customer lifetime value (CLV).
Take it a step further and learn the hows of nurturing market leads here
Use the right strategies to build your startup
Customer acquisition is not merely a numbers game. You should focus more on providing value to customers so that you can get the most valuable customers. When you focus on quality more than quantity, you can not only acquire valuable customers but you’ll also retain them. Just be sure to use the right mix of strategies as explained in these 5 customer acquisition strategies for start-ups.
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