10 Amazing Customer Acquisition Marketing Strategies

Ideas for your Customer Acquisition Campaigns

What is a customer acquisition strategy?

Every business’ goal is to have a steady and consistent stream of customers. That’s how bills get paid and profits get made. A customer acquisition strategy is the set of techniques implemented to help win over customers.

Without such a strategy, a business would be relying purely on luck for its survival. Savvy entrepreneurs take the time to create rock-solid plans that can guarantee their long-term growth and success.

This article will go over 10 customer acquisition strategies to help you influence your target customer’s purchase decisions and lure them into buying your products. But before jumping right in, the first step in customer acquisition planning is creating a detailed buyer persona.

A buyer persona is simply a fictional depiction of your target customers. When you have a clear image of who they are, you can design products and create marketing messages that resonate with them. You’ll also know what channels they’re most likely to be found on.

Without the guidance of a buyer persona, you’re likely to waste so much time chasing after the wrong people on the wrong channels. Marketing plans are useless without a clear direction. That direction is established by creating a buyer persona.

10 Customer Acquisition Strategies and Techniques

1. Give out freebies

Giving out free things is an effective growth hacking strategy that’s been the foundation of many businesses’ success. For example, Uber offers free rides to new users, which then helps eliminate any hesitancy they may have in downloading the app and trying it out. The cost of the free ride gets recouped when the first-time rider becomes a repeat customer, as is often the case.

You can offer freebies such as gift vouchers, product samples, t-shirts, discount coupons, free trials, etc. The goal is to lure your leads with the freebies so that they can give you a chance to impress them with the quality of your products.

2. FOMO marketing

FOMO, short for “fear of missing out”, is the anxiety that we often feel whenever we imagine that we’re missing out on a great deal.

Let’s say you’re looking to buy a pair of Bluetooth headphones and your budget is $20. You spend hours browsing on Amazon and eBay, but all the headphones you find are a lot more expensive. And just as you’re about to give up, you come across one that’s exactly $20 and has hundreds of 5-star reviews – however only one is left in stock. What are you going to do?

Chances are you’ll suddenly have an urgency to complete the order so you don’t miss out on it. But what you may not know is that the seller probably manipulated the stock number to force you to become more decisive.

FOMO marketing is a powerful way of driving action because it leverages our nature to make impulsive decisions whenever there’s a perceived supply shortage for something we like.

The way FOMO marketing works is simple: create an exclusive offer that has a strict deadline, or is only available to a small number of people, and then advertise it aggressively while emphasizing the exclusivity factor.

For example, if you’re launching a new restaurant, you can offer a free cocktail to the first 100 people and then promote the deal on your social media pages.

If you’re looking to increase your app downloads, you can create an offer that’s only available to app users, and then advertise it through your other marketing channels. If you would like to increase the number of online orders, offer a discount only to people who order online. You can be creative with how you structure your exclusive deals.

3. Start a referral program

Starting a referral program is an effective way of growing a business by leveraging other people’s social networks. It’s a very simple strategy to implement and has minimal costs and risks.

You can start a program where anyone who refers customers to you gets rewarded with a small commission from the sale. Make sure to offer attractive commission rates to motivate people to work hard promoting you.

HubSpot offers hundreds of dollars per sale to its affiliates. And as you can imagine, a substantial amount of its sales is driven by them. The risks are minimal since the commission is only paid whenever there’s a successful sale.

4. Focus on SEO

Most consumers begin their purchase journey on Google. The best way to get in front of their eyes right at that point of research is through SEO.

Aim to rank your website on the first page of the Google search results for all the keywords that are related to your products or services. For example, if you are a graphic designer looking to find clients, you can target the following keywords:

“graphic designers near me”
“where to get a business logo”
“best graphic design services”

Think of all possible search queries a person who needs your products or services might search and then add them to your list of keywords to rank for. You can do a more comprehensive keyword research using SEMrush.

When people can find your business organically through a Google search, you may no longer need to spend money on ads. Many small businesses neglect SEO because of how challenging it can be. If you don’t have the expertise to do it yourself, outsource the work on freelancing sites like Upwork.

5. Integrate a sales funnel on your website

Most professional websites are built for the sole purpose of displaying information about a business. You can take your site to the next level by integrating a sales funnel to immediately kickstart the purchase process as soon as a visitor lands on it.

Sales funnels help guide potential buyers through a journey that starts from them not knowing much about a product to actually making the purchase. They are the equivalent of having a salesperson walk a customer through the sales process while answering all their questions and even upselling other products to them.

ClickFunnels is one of the most popular website and sales funnel builders. You can build your entire site on the platform and easily add powerful funnels using ready-made templates. You can even create simplified funnels that capture a visitor’s contact information to enable you follow up later. Try it out free here.

6. Build an email list

Many people spend as much time on email as they do on social media. The problem with social media marketing is that most platforms severely limit the reach for non-sponsored posts to force businesses to spend money on ads.

For example, the organic reach for Facebook posts is just about 5.2%. If you have a page with 1,000 followers, only about 52 people actually see your posts. With email marketing, you can get your messages delivered to nearly all your contacts without any restriction. The average open rate for email campaigns is 21.3%.

An email list gives you unrestricted and unlimited access to your target customers. You can start building a list by integrating an opt-in form on your website and then offering free items such as gift vouchers or e-books to get people to sign up. Studies show that the ROI for email campaigns is as high as 4,400%. It’s definitely worth the effort.

7. Host free webinars

Did you know that 20 – 40% of webinar attendees end up becoming leads? Hosting webinars is undoubtedly one of the most effective customer acquisition strategies.

You can host them every month or quarter on various topics that would be of interest to your leads. For example, if your business targets HR professionals, you can host a webinar on “how to improve employee productivity” – a topic that would grab their attention. Make sure to start advertising it weeks in advance and emphasize the point that it is completely free to attend.

8. Target decision-makers on LinkedIn

There’s no better social platform for finding business leads than LinkedIn. Its userbase is largely comprised of business decision-makers with twice the purchase capability of the average internet user.

You can use it to find B2B leads, investors, partners, employees, etc. It’s more than just a customer acquisition channel.

LinkedIn allows you to search for people based on their location, job title, and even companies that they work for.

For example, if your buyer persona is a marketing director based in New York, you can search for “marketing director”, and then filter the results by location, and add “New York”. Within seconds you’ll have a long list of leads to reach out to. This article goes into more detail on how to do a cold outreach on LinkedIn.

9. Cross-promotion

Cross-promotion is a strategy that involves partnering with other businesses that are in a similar niche as you, however target a different clientele, and then actively promoting each other.

For example, if you’re a web developer, you can partner with a digital marketing agency since you’re both in the digital space and could benefit from each other’s audience. Now all you’ll need to do is promote each other through social media posts, email, blogs, etc.

The great thing about cross-promotion partnerships is that they’re quite straightforward. You promote me, I promote you, we both win. They barely have any risks or costs associated.

10. Paid online ads

Running an ads campaign is another great way of acquiring leads online, however it does require that you have a decent marketing budget. Sustaining a paid campaign on a medium to long-term basis can be quite expensive.

Most advertising platforms including Google Ads and Facebook Ads have a wide array of targeting options to enable you pinpoint your buyer persona, and then specifically show ads to them. You can target users based on their age, location, industry, gender, interests, and even keywords they’re searching on Google.

Check out this article to learn how to get over 1,000 in free advertising credit to run your campaigns on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and several other platforms.