What Is Acquisition Marketing? (Plus How To Improve)

Updated 21 September 2022

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While companies might capitalise on building relationships with existing customers, it might be helpful to acquire a new audience. Often, a company might use acquisition marketing to get new customers, which involves promoting products to customers and leads yet to make a purchase. Implementing these strategies can help a company stay competitive and build a larger customer base. In this article, we discuss what acquisition strategy is, list its benefits, outline acquisition channels and explain how a business can improve its acquisition strategy.

What Is Acquisition Marketing?

Acquisition marketing is the marketing process that focuses on targeting, promoting and marketing goods or services to new audiences to get customers. Typically, this marketing focuses on acquiring customers in the conversion funnel's consideration or interest phase. When planning to acquire new customers, a company does not focus on creating brand awareness. Instead, the business highlights its product's unique appeal. Using customer acquisition strategies, a company emphasises why and how they are different and superior to their competitors. Some channels that a company might use while acquiring new customers are:

Direct: This is when a customer reaches your website by directly typing your website name in the search engines.
Organic: This channel helps customers locate and visit your website in organic search results.
Email: This acquisition channel is useful when a customer clicks on the email to reach your website.
Paid search: This marketing channel is valuable when a customer clicks on a paid advertisement and reaches your website.
Referrals: This refers to when another website links your website URL to their blog or website.
Social: This refers to a customer accessing your website through a link posted on their social media platform.

The primary objective of acquiring customers is introducing them to the business and convincing them to make a purchase. These strategies can help a company make repeat purchases that foster brand loyalty.

What Are The Benefits Of Acquisition Marketing?

The following are some benefits of customer acquisition:

Empowers a company to acquire new customers
Encourages customers to check new products and services
Increases overall company revenue
Enhances the likelihood of repeat customers
Expands the business
Reduces marketing costs by increasing the company's revenue
Attracts new investors and encourages them to take part in the company's growth

What Are Some Key Acquisition Channels?

Acquisition channels are a company's platforms and strategies to engage and attract new customers. Often, marketers might use the following channels for acquiring new customers:

Blogs

While content is an essential aspect of every marketing plan, it is highly impactful for customers in the conversion funnel's consideration stage. Quality content has the power to educate customers about a company's products and services. It can be a crucial differentiator in building customers' trust to make their first purchase. Blogging offers customers insightful information, engages with potential and current customers and explores different topics. Before posting any blog on your website, optimise the content for the customer base you are trying to attract.

Social media platforms

Social media is an excellent way to educate customers about a brand. As more and more customers use social media to search for new products and services, this is an excellent channel for acquiring new customers. Based on the customer base you are trying to attract, a company can choose one or more than one social media platforms. Companies can build customers' interest in their products or services by sharing meaningful content on these platforms.

Email marketing

Email marketing is a cost-effective and efficient way to acquire new customers and engage existing ones. Using a series of emails, a company can take the prospect from awareness through considerations and encourage them to make a purchase. Sharing quality content and culminating product and service highlights can help acquire customers. Another reason email marketing is a valuable acquisition channel is that it allows you to assess customer behaviour by monitoring the subscription and unsubscription rates.

Paid advertisements

Paid advertisements are a highly effective method for acquiring customers. If your potential customers search for similar products online, you might consider pay-per-click advertisements. If your audience spends most of their time on a particular social media platform, you might prefer that method of reaching customers. Before choosing the platform, know where your customers are spending time and test to identify which platforms produce desirable results at the lowest cost for your business.

Video and visual media

Creating quality video content can help in acquiring new customers. Videos give your target customers a quick overview of the product's main feature and the message you are trying to convey to your customers. It also increases brand awareness and establishes a company as trustworthy.

Search marketing

Search marketing refers to search engine optimisation (SEO) and paid search marketing, like pay-per-click. This acquisition channel provides company visibility and allows it to optimise the website and content. By using SEO strategies, a company can ensure its content, services and products are easily searchable by the target audience. When creating content, companies can focus on using keywords, internal links, meta tags, alt text and subheadings to improve the ranking on search engine result pages.

How To Improve Your Customer Acquisition Strategy

Use these steps to improve your acquisition strategies to attract new customers:

1. Define your target audience

When creating or improving your acquisition strategy, it is essential to understand who you are targeting. Knowing your target audience makes it easier to create relevant content. Before creating a buyer's persona, ask why you want to market products to these customers. This can help create a persona that describes customers' problems, pain points and desires.

2. Choose appropriate acquisition channels

While there are different channels that you can use for acquiring customers, reduce the number of acquisition channels. You might feel intrigued to use them all but they might not deliver the desired results. Choose a channel based on the platforms your target audience is using. Focus on reducing the channels you might use to interact or get in touch with customers.

3. Keep your acquisition strategy flexible

As customer behaviour might evolve with time, it is essential to keep your strategy flexible. To ensure flexibility, your business can create a different campaign for each product to keep the customer engaged. A flexible strategy makes it easier for a company to acquire new customers despite changing market demands.

4. Focus on sustainability

Focusing on sustainability can ensure your acquisition strategy helps attract new customers. The more sustainable your strategy, the longer your strategy might yield the desired results. For instance, companies can create automated customer service or marketing team processes to streamline their workflow.

5. Optimise your website

Your website is a lead-generation machine. For acquiring customers, you can optimise websites to bring more leads and convert them into customers. When optimising your website, focus on including pop-ups and provide special offers with meaningful call-to-action (CTA). The flow of your website can improve the customer journey and ensure higher customer acquisition.

6. Focus on converted leads

While acquiring new customers is challenging, keeping these conversions can be even more difficult. Capitalise on your existing customer base to engage your existing ones. Businesses that focus on converted leads can take customer feedback and develop products based on the customer's requirements.

Acquisition Strategy Vs Brand Awareness

Often, marketers and customers might confuse acquisition strategy with brand awareness. While both help gain early leads' interest, they do it differently. Brand awareness strategies help expand the brand name and allow the brand to reach a wider customer base. This primarily involves targeting new audiences.

Acquisition strategies prioritise customers and their primary goal is contacting customers and ensuring they make a purchase. In comparison, acquisition strategy focuses on leads at the top of the marketing funnel. Customers become aware of your services and products but are yet to make a purchase. An acquisition strategy ensures a personalised and targeted approach. Another key difference is the goal of marketing strategies. While brand awareness focuses on the brand, its primary objective is to make it familiar and recognisable among the target audience.