Customer acquisition strategy

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A customer acquisition strategy refers to an always-on strategic plan businesses use to attract and gain new customers. Customer acquisition is a crucial aspect of any company's growth and success. As such, Smart Insights offers a wealth of Free Member and Business Member marketing resources focusing on this technique.

What is a customer acquisition strategy?

A customer acquisition strategy defines the best mix of media and engagement tools (lead generation and product offers) to gain new customers through targeting them and reaching them through online and offline customer journeys.

An effective customer acquisition strategy helps businesses reach their target audience, convince them to try their products or services, and ultimately convert them into paying customers.

Recommended Business Member resource: Online acquisition strategy guide.

8-step customer acquisition strategy

To help you get started, here are some key steps and components to consider when developing a customer acquisition strategy:

1. Define Your Target Audience:

Understand who your ideal customers are, their characteristics, needs, and preferences. This knowledge will guide your marketing efforts in reaching the most valuable customers for your business. Business Members can use our Customer persona guide and template to get it right the first time.

2. Unlock customer insights:

Conduct thorough market research to identify trends, competitors, and opportunities. This will help you position your products or services effectively and differentiate yourself in the market. Business Members can use our Competitor benchmarking guide and template to generate actionable insights from this activity.

3. Define Your Value Proposition:

Clearly communicate the unique value your business provides to customers. Highlight the benefits they can expect from choosing your brand over competitors. You can read more about this in our free blog: What is brand positioning and why aren’t you doing it yet?

4. Optimize Your Marketing Funnel:

Integrate your marketing channels and activities to create a data-driven, actionable, practical, customer acquisition marketing funnel. Our RACE Framework demonstrates how you can take customers from discovery to loyalty in just 5 steps. Read more in our free RACE Framework blog.

5. Content Marketing:

Create valuable and relevant content that engages your target audience and showcases your expertise. Content can include blog posts, videos, infographics, and more. We offer modular CPD-accredited strategic Content Marketing training.

6. Landing Pages and Conversion Optimization:

Create dedicated landing pages for specific marketing campaigns to increase the chances of converting visitors into customers. Our Business Members' website performance reporting template helps you quickly get to grips with which journeys are working and which need optimization.

7. Digital Experience and Nurturing:

Utilize personalization and automation to track and stay engaged with your potential customers over time. Our Free Member essential digital marketing tools guide helps you prioritize and categorize marketing tech to make this happen.

8. Analyzing Metrics:

Use analytics tools to measure the effectiveness of your customer acquisition efforts. Track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as conversion rates, customer acquisition cost (CAC), and customer lifetime value (CLV) to evaluate the success of your strategies. You can get started with our Free Member Guide 10 essential steps for using Google Analytics 4 to grow your business.

Customer acquisition strategy as part of your customer lifecycle

Remember that customer acquisition is just one part of the overall customer journey.

You can see in this example of a typical customer lifecycle before and after RACE implementation. Here - reach, act, and convert are all key steps to acquisition, while post-purchase engagement fuels retention and loyalty.

You can read more about RACE in our free blog: Introducing The RACE Growth System and RACE Planning Framework: practical tools to improve your digital marketing.

Or, download our free marketing plan template to get started today.