Fadi Agour, CEO of RPM, is a leading performance marketing agency connecting high-intent consumers with leading brands.
Customer acquisition. Any business owner knows this is essential to the survival of their business.
If you pay attention to the statistics, you know it is crucial to achieve this as soon as possible. Over 30% of businesses will fail within the first two years of operation.
But, you need to develop a customer acquisition plan that is right for you. To do that, you need to identify who you’re trying to reach and what your goals are. Once you have those answers, you can start choosing how best to reach your target market.
Determine Your Target Market
The first thing you need to do is to identify your target market. Are you trying to target primarily men or women? Is your product or service geared toward millennials, or is it a better fit for baby boomers?
Gender, age, race and even sexual orientation are all things to consider as you start developing a business marketing strategy. When you are advertising, you are trying to speak directly to a certain group of people. To do this, you need to know who you are addressing.
Once you identify who your product or service is targeting, you can start to dig deeper into what that group of people generally likes. For example, if you are a car company that is trying to advertise its car to families, you might talk about your car’s safety features. If you are in the luxury car business, you may talk about the car’s aesthetics and its luxury items.
Knowing your audience allows you to take your advertising in specific directions rather than speaking to a broad audience.
Determine Your Goals
Next, you need to determine what your goals are for your marketing. Is your goal to get as many customers as possible? Is your goal to get each customer to spend a certain amount of money? Is the goal to simply create more brand awareness?
Make these goals concrete, and then hold yourself accountable for them. You can do this by simply writing down your goals. Then, you can always remember what the point of all of this work was and what the endgame is.
Having a clear goal allows you to build your work around one clear purpose. It can also improve communication within your company and can get everybody on the same page to come up with ideas that center around achieving this goal.
Pick Your Outreach Methods
Once you know your goals, you can start planning how you want to reach your target market. Below are a few outreach methods that can help you reach the customers you want.
• Paid advertising: This allows you to get more exposure to potential customers and increase your chances of building brand awareness. There are different options for customizing your ads if you want to go this route. You can choose to have your advertisement pop up only on certain pages or mentions you think your potential customers will see. Or, you could go the pay-per-click route, where you only have to pay if people are clicking on your advertisement. Sit down and go over your options here to see which is best for you.
• Sponsored content: Along with paid advertising, you have the option of sponsoring content. This works well with social media influencers, bloggers, and popular podcast hosts.
For example, let’s say your business sells portable phone chargers. So, you target people who travel often. You could do that by offering a sponsorship deal to a popular travel vlogger or influencer. Here, you would give the vlogger or influencer money in exchange for them making positive comments and increasing brand awareness of your product.
This strategy can be very effective when you are trying to home in on a niche audience. This is because so many vloggers, podcasts and influencers focus on a certain niche. Therefore, your audience is likely already targeted for you.
• Email marketing: Finally, one old but good way to try to acquire customers is through simple email marketing. This is a great way to filter out customers you think may waste your time.
One of the benefits of going this route is there is a strong chance your customer will see your message the same day. A 2021 Pathwire survey of 2,000 consumers found that over 84% of respondents checked their inboxes at least once per day. So, if you want quick access to customers, email marketing might be the way to go.
These are just some strategies and tactics you can incorporate into your customer acquisition plan. But by determining your goals and who you want to reach, you’ll be able to create successful strategies to meet your customers where they are.