Acquisition strategy: definition and expert advice for success

Having top-notch products and services is not enough! The competition is tough, so you need to know exactly who to sell them to and how to retain them. To gain notoriety and boost the growth of your business over the long term, you need to put in place a well-oiled and efficient acquisition strategy with quality content. In this article, we take stock of the essential acquisition levers and channels and the steps to launch a good customer acquisition strategy for your business.

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Acquisition strategy: definition

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Customer acquisition is all the means put in place by businesses to attract and retain consumers. Clearly, a customer acquisition strategy includes all the steps that successively transform a prospect, into a lead and into a customer.

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Concretely, customer acquisition is actions:

👉 marketing, in general, digital;

👉 of communication;

👉 commercial techniques;

👉 commercial channels.

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⭐️ The Growth Room Council : The growth of a company is built on its ability to renew its customer base and its turnover. You must therefore succeed in activating various levers and channels on the Internet to create continuous traction. Our recommendation is to avoid being dependent on a single customer acquisition channel and to succeed in developing the profitability of sourcing according to the repurchase rate. Remember that signing new customers costs you 3 times more than retaining them!

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5 effective acquisition strategies

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Before presenting the various customer acquisition levers, let's recall the basics: no, customer acquisition is not just about overreaching out and buying leads. Moreover, they are generally expensive with not a lot of results in the long term.

Instead, you should focus on high-ROI levers and channels that increase your growth quickly and sustainably on the Internet and elsewhere.

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The SEO

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When BtoB or BtoB players conduct 80% of their buying decisions alone, they generally go to Google to type their query to find answers to their questions, in free articles. With SEO, you provide value with optimized content and, in fact, start building relationships earlier in the customer acquisition funnel.

It is a profitable long-term acquisition strategy that, with patience, will bring you leads on a regular basis. Be sure that SEO articles published a few months ago, will continue to bring you traffic and leads!

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⭐️ The Growth Room Council : don't stop investing in your content strategy and on your blog! Especially since it feeds your other customer acquisition levers: SEA, emailing, social networks, outbound... It is a big challenge, so take the time to properly define your content strategy and to constantly optimize the existing one.

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The SEA

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Where SEO is an Internet marathon, think of SEA as a sprint instead. Concretely, the results of SEO fall later but are more sustainable than those of SEA. That said, digital advertising is a very effective customer acquisition tool to boost the growth of a business.

Simply put, you pay the search engine to appear among the first results of the SERP or in the social media news feed. SEA has its advantages, in particular, its ultra-advanced targeting options (age, sex, place of work and residence, type of device used (telephone, computer, etc.). SEA is especially interesting during ad hoc advertising campaigns.

The success of your SEA strategy depends on the budget allocated and the competitiveness of the target keywords. The more competitive your market is, the more you will have to spend to appear in the top results.

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⭐️ The Growth Room Council : always with the aim of not focusing on a single customer acquisition strategy, try to find the right balance between SEO and SEA. For example, you could start with a customer acquisition strategy via SEA to quickly generate the first leads. And in the second step, focus on an SEO strategy.

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Emailing

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Emailing is very interesting for the second part of the acquisition funnel, when visitors turn into leads. To be able to launch an email marketing campaign, the prospect must have previously shared their contact details, after, for example, downloading a white paper.

Today, the emailing customer acquisition strategy converts 3 times more than social networks (Source: McKinsey via MDirector). To do this, you must not forget the essentials:

👉 a segmented email marketing database;

👉 personalized content;

👉 an optimized sending frequency to avoid over-soliciting prospects.

⭐️ The Growth Room Tip: Although very effective, email marketing can quickly become time-consuming if you don't automate tasks! By using online automation tools, you not only save a lot of time, but you really increase your acquisition rate! For example, you can turn to a CRM tool like Hubspot, which centralizes and secures all your exchanges and helps you manage and monitor your commercial pipelines but also your online opportunities thanks to tailor-made functionalities.

Do you want to improve your marketing emails? That's good, we'll deliver to you in an article 7 examples of (really) effective emails.

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Outbound

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Outbound marketing is one of the keys that allows you to reach out to your prospects in order to canvass them. We talk about “pull marketing” forInbound Sales (which attracts prospects with quality content, and “push marketing” for outbound).

Outbound marketing offers a quick and easily measurable ROI, especially if prospecting messages are well targeted and personalized.

⭐️ The Growth Room Council : outbound and inbound are not incompatible, on the contrary! You should use both strategies to reach your acquisition goals more quickly.

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Social networks

Social networks are effective at different levels of the customer acquisition tunnel: users can discover as well as take action. Your challenge will be to attract a qualified audience, varying the types of speech that bring value, build preference, and promote conversion.

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Tips for a successful acquisition strategy

Set concrete goals

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It is the basis of your customer acquisition strategy! Without it, it's as if you were walking in the dark. To do this, you can use the SMART marketing method:

👉 Specific: each objective is focused on a result;

👉 Measurable: progress is easy to follow;

👉 Achievable: focus only on achievable and realistic goals;

👉 Relevant: your objective is in line with the needs of your business;

👉 Timely: you set a deadline for reaching your goal.

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Know your target perfectly

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You must know your ideal customer very well, what he likes, what he likes, his needs, his challenges, his habits... Without a precise answer, you must determine your persona and set out to discover it. This will allow you to create engaging, accurate and tailor-made messages and content.

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Select the right acquisition levers

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Before you start choosing the acquisition strategy, make sure that your website is properly optimized for conversion (page loading time, UX/UI journey, content, etc.). It alone represents a good acquisition channel!

We give you 3 levers of progress that you absolutely must include in your website:

👉 Well-copywritten and visible CTAs (call-to-action);

👉 Pop-ups for registering or downloading your content (newsletter, white paper...) that will allow you to build your database;

👉 A subscription box for your newsletter.

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Structure the acquisition strategy

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The action plan for your customer acquisition strategy details the achievement of objectives over a defined period of time. Every member of the team should have it, especially sales people.

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Track and analyze your results

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Here, we are talking about KPIs. They are essential to see if your acquisition strategy is really working. Here are some interesting KPIs to keep track of:

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👉 Number of qualified leads per acquisition lever;

👉 Conversion rate per lever;

👉 Number of visitors to your website and/or content;

👉 Bounce rate;

👉 Average time spent on your website and/or content;

👉 The CAC (customer acquisition cost);

👉 The global ROI of your customer acquisition campaigns.

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To learn more about good marketing KPIs, read our article on 10 marketing KPIs to track.

Now that you know in general terms how to set up a customer acquisition strategy, you can start thinking about using experts for each channel: outbound, SEO/SEA, Media Campaign Strategy ...

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