As a startup entrepreneur or enthusiast, if you still think that an exceptional product is the only pre-requisite to make big bucks and outshine competitors, I am sorry to that your thought is far from the truth.
Nah, I don’t mean to say that a great product is not required to excel. All I am saying is that many a time, even the greatest product might not propel your startup to greater heights. The present juncture calls for much more than product development.
All businesses need customers to survive and thrive. For this reason, if your startup hasn’t build good customer acquisition plan, you can be rest assured that things might not fall in place.
In simple words, customer acquisition plan necessarily translates into gaining new customers, by persuading and convincing them to purchase your products/services. Therefore, the acquisition plan includes a set of methodologies and systems that help you manage prospects and customers with a host of marketing tactics.
Today, we’ll make an earnest effort to enlist some unputdownable tactics to acquire an increasing number of customers for startups.
1. Identify your Ideal Customer Profile
Whenever a startup is formed, there must be a burning need to have a specific user in mind. Identifying your ideal customer profile is the cornerstone of a great customer acquisition strategy. Not having an ideal customer profile is one of the worst mistakes that startups usually make, and this acts as a hindrance in customer acquisition. Drawing the right customers to your business constitutes more than half of the job to acquire more customers. Decide what your ideal audience looks like. Thereafter, conduct some research on their interests and preferences on various mediums of interaction.
2. Create a Superior Buyer Journey
You should think of the customer acquisition journey as a composition of multiple smaller funnels, and also make continuous attempts to explain the journey your customers need to traverse. Breaking the journey into many parts allows you to monitor each of them separately, and identify the shortcomings at regular intervals. This way, you will be able to tap the areas which provide the most opportunities.
3. Be familiar with your Business Metrics
Keeping a watch on some key business metrics will help you to transform your startup into a real business. Some of the significant metrics that you should be well acquainted with are – customer acquisition cost, retention, attrition, life time value, revenue, referrals, and others. If you don’t have clear understanding of your business metrics, you’ll often end up being unsure of the strategies that might work the best to have greater profits. When you gain a good idea of these metrics, you will know exactly whether a particular campaign is worth pursuing or not, even before you put your money in it.
4. Use and Develop Expertise on the Right Social Platforms
Depending on the user base you are targeting, you should first identify the right channels to interact with your prospective customers. If social media is where you are hoping to get most footfalls, you should develop a well researched strategy to select the right platforms. For targeting a general audience, you can use Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. However, if your target customers are younger, you should also try Tumblr as 13% of internet users of the age group 18-29 use this platform. On the other hand if your business caters only to women, you can try Pinterest, since women are 5 times more likely to use this platform than men.
5. Adopt a Systematic Approach for Content Marketing
While you will have to use the right social platforms but none of that will be possible if you can’t create and disseminate fresh and exciting content, almost every day. Some of the great approaches that you can adopt for customer acquisition through content marketing are – Blogs, Ebooks, Case Studies, Whitepapers, Webinars, and interactive Videos. For Blogs, you can create an editorial calendar for every week/month and update it with fresh topics of interest. Thereafter, make sure you do proper SEO, metadata and keyword tagging, etc. For Ebooks and Case Studies, you will need a good graphics designer to create high-quality pictorials and images that goes well with the content you produce.
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