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Building an effective customer acquisition strategy needs short and long-term investments to continually attract, nurture and guide your target audience through your marketing and sales pipeline. It can be challenging to balance both short term and long-term gains, especially in the early days when you’re eager to get to market. With a little patience, strategy and planning, your multi-channel customer acquisition strategy will develop into a repeatable, scalable marketing engine. Here are a few key considerations to get started.
Invest in Building Brand Value and Awareness
You’ll find different brand frequency stats online, but at a minimum, it takes at least 10 interactions or impressions before your brand moves into your target audience’s consideration set. That will require you to make investments in brand awareness marketing. This is where the patience comes in. The return on these investments can be difficult to track in the early days of your marketing plan. If you’ve spent the time needed up front to develop a thoughtful strategy, these investments will yield returns over time and pave the way for more effective direct lead generation efforts.
Consider all the areas of the customer acquisition funnel that need your attention and create a plan that checks off each box from awareness to action. Leverage content, digital and physical channels and consistent touch-points. But don’t stop at product marketing or advertising to attract a lead. Invest in some brand spend to boost your reputation and market presence, even if it doesn’t directly correlate to driving specific business attributable to a lead. Collective and continued brand and prospect-pipeline investment is what drives sustainable business over time.
Leverage Both Online and Offline Channels
Creating continuity across the prospect-customer journey is about eliminating gaps in what your marketing messages are trying to accomplish and what your prospects are seeking. Taking an integrated channel approach can create more opportunities for your customer to authentically engage with your brand in multiple ways.
Often it takes significant nurturing of a customer through multiple channels to fully capture their attention and convince them to engage with your brand. Integrating your online and offline channels creates a unified and seamless brand interaction between prospects and your company, which increases the chances they’ll engage further in the sales funnel.
Personalized mailing materials that can be custom curated for niche events and trade shows, both physical and virtual, complement your digital efforts. Know your audience’s behavior and attitudes toward these materials and craft assets that fit the bill. Use your physical marketing assets to lead prospects to your digital channels, and vice versa. Keeping connected with your prospects through physical and digital materials helps create a stronger connection with your brand and encourages prospects to engage more with your products and services. Often it’s that one unexpected form fact that may make the difference.
Create Personalized Content
Keeping your qualified leads and prospects engaged is about creating content that tells an authentic story that personally resonates with your audience. Your customer acquisition strategy is best supported with useful, educational content materials that focus on what someone is specifically looking to understand at that particular point in their journey, and how it will help them achieve their goals or solve a problem they have.
Learn their pain points and aspirations and showcase what you can do for them personally. Buyer’s needs are distinct and unique, and your content, marketing and sales messaging must be built on that philosophy. Generic email marketing, blogs, product sheets and digital/physical ads won’t cut it in today’s competitive ecosystem. And, we’re not just talking about using someone’s first name. Greater customer acquisition comes when you understand how to tap into your targeted audience’s needs at particular points in the buying journey and use that to meet them where they are in that journey.
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