This week we feature an article by Daniel Bishop, an assistant editor and marketing consultant for ReallySimpleSystems. He shares multiple approaches to updating or creating your customer acquisition strategy. The phrase ‘customer acquisition strategy’ is one that you would rarely hear outside the confines of a corporate marketing department. For most businesses, customer acquisition simply […]
This week we feature an article by Daniel Bishop, an assistant editor and marketing consultant for ReallySimpleSystems. He shares multiple approaches to updating or creating your customer acquisition strategy.
The phrase ‘customer acquisition strategy’ is one that you would rarely hear outside the confines of a corporate marketing department.
For most businesses, customer acquisition simply involved choosing a marketing channel and publishing some kind of promotional content. This kind of approach certainly brought some results, but the how and why of its effectiveness often remained a mystery.
If we fast forward to the present day, we will find that the status of customer acquisition has changed dramatically. Whether you’re running a multinational enterprise or a small local business, you need to have a customer acquisition strategy in place in order to steer customers your way.
There are numerous acquisition strategies to choose from and it’s easy to get overwhelmed if this is your first foray into systematic customer acquisition. So to help you find a strategy that works for your business needs, we have collected the 6 most effective ones into a handy list which you can find below.
As you publish content on your blog over a longer period of time, older posts will start getting buried deeper in your site’s architecture. And the deeper a blog post resides within your archive, the lower share of internal PageRank it will get. Even pages with plenty of external links will have a harder time staying relevant in terms of rank.
With that being said, the content within these pages can still possess significant conversion potential. All you have to do is bring them to the forefront of your website once again.
The simplest way to do this is to change the date of the post and publish it again. This will bring it to the top of your content feed. You can also go a step further and update the content within the post. This is especially handy for content that relies on data and hard numbers.
Among the pages that host your content, some will perform better than others in terms of organic reach. If you can identify these pages, you can enhance them with content upgrades to increase their conversion potential.
Start by using Google Search Console to discover which keywords have the highest search volume when it comes to your content pages. By analyzing the keywords the people are using to reach your content, you will learn more about the intent behind their search. They might be looking for something as simple as a definition of a term, or they might be looking to buy something.
Whatever the case may be, this information will tell you what kind of upgrade you should make for your content. For instance, if someone is looking for data on the impact of color on web design, you can upgrade your content with an infographic that visualizes the information, or a whitepaper that elaborates on the topic.
A lot has been written on this topic under the heading of ‘guest posting’. It used to be a standard SEO tactic a couple of years ago, but it has since fallen out of favor due to spam and other unsavory practices. Nonetheless, guest posting is still a powerful tool for acquiring customers.
The way you want to go about using guest posting is to only publish on websites that are directly relevant to your target audience. Relevance is best measured in terms of engagement. If the site in question has a high number of comments and shares, the odds that someone will follow a link to your website will rise.
Another point to consider when guest posting is the similarity between your own audience and the one on the external website. If your customer personas match, it will be much easier to create a piece of content that actually converts.
The majority of promotional emails you send will inevitably end up unopened. This is simply a fact of life in email marketing. However, even unopened emails can still help you achieve your customer acquisition goals.
The idea here is to create custom follow-up emails specifically targeting subscribers who haven’t been opening your emails or replying to them. These emails should have a different subject line to set them apart from the previous email in the chain.
Timing is critical for salvaging unopened emails. You don’t want to wait for too long, but you also don’t want to spam their inbox with a series of emails in a single day. Forty-eight hours is the sweet spot for sending follow-ups after an unopened email. Email marketing software makes it easy to keep track of your email marketing campaigns, as well as salvaging unopened emails.
For the uninitiated, Quora.com is a website where users can ask questions and get answers from other registered users. The topics it covers range from cooking pasta to migrating your offshore holdings, and everything in between. Quora is also a great source of referral traffic, provided you can give useful answers to user questions.
To get started with Quora, use SEMrush (or a similar service) to find top ranking Quora questions according to search engines. These are the questions you should create content for.
Don’t simply post a link to your website as a part of your answer. At first, try to provide value without resorting to links. Once you build up your reputation, you can start including links to your website in your answers.
Influencers within your industry that command a large online following can be a valuable source of new customers. The trick is finding ones with a reputation that inspires trust in followers. You don’t want to entangle your brand with influencers that are prone to mood swings, chasing trends, and switching brand allegiances.
Work with each influencer individually. You want to leverage the strength of their unique personality and followers. This should extend to your referral links as well. Have all of them link to custom-built landing pages.
Customer acquisition is a critical component of your business strategy. It provides the ‘raw’ resources for your sales operation, i.e. customers expressing interest in your business. By acquiring customers in a strategic manner, you will create a stable revenue stream. Give these approaches a try, and prepare your business for the long haul.
Daniel Bishop currently works as an assistant editor and marketing consultant for ReallySimpleSystems. He started off his career in digital marketing by working for a few local companies. After a year or two of learning different aspects of the job, he moved on and worked for DesignRush as a content advisor.
For more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors go to customerserviceblog.com.
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