One of the surest ways to grow a business is having the ability to attract and retain a significant number of buying consumers. However, this is never the easiest of tasks, especially with the competition now growing faster than ever in nearly all industries. The situation is even more difficult for startups that usually don’t have the luxury to spend big money on marketing and promotion.
Are you just starting out and looking for ways to accelerate customer acquisition and build your business quickly? Here, we show you five ways to boost your business growth fast and affordably.
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Email Marketing
Email marketing is highly rewarding customer acquisition method when done right. While the process of collecting emails can be quite involving and costly in some cases, this strategy is well worth giving a try.
For starters, email marketing allows you to market your products and services directly to an audience you’ve ascertained to be interested in your type of offerings. What’s more, you can easily collect useful data such as open rates and click through rates and use it to improve your messaging and products. The good thing is that there are numerous automation tools available today including this Hubspot Mailchimp integration that will assist you track every activity in your mailing list.
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Content Marketing
Irrespective of your line of business, content marketing can be an effective strategy to acquire new customers and grow your brand. The idea is to create attractive, original, and problem-solving content that adds value to your target audience.
When creating this content, make sure that it helps your customers understand your brand and products better. Let the reader understand the benefits that they can derive from using your product or service and how your offerings stand out from the rest in the market.
Some of the most effective ways to promote your content include videos, emails, eBooks, influencers, guest posts, blogs, and giveaways. You can also use content formats like infographics to help build links, trust, and online authority.
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Customer Retention
It’s very unfortunate how a lot of businesses spend so much time and money acquiring customers only to lose them needlessly, usually due to bad customer experience and poor services. This loss in business is popularly known as customer churn, turnover, or attrition.
In the past, customer attrition is what encouraged businesses to get out and look for new customers. However, a lot has changed these days and now customer retention is quickly taking over as the new trend. Instead of looking for ways to find new customers, the majority of shrewd businesses are investing in ways to retain existing ones.
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Social Media
There are two main methods through which your business can use social media to acquire new customers – organically and using paid advertising services.
Organic use of social media is best applied when you want to boost brand awareness and share the personality of your business. Your existing customers and fans can also help to promote your brand by sharing your content on their social accounts.
To successfully acquire customers through this method, ensure you have the right network, a solid reputation and customer complaints management strategy, and a consistent brand voice for all your content promotion.
When it comes to paid advertisement services, the social platforms you use help to do the hard part of promoting the business for you. In a nutshell, they deliver content to the right eyes – usually, people already familiar with your brand or already using products and services provided by your competition.
For example, Facebook sponsored ads feature allows you to target users based on a wide set of criteria like location, gender, and most importantly, interests and preferences. You can also gather customer information including names and email addresses of interested people.
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Search Engine Marketing
Being able to rank your business website high on search engine results is another way to accelerate customer acquisition. Just like in social media, the ranking can either be organic or paid.
The organic method is what is commonly known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It involves designing content in a way that makes it easy to find when your audience types certain keywords on search engines like Google and Bing. In essence, your content should be easily read, understood, and indexed within the search engine results pages. To learn more about SEO, please check out this detailed guide.
For paid search marketing, the concept is to advertise on the search engine results page in collaboration with its provider. For example, Google offers a pay per click service where your ads are displayed alongside organic results but at a cost. The only downside is that more and more people are now using ad-blocking tools to block such ads thereby lowering the effectiveness of this method.
Which of these five ways do you think best suits your business? We’d love to hear your feedback.
