No matter the kind of startup you are running or planning to open, sooner rather than later you will need to find a good customer acquisition strategy that will allow you to regularly get new customers for your product or service.
In a market saturated with tough competition, finding people willing to chose your business services rather than someone else’s may prove difficult.
How can you convince people to make a purchase?
How can you make sure they will come again?
What can you do to get customers’ attention?
The article was written with various kinds of businesses in mind so you should be able to find some tips applicable to your circumstances here. Now, let’s find a good customer acquisition strategy for your startup.
How to Get New Customers for Your Startup
1. Define your customers
What are the characteristic traits of your customer? What sets him apart from the crowd? What are his/her needs and in what way can they be met better? How could your services be more valuable to them than the services that other businesses are providing?
You may say searching for those answers is just the basics, which is true, but if your customer acquisition strategy has a weak foundation, it can fail quickly. Even the best thought-out plan will prove useless if you don’t know where are you aiming.
Think of the people you know are purchasing similar products or services. Do they have any features in common? It might be the industry they work in, their age group, the shape of their family, level or type of education, etc. Write those features down, they are the key to understanding your customer’s buying habits and needs.
If you already have a group of loyal customers, try talking to them personally or asking for participation in a survey. This way you’ll get valuable first-hand information and will be able to use it for further analysis.
2. Engage your audience
Try to open a dialogue with your buyers. Have a forum or a Facebook group set up specifically for your customers. If they ask any questions there or communicate the need for help, have their messages/posts answered quickly and thoroughly.
Try integrating live chat, co-browse, chatbot, voice, or video call tools to build a great engagement with your customers. Treat them well, never let them feel they are wasting your time, or ask ignorant questions.
Get social media engagement, get as many people talking about your product as possible. This will help you keep your potential customers engaged and attract new prospects in the long run.
3. Apply emotions to your message
Most customers do not respond well to technical jargon. You need to make an attractive narrative surrounding your products and engage customers’ emotions.
Use eloquent words alongside evocative images and/or sounds to grab customers’ attention. Those human touches are very important, and in some cases, they can be a deciding factor in the outcome of your marketing campaign.
4. Monitor social media
If you know what customers like about your products and what they hate, not only will you be able to improve your services, but also you will have knowledge about how to change your marketing tactics. Maximize customer exposure to the strong points of your services and minimize the time they spend reading about the parts of your product they are not interested in.
What’s even more interesting is that by using social media monitoring tools you can easily find places or threads where your potential buyers post questions or complaints about your competition.
Once you find them, simply get involved in the conversation – answer their questions, doubts, or suggest your product, this way you’ll be able to drive traffic to your website and get new customers.
5. Offer social proof to validate the product’s value
People trust the opinions of other people more than the descriptions you’ve written yourself and put on your website. What can you do?
Try to encourage your customers to share their reviews on your site, you can curate them later and put the most positive ones in the spotlight. If you can get some customers to sign their reviews with their real names, the effect will only increase! Remember that your website is your company’s business card so it must look good and impress your buyer.
6. Build partnerships to get new customers
There are some companies that could use your customer base and in exchange share their own base with you. By forming alliances with other brands you may quickly and inexpensively get exposure to a whole new audience. These partnerships are beneficial to both businesses, as each puts its experience and value towards the shared goal.
If you find another company whose products would look good with, or complement yours, then think about building partnerships with them. Have an open mind and be creative, sometimes the most unexpected partnerships drive the most rewarding results.
7. Assessing the cost of customer acquisition
You paid for an advertisement in a few different places and customers are pouring in. Great! But it does not mean your strategy is optimal. You must know that even the best plan can be improved.
Look how much you are spending in each place every month, and evaluate how many customers each of those venues bring in. When you calculate the costs of customer acquisition per venue you will see that some of them are lower and others are higher.
If you take money from the more expensive places and invest it in the cheaper ones, you will get more customers without changing your overall marketing budget.
Never stop experimenting
Treat these tips as a rule of thumb. Of course, depending on your business model, some of the tips will be more useful than the others. So try to experiment! Some changes to the usual formula may yield unexpected positive results.
Be constantly watchful, and able to switch back to the older strategy if the new one doesn’t work well. Always seek non-obvious ways to get new customers. Search for new spins on older tricks. This way you’ll be able to establish an effective customer acquisition strategy.
