Customer Acquisition Strategies for Startups

Customer Acquisition – it’s easy to waste a lot of money in the wrong channels, especially ones where you go hand-in-hand with the big firms and can easily be outspent. As a startup, the majority of your time should be spent on customer acquisition and product development – the things that will move you forward. “Startup growth happens in spurts. Initially, growth is usually slow.

 

Cold emailing? SEO? Content Marketing? but at this point you’re just shooting in the dark. What works initially might not work later on, and what doesn’t work now might be worth revisiting in the future.

1. Establish your Goals
2. You create a process / system to work within
3. Then you fill it with strategy / ideas to align with your goals,
4. Lastly, you’ll break those down into specific tactics to execute…

1. Define your Ideal Customer - Prospect and Analyse your user and user markets.
2. Define your Goals = S.M.A.R.T. Goals may be monetary, user count, or activity based goals.
3. Define your Acquisition Funnel = Running multiple landing pages and you’re sending traffic to them from SEO, content marketing and paid acquisition, funnel to be measured individually
4. Know your Metrics = Start implementing Campaigns, you’ll know fairly know whether something is worth pursuing or not
5. Track everything from day one = Most Startups don’t begin this process early enough, and they pay for it later, start to build the history as early as possible. The best customer acquisition plans have measurement strategies organized in advance.
6. Reverse engineer your Growth = Look for bottlenecks in your metrics: is your visitor to trial rate low? Is your churn rate high? Do you need to drive traffic?
7. Create your growth ideas list = Prioritize your plans
8. Execute your plan = By using the following (some more) strategies

• Using Big Content to Generate Buzz
• Focusing on Long Tail Keywords
• Tools usage and Analytics
• Engaging in Forum Marketing
• Tracking and Reacting to Competitor Mentions
• Developing Online Partnerships
• Networking
• Reviving Old Customers