5 Powerful Ways to Drive Customer Acquisition

You can spend a lot of time and effort working on a great marketing idea, spend long hours crafting the perfect marketing strategy, but without customers, your business will cease to exist. The growth of your business hinges on one thing – Customer Acquisition and the strategy you deploy to make that happen.

In this article, we’re going to discuss what is customer acquisition and give you a few helpful tips on how you can create a winning customer acquisition strategy. Let’s get started

What is a customer acquisition strategy?

A customer acquisition strategy defines the set of activities and engagement tools that businesses use to gain new customers or clients. 

A successful customer acquisition strategy is one that uses a systematic and sustainable approach that evolves over time.

While this may sound simple, most businesses will tell you that customer acquisition in an increasingly crowded marketplace and it can be incredibly challenging to find new opportunities for growth. 

With millions of blog posts published and emails sent every day, the only way you can win is by acquiring paying customers in a way that differentiates you from the competition.

To help you understand and improve your customer acquisition efforts, we scanned the web for top customer acquisition strategies, tactics, and channels from successful SaaS leaders. This should give you some ideas on how to build a sustainable customer acquisition strategy for growth.

Before you dive into implementing these customer acquisition tactics, you need to set clear goals you would like to achieve from this process – even if you don’t have a lot of data to base them on. Setting goals will allow you to understand whether something is working on not. After testing out a few different tactics you’ll be able to compare their individual success in relative terms against your goals.

It’s probably best for you to note that it doesn’t matter if you can’t figure out a way to scale these individual tactics right now. Instead, you should look to see if these tactics and the channel you use provides what you’re looking for, which is large volumes of high-quality new customers.

Below are a few tactics you can work into creating an effective customer acquisition strategy.

1. Identify Referral Opportunities 

If you speak to your company sales representative, they will tell you that a referral lead is the holy grail of lead sources. They close faster mainly because these leads are at a higher point of trust in the sales process. Additionally, It’s very unlikely for you to face price objections as your existing customer may have given these referral leads a ballpark range to expect upfront.

Referral marketing is one of the few customer acquisition channels that can scale infinitely, and your customer success team can play a big role here. If your marketing efforts involve keeping your customers satisfied, delighted, and engaged, they are more likely to give you referrals, sometimes without you even asking. However, it never hurts to have your customer success team reach out to happy customers and see if there are any possible referral opportunities. 

Let’s look at the company Mailshake. Milkshake gets 90% of its new customer acquisition through word of mouth referrals. The founder of Milkshake, Sujan Patel says, “We ask all new customers how they heard about us, and if they were referred by someone, we ask for the name of the person who referred them. We then find that clients on social media and send them a thank them and sometimes offer them free Mailshake swag. That leads to more referrals, great feedback, and a deeper relationship with our best customers.”

This action is highly impactful, and easy for any customer success team to implement.

2. Drive Positive Customer Reviews

Today for most companies, we’ve noticed that the purchasing process has changed and buyers are more control than vendors who are doing the selling. Prospects are not only relying on what the salesperson is telling them, but they are also going to review sites to get a better understanding of the experiences real customers have had with your product or service.

Today, your prospects do a lot of research on who to consider, making user insights such an important component in the B2B sales and marketing strategy. As a business looking to acquire more customers, you will need a team to drive that review engine. In most cases, your customer success team should be that driver, they are closest to the customer and can ask for feedback, in the form of customer reviews. 

3. Optimize Messaging for Prospects

Having a clear definition of who your ideal customer is, is one of the most important things you’ll need when you’re trying to acquire more customers. Your ICP (ideal customer profile) will dictate everything, from the features and functionality of the products and services to what makes up your service offering, the words you use, and the emotion you invoke through your marketing message.

Customer success teams are the closest to your customers and will be able to review and critique your marketing messaging. They can give you feedback on if there is any disconnect with what active customers actually think and say vs. what you are communicating to prospects. This will help you build unique messages for your prospects and create an instant connection with ideal customers. 

4.Case Studies

Most B2B businesses today use case studies to drive customer acquisition because it works. Case studies are proof that your product or services actually works or is beneficial.

The first step to writing a case study is to find the right case study candidate. 

Here’s a guide that will help you pick out the right candidate for your case study. 

• Ensure your candidate has In-depth knowledge of your product
• The client has seen remarkable results using your product
• The company is a recognizable brand
• The company switched from an alternative product

While creating your case study, ensure your writer or marketing team seeks feedback and input from your customer success team and they are in a position to give you better information about the client and what has worked well, while also helping your team identify the right candidate for the case study

5. Create a Customer Success Team

Now, you would have read over and over again in this blog the importance of a customer success team and the role they play in helping you acquire new customers. This brings us to our last and final tip for user acquisition. If you do not have a customer success team in place, it’s time you created one. 

Building a customer success team would demonstrate to your prospects and current customers that you are dedicated to helping them reach their goals. Additionally, your customer success team can help your marketing team understand your customer profile better, drive engagements, and also help with customer retention. 

Remember, Customer acquisition and customer retention go hand in hand. Both of these processes are important for sustainable business growth. So, if you want to be successful in both your customer acquisition and retention efforts, you need to put your customers in the spotlight, equip your customers to succeed, and they’ll work on your behalf to help you grow your business.

All the customer acquisition tools listed above (referrals, reviews, references, and case studies) can seem overwhelming, but don’t worry you can reach out to our team at Mobistreak to guide you through the customer acquisition process.