My Customer Acquisition Strategy Guide: Find New Customers in 2024

Customer acquisition (also known as client acquisition) is the process of turning potential leads into paying customers. 

You’ll need to make use of numerous strategies to boost conversions, which includes using customer acquisition channels to reach out to more leads and inspire them to make a purchase. The overall aim is to increase your conversion rate (and keep your customers buying – again and again!).

Later on, I’ll describe these customer acquisition strategies in further depth so you can get started.

If you want your business to grow and survive in a busy market, building a strong customer acquisition strategy is key. Here’s why it’s important:

• Increase brand awareness – You can’t attract new buyers if people don’t know about your brand in the first place! Customer acquisition allows you to cast a wider net and reach different audiences.
• Increase online sales – More customers purchasing your products or services means a rise in total revenue and profits.
• Survive customer losses – No matter how fantastic your business is at satisfying your clients, some loss of customers is inevitable. You need to keep finding, engaging, and converting new customers all the time to prevent your sales from dropping.
• Improve investor interest – A solid client acquisition strategy will impress potential investors, suppliers, influencers, and partners. It shows that you have a sustainable plan for generating leads and turning them into customers.

Your customer acquisition strategy will cover multiple channels, which are the online platforms you use to promote your products or services to different audiences online. Not all of the channels I’ve listed below will be a suitable fit for your company, so keep your unique branding and target audience in mind when picking which platforms to focus on:

1. Paid search

This approach – also known as search engine marketing (SEM) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising – involves paying to place an ad on a search engine, such as Google.

If you have the budget for it, this customer acquisition channel provides immediate results. Once you’ve set up an ad, you’ll appear alongside top pages on search engines, placing your brand directly in front of a wider audience. However, costs can also build up if you rely on this method, so pay careful attention to how much you’re spending.

2. Organic search

Unlike paid search, this customer acquisition channel uses unpaid, organic methods to help your business appear on search engine results pages.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is key for this channel. You need to optimize your content by targeting keywords specific to your industry and customer pain points. Also, creating high-quality, relevant content increases your legitimacy in the eyes of Google’s algorithms and your audience, and so helps the latter find your content online.

This method isn’t easy, and does take time. Search engines are always evolving, so you need to stay on top of any algorithm changes and make sure that your SEO strategy adheres to the current search landscape.

3. Social media

Social media is a more personable way to engage with new audiences and catch their attention. You can build brand awareness organically by posting regular content – be it polls, relatable posts, short form videos, or funny memes – that expresses your brand’s personality and values.

For further reach, you also have the opportunity to create paid ads (for instance, Facebook ads or Instagram ads) that will boost your posts and help them get seen by even more people.

4. Email

Building up an email list of contacts, then reaching out to them with news, exclusive updates, tailored discounts, and more, is a tried and tested way to acquire customers and lock in their loyalty.

It’s also the best way to connect with your audience on a personal level. Through personalization, you can speak directly to customers and address their needs, inspiring them to make repeat purchases. For instance, on a customer’s birthday you could send them a celebratory 10% off discount, or give your subscribers early access to product drops they’d be interested in.

5. Customer referrals

Slightly different to the offer channels I’ve mentioned, customer referrals are a way to spread brand awareness through word-of-mouth. Typically, a customer will recommend your brand to someone they know in return for a reward, which might include a discount code, store credit to spend, or a freebie.

This is a brilliant way to attract customers to your store, since shoppers are more likely to make a purchase if their decision is informed by a trusted source: their friends, family members, or colleagues!

Now you know about the customer acquisition channels at your disposal, it’s time to set up some specific strategies for your business. Bear in mind that there’s no “one size fits all” guide here. The customer acquisition strategies that are right for you will depend on your business’ goals, audience, and KPIs – plus your preferred customer acquisition channels.

But for inspiration, here are some major ways you can entice an audience and get them buying:

Hone your Email Marketing Campaigns

If you’re engaging with customers via email, you need to send them content that they either care about or will find useful. My pointers for your email marketing strategy include to:

• Send abandoned cart emails – If a potential customer leaves an item in their cart, you need to reengage with them so you don’t miss out on a sale. That’s why I recommend sending out an automated abandoned cart email to anyone who’s left checkout without making a purchase. You could even send a special deal or discount that encourages them to follow through with their order.
• Create gated content – Need help building up your email lists? Sway potential customers with comprehensive ebooks or whitepapers they can download from your site in exchange for their email address and contact details.
• Conduct A/B testing – To make sure your subscribers are fully engaged, you need to conduct email A/B testing to see which parts of your emails audiences resonate with the most. Try out different subject lines, email content, buttons, or imagery.
• Experiment with segmentation – As subscribers grow, you may want to experiment with segmentation. This is when you separate your email list into smaller groups, sending each group different emails based on specific characteristics, be it demographic information or purchase behavior.

SEO Optimize Your Content for Search

When it comes to SEO, your main goal is to appear as high up on search engine results pages as possible. To achieve that, you’ll need to use a number of SEO strategies, which include:

• Keyword research – Your content should include relevant keywords that your audience will be searching for on search engines. Conduct keyword research to come up with a list of keywords and make sure that they’re present in your copy.
• Competitor research – I also recommend researching your competitors’ content and gauging how well they’re performing on search. You can assess their content, identify any keywords they’re ranking for, see what they’re doing well, and work out what they need to improve on (so you can make content that’s better!).
• Use SEO best practices – Don’t forget to audit your website and ensure that you’re following SEO best practices. Don’t stuff keywords into your text, don’t post duplicate content, and don’t forget to add alternative text to your images.
• Improve the user experience – Did you know that your site’s performance can also impact your ranking on search results pages? Keep your users happy by optimizing your site for mobile devices, checking your page load times, and making sure that your website is easy to navigate.

Create and Share Content Marketing Posts

If you’re posting content on your site or social media channels regularly, you’ve got yourself a content marketing strategy! Another fantastic way to engage with new audiences by appearing in organic search results, your content – whether that’s blog posts, guest posts, or social media posts – should showcase:

• Industry authority and expertise – It’s important to build trust with your audience, since they’re more likely to buy your product or service if they know that you’re a reputable company. When creating written content like blog posts or case studies, ensure that your information is backed by facts and stats to build your brand’s credibility.
• Calls to action – Once readers have looked through your content, they’re more likely to take action if they’ve ended up at a call to action button that says something like “buy now” or “learn more.” Remember to add these buttons since they’ll help you convert your leads into customers.
• Eye-catching visual content – A page filled with just text is boring to look at. By adding a few visuals, like company-taken photographs or colorful infographics, can make your content more interesting and shareable for readers.

Invest in Video Marketing

Video marketing content is suitable for a number for customer acquisition channels. Videos can be shared across social media, featured in your website’s blog content, attached to your emails, or even support your PR efforts when circulating awareness of your brand online.

You could create product videos demonstrating how to use your best-selling items, or help audiences learn more about your business with behind-the-scenes or meet the team content.

As well as serving concrete commercial targets – like generating leads and funneling customers to your website – videos also serve softer, longer-term goals. By posting regular short-form or long-term content, you can cultivate a community of loyal viewers, and shape your brand’s online personality and tone of voice in the process.

As you embark on your customer acquisition strategy, I have four top tips that’ll help you at each stage of your journey:

1. Define your goals – Ultimately, your strategy needs to have an end goal. Whether that’s to acquire a specific type of customer, inspire repeat purchases, or hit your monthly revenue targets, you need to have a clear goal in mind to stay on track.
2. Set KPIs – Once you’ve established your goals, you can use KPIs (key performance indicators) to track your progress toward reaching your targets. These are key metrics that show you how successful your customer acquisition strategy is, such as your impressions (how many people have seen your content on search) and your overall conversion rate.
3. Understand your customers – You wouldn’t have a business without your customers, so keep them at the center of everything you do. Be aware of their struggles and clearly communicate how buying from your brand can help them. Also think about what motivates them to make a purchase in the first place, so you can anticipate their needs.
4. Update your strategies when required – A client acquisition strategy isn’t a static endeavor; it’s a living, breathing part of your business that needs to be updated constantly. After a set period of time, audit your campaigns across your different channels to see how well they’re doing. With this information, you’ll know what’s working, and where you need to go back to the drawing board.

With your customer acquisition marketing strategy underway, you’re now ready to drive more customers (and conversions) to your store. Remember that your customers will always be the lifeblood of your business, so be sure to pay plenty of attention – and funnel enough time, effort, money, and resources – into acquiring them.

As your business grows, mapping out the lifecycle of your customers is also worthwhile. This way, you’ll find it easier to keep track of the customers on your website and make sure that they’re engaged at every stage of their journey.