Tips & Guides — 12 Dec 2022
Top Strategies to Boost User Acquisition
In today’s world, digital marketing is hugely competitive. Every day, hundreds of thousands of new apps, products, and services are released, which naturally drives up and raises customer acquisition costs (CAC). On the other hand, customers are losing trust in companies and brands since some companies have misused their data.
However, today, the most challenging part of running a business is not finding clients but convincing them of the worth of your ideas, and turning them into paying customers. There are various marketing efforts and strategies you may implement for lowering advertising expenses while also attracting new loyal customers.
In this article, we’ll discuss strategies for taking your user acquisition to the next level. But first, let’s go through the fundamentals.
User acquisition is a marketing term that refers to obtaining new users for an app, platform, game, or service.
In a marketing context, user acquisition is a strategy for reaching out to new customers and persuading them to purchase a product or service through marketing-driven activities. The ultimate goal of customer acquisition is to build a customer base that becomes sustainable over time.
A customer acquisition channel is where you encounter your potential customers for the first time. Simply put, it’s your space to expand. However, a channel of acquisition that works for one company may not work for another. That’s why it’s better to explore multiple channels to determine the most profitable for you.
So, before you go into the strategies, here are the most common user acquisition channels you may start with:
Making content more integral to the buyer’s journey is the key to successful content-based user acquisition. When a customer realizes they have an issue, they’ll go through numerous stages, from searching for a solution to discovering or purchasing one. This process is the buyer’s journey, also called the customer journey.
However, marketers have identified five stages to target when developing content to acquire customers: Awareness, consideration, decision, retention, and advocacy. You should map your content depending on these stages, as shown in the graphic below.
So, you must optimize your content marketing strategy for each stage of the customer journey and ensure that you deliver complete, immediate, and fast answers to your audience’s needs.
Content offers are crucial for converting visitors into leads. You provide users with valuable material such as ebooks, spreadsheets, or professional PowerPoint templates. The ultimate goal is to encourage users to give you their contact details, such as email addresses, in exchange for this type of content.
Content offers are also called “lead magnets” because they help attract potential users interested in learning more about what you can do.
When your content positively impacts the leads, you establish yourself as an expert in the field. This strategy offers you a definite advantage when it comes to attracting new users. So, you will need to provide a premium piece of material that you won’t find in a typical blog post.
Videos are effective not just for grabbing attention but also for establishing positive relationships and communicating information in a way that encourages customers to act. According to Optinmonster, 84% of customers have been persuaded to purchase a product or service after seeing a branded video.
However, to achieve the best results, try to use videos at every stage of the buyer’s journey. That implies you should have a video marketing strategy for each platform and channel. An introduction video, for example, on a landing page, may guide your visitors through a customer acquisition process and increase conversions. Take, for example, one of Shopify Plus landing pages.
It’s a good idea to feature user-generated content in your videos. This method will increase the number of active users and encourage them to share, post, and engage with your content. You might also include download links for your product.
Blogging is an organic marketing approach that allows you to reach out to potential consumers in concert with strategies such as email marketing, link-building, SEO, and other options. Even if your product is a mobile app, you should create a website to convert the readers of your articles into a registration funnel and help in user discovery and acquisition.
Zoom, for example, maintains a blog on which they educate its consumers and strive to reach out to more people through blogging.
When creating content, it should become intuitive to consider delivering value to potential consumers, building trust, and persuading visitors to choose you.
Social media is a game-changer when it comes to marketing. Almost everyone online has a social media account. By maintaining a social media presence, you reach new audiences and engage with potential customers like never before.
However, it’s crucial to select the right platform for your marketing campaigns. For example, if you are a B2B marketer, LinkedIn is an effective platform to use, but if you are an ecommerce brand, Instagram is a great place to be. Hubspot, for example, has more than half a million followers on Linkedin, which is quite effective for organic lead generation.
So, to reach more prospective customers and build a community of brand lovers, you must adhere to the platform’s algorithms and culture. That means creating related material that encourages engagement, such as liking, sharing, and commenting, organically reaching more potential customers.
Email marketing is still a very efficient strategy to stay top-of-mind with your target audience. Getting new people to join your email list does not imply that you have acquired new users. However, keeping your email subscribers engaged and converting them into paying members is your goal with this method.
Your email marketing strategy here can be a nurture funnel that drives sales and increases the conversion rate. Consider this brilliant email from Canva that encourages email subscribers to learn more about the software by doing a project on it:
You can even use a mass email provider to reach our target audience. However, you must understand how to use email effectively to provide value to your consumers and avoid hard-selling your products. Otherwise, your marketing emails will end up in the Spam folder.
It’s great when someone Googles something, and your material shows up on the first SERP. When people search, it often means they are ready to act, and this is the perfect opportunity for you to get new customers. There are two primary methods for appearing in SERPs: pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization(SEO).
SEO is all about targeting people who are interested in your company based on the keywords they used to discover you. PPC allows you to create a search result and pay to have it shown alongside organic results, increasing your chances of being seen by searchers. It enables you to obtain immediate results of your acquisition efforts, such as increasing overall website traffic, targeting clients in real-time, and boosting your brand recognition, among other things.
Because traditional consumer acquisition strategies, such as advertising and discounting are getting increasingly expensive, having a long-term plan for new user acquisition is critical to optimizing the process.
Here are ten main strategies for attracting people to try your product or service.
Let’s dive in!
Customer acquisition channels are the sources via which you bring in clients. The channels mentioned above are only a few of them. There are more, such as referrals, cold outreach, webinars, word-of-mouth marketing, and others.
However, if you don’t figure out where the most engaged consumers for your type of business are, you won’t get much out of your customer acquisition strategies. Take, for example, the most successful lead generation channels employed by B2B companies. Top sources such as live events, content marketing, and email marketing are the primary channels for new B2B leads.
So, to select the ideal marketing channel for you, you need first to understand your customer personas and then conduct an experiment. This will allow you to effectively compare all of the acquisition channels available to you and select the best one for you in the long run. The success metrics, as well as the cost per acquisition, may vary depending on the channel.
A forum such as Reddit or Quora is a powerful channel for reaching out to interested customers, establishing trust and brand awareness, and increasing user base traffic to your website. Mainly because forums are beneficial for SEO and organic search in the long term.
Of course, just like any other platform, you can employ paid advertising on each topic to reach out to potential buyers—primarily because some forums restrict users from linking directly to external sites. For example, the sponsored Quora post below states the user’s name and company and promotes the company’s product as a solution to another user’s problems.
You may also use forums to promote your business by participating in discussions and creating material such as reviews, questions and answers, and tutorials. Also, include keywords in the title and content of the forum to improve chances of getting organic traffic.
Analytics may help you understand your consumers’ characteristics, sources, and behaviors, so you can decide where to invest more time and money. The ability to separate your data by customer experience is crucial for managing your marketing efficiently. Ensure that you analyze your sales and marketing data for better results.
Knowing where your visitors originated from—search engines, social media, or website referrals—will help you determine which traffic sources and internet marketing strategies work best for your business.
All the best ecommerce platforms such as Amazon, Shopify, Wix, and others have a referral program. It is a strategy for encouraging existing customers to spread the word about your company to their friends, family, or anyone else they know, in exchange for a reward, such as a gift card, discount, points, or money. It’s a type of recommendation that comes with a high level of trust.
Referral marketing may take various forms, including user-generated content, social proof, recommendations, and more. It’s an effective customer acquisition channel that may speed your growth, improve customer retention, and lower your customer acquisition costs, among other things. Every company has its own referral programs, such as PayPal, which pays customers more than $50 for referring five new PayPal members.
Marketers can use referral marketing software and track customer referrals via referral codes, rewards cards, or referral links. This allows you to automate the payout of these referral rewards.
To begin with, affiliate marketing and referral marketing are not the same things. Affiliate marketing, also known as partnership marketing, does not provide promotional incentives, such as discounts or shop credit. Instead, it pays a commission on sales, subscriptions, or other actions taken by clients through the affiliate link.
However, in 2020, 38% of marketers used affiliate marketing as their primary acquisition channel. The main reason is that marketers are more likely to collaborate with bloggers and influencers who have direct access to and background knowledge of the target audience.
Besides, you only pay when the required activity is completed, which means you will save money.
It’s preferable to make your affiliate program transparent, as Grammarly did by disclosing commission details before submitting to the program. Also, try to supply affiliates with the materials they need to advertise and convert visitors for you.
If you provide a digital product that does not require a physical location, it’s still a mistake to run advertising everywhere and hope for the best.
Campaigns that match the styles and culture of the target demographic’s location are more likely to resonate with the target audience. That’s why being open to targeting people from any place can damage your acquisition approach.
Mapping the location of your target consumers will allow you to make better recommendations, take appropriate actions, and incorporate relevant keywords based on their location. Also, it will lower your ad spend.
Lead generation increases your possibilities of bringing new customers into your sales funnel and boosts your chances of making sales. You may generate leads through various channels and tools such as marketing content, cold calling, product trials, forms, lead landing pages, and so on.
It’s a good idea to build tools that match your goals, strategy, service, and target audience to evaluate and implement your approach. For instance, you might create custom landing pages for specific audiences and build a form scraping tool that collects submissions on your landing page to add all of your leads into your contact database automatically.
You may build your tools with coding or a lead-generating platform like OptinMonster, LeadPages, orHello Bar that make managing leads and keeping track of the workflow simple.
Co-branded content is a win-win situation for both parties. You might broaden your reach and generate massive lists of new clients from a qualified customer base of another well-known brand. Also, you divide the expense of a lead campaign with a single or numerous brands, resulting in high-quality lead generation, improved brand awareness, and effective trust-building.
For the best results, the co-branded partnership should be with a like-minded company with comparable values, purposes, or missions. Also, collaboration with complementing brands may be a tremendous success.
The camera manufacturer GoPro and the energy drink producer Red Bull, for instance, recently established a worldwide partnership that involves content creation, distribution, cross-promotion, and product development. This co-branded content incorporates GoPro cameras to record immersive footage of Red Bull media productions and events:
This partner marketing can help you in getting your products in front of the right clients. When carefully planned and implemented, co-branded partnerships may help you grow your business and edge out bigger competitors
Would you click on an article published in 2016 if you were searching in 2022? No, most likely. Things become outdated. So, it’s critical to examine your old content and identify what should be changed, added, or removed to make it relevant. The good thing about updating and republishing is that it may immediately increase organic traffic.
However, there are several requirements and strategies to follow. It’s best to begin with posts that rank lower for their main keyword. Then, verify whether your content has any issues or if any of the URLs included are no longer valid, and fix them.
Of course, you must update the keywords you incorporated into your content. Be careful when updating old posts that are still generating a lot of traffic since this might affect your ranking. It’s also good to be transparent and leave a note about your updates, as HubSpot has done.
It’s also crucial to keep the URL the same. So, when republishing your content, you should submit it for reindexing. If you’re using a content management system like WordPress, change the published date to the current date and click Update. Then, in Google Search Console, resubmit your URL and request reindexing.
By optimizing your content for search intent, you may more precisely target your search users. It means you may create content to meet the needs of audiences based on their intent. For example, when a user looks for the best user acquisition tool, the user intends to purchase a product but is unsure which brand or version to purchase. So, based on this intent, you may generate content to educate him while also recommending or promoting your service or product.
You can identify user intent based on the keywords users are searching for. The intent behind keywords can vary and change depending on the type of business you run. As a result, you should periodically review your content in user intent and upgrade keywords accordingly.
The competition isn’t going to get lower, and obtaining clients immediately before or during the launch of a new application or service will become much more challenging. The most profitable brands generally have entire teams of user acquisition managers and growth marketers working for them.
User acquisition experts eek out the customer lifetime value of the most engaged, loyal, and ultimately monetizable users. Also, when good users leave, savvy managers employ various methods to retarget and reactivate them.
Written by
Jimmy Rodriguez is the COO of Shift4Shop, a completely free, enterprise-grade eCommerce solution. He's dedicated to helping internet retailers succeed online by developing digital marketing strategies and optimized shopping experiences that drive conversions and improve business performance.
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