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As you start to build out your strategy, consider the following seven customer acquisition techniques that will help get your products in front of more prospective customers.

1. Content marketing

Content marketing involves creating blog posts, guides, infographics, videos, podcasts, and more to answer questions, solve problems, and introduce readers to your business.

Content marketing is efficient, compelling, and persuasive for capturing website traffic. Plus, it generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less, according to research from Demand Metric.

With content marketing, you can:

• Improve ROI 13x by prioritizing blogging in your marketing strategy.
• Build authority in your industry with lower upfront costs and more profound long-term benefits.
• Support your entire customer journey, from lead generation to acquisition and retention.
• Create videos that capture up to 66% more qualified leads than those without.
• Build marketing assets for multiple customer segments.
• Build trust with prospects, considering 61% of U.S. consumers bought something after reading recommendations on a blog.
• Assist your SEO efforts by adding more targeted, indexed pages to your website.

But how often should you be blogging? It depends. For smaller businesses, you can see success by publishing one to four blog posts per week. Larger companies (think Shopify or Forbes) often publish articles daily or multiple times per day.

Even if you don’t have the budget for a full content team, you can have people from different departments write content for your audience, hire an editor, and start publishing. The goal is to create good content consistently so you can build closer ties with readers and get the most from your acquisition budget.

2. Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is the process of tailoring your website content to boost rankings on Google or other search engines.

SEO is one of the most important online customer acquisition services for businesses, and it’s likely your customers are using search engines to find information. That’s why it’s a valuable channel for acquiring new customers.

With SEO, you can:

• Drive quality traffic to your website. Unlike paid acquisition channels that involve unsolicited outreach, customers can find you when they’re looking for information. It’s a more customer-centric approach to customer acquisition.
• Lower Google ad spend. Producing content that ranks high in Google search is an investment. But once you rank in a good position, you can drive the equivalent monthly cost of PPC campaigns so you don’t have to spend as much on ads.
• Get more clicks than pay-per-click advertising. Even though Google ads show up higher on search result pages, 71.33% of people click through an organic result on page one.
• Convert more leads. SEO leads have an average 14.6% conversion rate versus traditional outbound marketing (think direct mail or advertising), which has an average 1.7% close rate.

The one drawback of SEO is that it’s not an overnight success. Getting your articles found in search results can take time, so you want to plan for the long term. However, the results from SEO are worth your time.

A personal finance company, bet big on SEO over the past five years. In July 2020, the company, valued at roughly $500 million, generated nearly 14 million organic search visits. You’d think a company of this size would be dumping money into paid ads, but the story is quite different.

In a recent post on Some Good Content, the company revealed how it took over the market on all “The Best of…” content on the web related to personal finance. Through well-written content and a simple SEO strategy, the company continues to acquire new customers from search engines.

3. Mobile marketing

Mobile marketing refers to reaching customers on their smartphones through SMS, Facebook Messenger, push notifications, or mobile apps. Mobile sales are expected to reach over 280 billion dollars in 2020, making up 45% of the total ecommerce market.

With mobile marketing, you can:

• Easily create automated omni-channel campaigns. With marketing automation software like ManyChat, you can create integrated, cohesive shopping experiences across your customer touch points, including email, text, Facebook Messenger, and push notifications.
• Align with consumer market demand. Audiences today want to interact with brands 24/7. An omni-channel presence can help deliver an informed, consistent message across multiple channels.
• Personalize at every stage of the buyer journey. Mobile channels help you more easily collect customer data to create more targeted outreach to cold audiences.

The company captured new leads on their website, built detailed customer profiles — based on buying behavior, quizzes, giveaways, and demographics — to create personalized experiences for shoppers, generating 68,000 subscribers to improve future marketing efforts and sell more products.

4. Social media

For online businesses, having a presence on social channels like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter matters. With an estimated 3.6 billion people on social media worldwide, it’s easy to promote your business.

Benefits of getting on social media include:

• Increasing brand awareness by posting consistently.
• Showing customers a more creative side of your business.
• Engaging with your audience on social media to bring them back to your website.
• Promoting your products to followers.

Three key tactics to consider when looking at social media are:

Organic social posts — Scheduling or instantly publishing posts on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media channels your audience lives on.

Facebook ads — Finding new fans, connecting with existing ones, and retargeting website visitors who didn’t buy.

Instagram ads — Visually promoting your brand to find new customers and retarget visitors. Kortni Jeane, an online swimwear brand, ran Facebook video ads and photos in a campaign to reach more shoppers and increase sales.

Using the Facebook ads platform, they automatically placed ads where they were likely to drive results at the lowest cost possible. They also used budget optimization to distribute the budget across top-performing ad sets in real time.

5. Email marketing

Do you know what smart entrepreneurs do with the traffic they receive from content marketing and SEO? They build an email list.

Outside of direct sales, there is no better business outcome attached to first-time visitors than when they subscribe to receive updates from you. You can send sales or discounts for your products or services, exclusive content, customer features, and other promotional campaigns.

When you want to communicate something with your customers, email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to do so. In fact, a study by the Direct Marketing Association found that for every $1 spent, email has an average $38 return on investment.

Some other reasons to use email marketing are:

It’s easy to start. Email marketing platforms like MailChimp are easy to use and intuitive. They come packed with features to help you get sign-ups, design emails, collect data, segment customers, measure success, and more.

To automate marketing tasks. Unlike paid marketing campaigns, you can set up an automation to trigger a series of emails you can set and forget. From welcome series to post-purchase follow-ups to rewarding customers with special promotions, you can connect with thousands of customers quickly and easily.

To increase brand awareness. Each time you send an email, your customer gets a notification. Whether they decide to open your email or not, they see your brand and offer, which can keep you top of mind the next time they want to buy something.

It’s easy to measure performance. Email marketing platforms also make it easy to collect data and use it to improve your marketing strategy moving forward. You can track opens and clicks, ecommerce activity like purchases and abandoned cart recoveries, and even how much traffic you send to your online store or website.

If you have the means, hiring an expert in email marketing can pay off. But if you don’t have the budget, you can still invest in client acquisition software with email marketing features, which can expand your reach and increase your sales.

6. Referral program

Referral programs are an easy way to improve client acquisition in your business. You’ve probably come across them before for professional services or online stores. The programs are typically straightforward: The more people you refer, the more you save or earn.

7. Paid advertising

If you’re a newer business or online store, chances are you’ll have to invest more in paid advertising to acquire new customers.

Ads produce results immediately, generating traffic, leads, and sales right after you launch. And paid ads can support SEO efforts by helping you find keywords to drive your organic search campaigns.

However, pay-per-click (PPC) can get expensive fast without the right tactics. Some best practices to follow to maximize ad spend are:

Always include a remarketing strategy. Whether you run Facebook ads or Google ads, not everyone who clicks through your ad will buy something. Support your paid advertising with remarketing ads to (basically) follow shoppers around the internet while showing your ads until they buy. Some brands see up to 1,300% ROI from using remarketing ads.

Use Google Dynamic Search Ads. Dynamic Search Ad headlines and landing pages pull content from your website based on what a person was shopping for. They help keep your ads relevant, save you time, and increase conversions for your ads.

Use automation for Facebook ads. If you choose to run Facebook ads, consider using a chatbot to start a conversation with paid traffic. It’s an easy way to create interactive experiences for potential customers and maximize your ad spend versus traditional methods.