The digital experiences that consumers adopted during the pandemic, such as in-store and curbside pickup of online orders, as well as home delivery, are expected to remain a part of the business environment in the future. As a result, bringing customers to your brand’s digital properties and then converting them will remain a top goal for retailers.
It wasn’t a quick fix, either, and those who were digitally prepared or acted quickly won the game.
Purpose of customer acquisition
The goal of customer acquisition is to establish a logical, repeatable strategy of recruiting clients to your organization. While you can wait for clients to come to you, this does not guarantee that you will be able to expand, or even retain, profitability over time.
Customer acquisition professionals employ specialized strategies to persuade potential consumers to act. The purpose of this procedure is to develop a methodical, long-term strategy for acquiring new consumers and increasing income for the company.
In many ways, this process resembles marketing in that you’re looking for ways to promote your brand and interact with customers. But there is a distinction between the two.
Customer Acquisition vs Marketing
Customer acquisition seeks to drive action, whereas marketing seeks to raise awareness. Assume you run a Facebook ad targeted at your target market. Metrics will assist you evaluate whether your effort is effective – you can measure how many people shared your ad, commented on it, and so on. That is called marketing.
Meanwhile, acquisition refers to what happens once potential customers click through to your page or receive your emails. Acquisition occurs when people are willing to take action by purchasing your products or services. Simply put? Marketing generates awareness; acquisition generates income.
Two reasons why you should prioritize digital customer acquisition:
1. Digital Growth Rates:
Not everyone who uses the internet or logs onto social media is doing so for business. We do know, however, that the most common reason people use the internet is to find information, with nearly half of them researching items and companies. The question for businesses is whether or not they will locate your brand when searching.
2. The Shift To Digital Selling
The technique of leveraging online resources to discover a buying audience, engage them, and subsequently shorten sales cycles is known as digital selling. Essentially, you are shortening the time it takes to conduct research, uncover information, and make a purchase. Customers nowadays are digital natives and extremely demanding, so if you’re not all-in on digital selling, you can bet one of your competitors is.
Over face-to-face contacts, more than three-quarters of purchasers now choose digital self-service and remote human connection. B2B sales and marketing leaders cannot afford to feel obliged to adopt digital methods; they must understand that it is the only alternative.
Customer Acquisition in Digital World
Customer Acquisition in the digital world targets and attracts new customers through online channels such as organic search, social media, and display adverts. Collaboration and synchronization between marketing and customer support teams are often required for a strong customer acquisition strategy.
Your marketing staff is in charge of creating and distributing new promotional materials that may pique the interest of new customers. Your customer care team, on the other hand, has a direct channel to your current customers – and your current customers can be some of your finest marketers.
When visitors arrive at your website, they will read the content provided by your marketers and may opt to purchase your products or services. If a potential consumer contacts you through social media, they will most likely chat with one of your customer service staff.
In other words, your customer care team has the same ability as your marketing team to acquire and retain new consumers. As a result, customer acquisition extends beyond your marketing team.
Four Game-Changing Insights
Create Segments And Personas Based On Your Insights
First, you’ll conduct research on your target market. You must first grasp who is involved and what their needs are in order to convey those demands.
Consider your ICP and what will make them appealing to you, and you to them. Be realistic about your chances of succeeding in that market niche. If you can, terrific; if not, develop another part that is perfect for you and own it.
Your segment is worth only after you bring it to life and contextualize it so that it is understandable and applicable to your product and the rest of your organization. They will ‘get it’ and agree that this is the path you should take.
From a tactical standpoint, it is vital to develop buyer personas that include:
Titles.
Business obstacles.
Keywords related to their relevant interests
Defining the right ICP will also assist you in developing a buyer-centric approach to customer acquisition and digital selling, especially through social media.
To Locate Your Target Audience, Use Intent-Based Analytics
Digital customers leave a digital trail, and there are numerous companies that specialise in buyer intent toolsThese are the buyers who are attending an industry event where you are; they are searching for your keywords; and they are hiring in areas that match your ICP.
G2 predicts that organizations who provide buyer intent data tools will:
- Capture online buyer journey research to discover purchase intent signals.
- Provide context so that businesses can reach out to and market to prospects and consumers who have active intent.
- Improve audience segmentation and message personalization by providing expanded contact profiles.
However, there are other (and less expensive) options, such as:
1. Identifying organizations that are interested in your brand through personal LinkedIn updates.
2. Keeping track of who is interested in your webinars.
3. Scanning industry news for publicity about senior hires or keeping an eye on target businesses’ job postings.
4. Sharing relevant content and developing download forms to get data on who is interested in key themes.
Fill The Digital Shelves With Relevant And Appealing Stuff
We already know that in the new digital age, buyers conduct online product and service research. It is our responsibility as marketers to fill the digital shelves with relevant and appealing content that will allow the audience to find us.Marketing should be able to tell sales which content is most popular based on search and website navigation so that it may be used in email cadences and social postings.
Firms are notoriously bad at removing old content. Even your best-performing content has a limited shelf life, so make sure to purge on a regular basis and discard anything that has passed its sell-by date. Of course, the material you create must be distributed to your target audience; it cannot simply sit on your website looking lovely or going off.
Learn How To Have Successful Digital Conversations
LinkedIn is the number one social media tool for B2B sales. It currently has nearly twice as many company pages as it did two years ago, and content creation surged by 60% last year. Individuals and corporation posts both contributed to the uptick.
If marketing encourages employees to be active on LinkedIn, the company will stand out since, despite the fact that there is a lot more content available, only 3% of LinkedIn members publish once a week or more.
Posting results in engagement, which results in connections, which results in more inbox messages. And it’s the inbox discussions that matter the most.
Marketing may assist salespeople in having more inbox interactions by increasing engagement and responses:
- Teach salesmen how to produce effective connecting messages that are approved.
- Be generous with likes and comments to make individuals more open to conversations.
- Provide content ideas for sales to share so they can become core matter experts.
Conclusion:
Customer acquisition is the lifeblood of any business, large or small and given that the rate of digital adoption has skyrocketed, Customer acquisition digitally has been widely adopted by both B2B buyers and sellers worldwide, with purchasers really preferring their new digital reality.