The goal of many if not all businesses are to grow. There are two ways for businesses to grow. We either find new customers or sell more to existing customers. The Holy grail is achieving both of these things, finding new customers and selling more to all our customers. There’s a quote I love that says the goal of a business is to create customers. So clearly customer acquisition is one of the most important activities in your business, perhaps the most important. Here we have 6 tips or customer acquisition strategies that your business should undertake.
Define your audience
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is aiming for everyone. Customer acquisition isn’t putting out an advert and hoping as many people as possible respond to the advert. You need to be clear about who you are targeting with the advert. Being clear on who your target audience is will inform whether you relate to your audience through music, football or other cultural aspect. The better defined your audience is the easier it is to understand them and their needs. So you will need to sit down and decide who your product is for or who you’re trying to reach.
Pick the right channel
As mentioned before having a defined audience will help you figure out how to relate to your target audience. It’s not just how though but also where. Understanding the behaviour of your target audience tells you where to find them and where they are paying attention. For example, if your target is the young Zimbabwean you may have better success with a strategy that is catered to social media such as TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp and Twitter. This would be very different if your target were senior citizens. You may also find them on WhatsApp but you will not use the same approach to these two groups.
Use Video
Leverage video in whichever way you can. You have so many options here from animation, raw video, slideshows and other expressions of video. Video works better than most other methods of advertising because the video is immersive, it engages people on at least two sensory levels. There is a place for other media of course but thanks to the way things are going videos are becoming easier to both create and send. You have so many options for video advertising and content and some of the popular are explainers, how-to, unboxing and product information videos. Start where you can and incorporate video into your customer acquisition strategy.
Giveaways work
Giveaways and competitions are great ways to improve your customer acquisition. They introduce the product to new customers and incentivise people to try out the product. Giveaways also encourage existing customers and reward them for their patronage. So there is almost no such thing as a bad giveaway. Almost. The prize should be significant and sufficient to motivate people. Of course, there are times or cases where your product doesn’t work for giveaways and you may have to think of more creative things to giveaway. Whatever the case is find giveaway opportunities that match the target customer you are looking for.
Start a Referral program
The best marketing, they say is a great product. A great product means a great customer experience and this will lead customers to recommend or refer people they know to the business. Of course, waiting and hoping for customers to recommend your product need not be the case, you can take action to motivate this through a referral program. This incentivises people to recommend other people they know who may benefit from the product or business to it. Done right this is a brilliant customer acquisition strategy that will pay more than the cost of establishing it.
Use the internet
We really can’t run away from this anymore. Not only is the internet here but it’s most certainly here to stay. While most people think of expressions of the internet such as websites, email marketing and social media as using the internet there are more ways to leverage the internet. Consider Google my business listings which also happen to be free. In Zimbabwe the preference for WhatsApp bundles is prevalent and you can still use functions such as WhatsApp business to create a catalogue that is visible to anyone at any time. You can find more ways to get on the internet for free here. The point is to leverage the internet in your customer acquisition.
