No matter how incredible a product or service is, there is no guarantee that potential users and customers will come flocking or even be aware that it exists.
For any start-up, customer acquisition management must be a key part of the business plan.
Customer acquisition management is a set of data driven techniques used to manage the connection between advertising, lead management and customer relationship management to acquire new customers in a closed continuous loop system.
Customer Lifecycle & Acquisition Framework:
Customer Acquisition
Customer Acquisition Management:
Most start-ups focus largely or entirely on social media channels and tools that are native to Facebook and Google Campaign for customer acquisition.
The marketers must rely on measurement and attribution tools to pinpoint the sources of the highest quality customers and zero in on their strongest performers to allocate future budget. Even with a limited budget, spending more time with attribution data will help scale both organic and non-organic traffic and ensure marketing investment consistently comes back… with interest.
Successful customer acquisition is extremely reliant on continuous data-driven optimization and shift from quantity to quality. It is especially driven by ongoing testing and re-adjustment of campaigns with time. Ultimately, the purpose of data in customer acquisition is to identify the trends and patterns that work for the goals.
Impact:
Not designing an effective customer acquisition plan will leave the start-up guessing, and ultimately wasting money.
The effectiveness of customer acquisition is influenced by
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- Strategies – creative and out-of-box
- Intent – With so much noise around, company’s values will be the determining factor that rises to the surface and draws in the right kind of users
- Budget
How to measure customer acquisition strategies
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- Reach by channel
- Lead generation strategy
- Lead conversion ratio
- New customers by source
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
- ROI
Our Take:
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- Effective strategies for customer acquisition include
- SEO
- Blogging
- Active Discussion Forum like Quora
- Partnering with like-minded & more established companies
- Referral sales system
- Joining incubator or accelerator program: Referrals, outbound reach & word of mouth through networks and communities creates trust, value & sometimes even financial commitment for start-ups
- Strong ‘Call to Action’ such as text or a button, that encourages audience to complete a certain task
- Subscribe Now
- Let’s Do It!
- Try it for Free
- Create my Resume
- Send a Gift
Warning: Great Product is a requisite for any strategy to work well
