All businesses have customers of some kind. You offer either a service or product that an individual or company needs. For this reason, you must have a customer acquisition strategy, which at its basic level is just a way that you identify, pitch, and hopefully, gain customers. Optimally, you have a systematic strategy that yields consistent results, but is also one that you can slightly tweak to keep pace with market changes and trends. These tips will help you create a customer acquisition strategy that will allow your company to grow and thrive.

 

Ask Yourself Important Questions

The first step in developing a customer acquisition strategy is to ask yourself questions that lead you to the type of customer you want to acquire. Develop a persona that represents your ideal customer and will allow you to create targeted marketing campaigns that resonate with people who resemble that persona. 

Ask yourself what your company’s goals are and narrowly define them. Perhaps you want to raise awareness of your brand. What will success look like when that goal is achieved? Maybe you want to increase conversions. What conversion percentage would be considered successful? Are you looking to grow your revenue? If so, by how much? These questions are critical so that you can gear your customer acquisition strategy toward your goals and measure your progress toward them.

At this stage, you should also determine the channels through which you will implement your strategy. Are you going to focus on out-of-home advertising or will you use social media to grow your customer base? You probably won’t be able to target all channels equally and it’s usually better to focus on one or two channels to really fine-tune your strategy anyway. You can always add more channels later.

 

Optimize Your Online Presence

These days, a robust online presence is almost required for customer acquisition. Most people use the internet to find businesses, so if you’re not there, you’ll be skipped over for the companies that are. Even if you’re not advertising online, you still need to have a website that’s optimized for SEO. This is the key to customers finding you when they enter specific keywords into a search engine. For example, if you sell widgets for flying cars, your website needs to be one of the first results when people enter “widgets for flying cars” in a search engine.

You’ll also want to target specific keywords that relate to your business (not just the main keyword for your niche). To do this, consider maintaining a blog that includes articles that focus on those keywords. You can either write the content yourself, or hire a third party to do it for you. Other aspects of SEO optimization include location-specific, feature-specific, and industry-specific keywords that intentionally target customers who are local and searching for your product or service.

 

Engage in Social Media

Interacting with your customers (and potential customers) on social media is another way to target people who are specifically searching for what you offer. Create a business page on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram to reach the most people. Share content that you create or have created for you and consider hiring a social media manager to help you craft the right messages.

 

Conclusion

If you don’t have a standard way to acquire customers, it’s time to start developing a strategy that brings you the customers you want. Your competitors are already doing it, so if you want to keep up with them or even pass them by, you’ll need an effective customer acquisition strategy of your own.