© Cloudspotting 2013

Image reference: http://www.waldenwood.com.au/upload/images/WWG_services_diagram.gif

© Cloudspotting 2013

Whether you are selling a product or providing a

service, one fact remains the same, you need an

audience of engaged customers in order to be

successful and turn a profit.

However, the majority of those customers need

wooing, engaging, and attending to before they choose

your brand over all others. That means you need a

strong customer acquisition strategy.

So here is our relationship advice or rather, our guide

to building a successful customer acquisition strategy.

© Cloudspotting 2013

The likelihood is you will have already invested huge

amounts of time developing your product/services and

you don’t want to alienate potential customers by

presenting them with something that is inferior, while

you may eventually win some of these people back,

some will be lost to you forever.

So first things first, you must establish the baseline

product or service which you are willing to release to

customers. Then you must establish whether you’re

ready to share it with potential customers.

© Cloudspotting 2013

There are several questions you can ask yourself to work

if you’re ready to put yourselves on the market:

• Are the product/services ready?

• Are there any user experience / bugs to address?

• Can your servers handle high activity?

• Do you have a customer support network set up?

• Will potential customers understand your

product/service?

© Cloudspotting 2013

While the original plan will inevitably change once it’s

put in to practice, it is still important to begin with a

thoughtful proposal because it will give you the

necessary direction to get started and help you

measure the progress you begin to make.

Your customer acquisition plan essentially knows

where you want to go and if you’re getting there. With

that in mind, it should establish things like timelines,

goals, costs and staffing.

© Cloudspotting 2013

Goals: identifying your goals helps you focus on what

you need to achieve with your customer acquisition

strategy, but they also dictate which analytics you need

to take note of and what data needs monitoring,

because you can’t analyse everything!

A word of warning here is to beware of ‘vanity metrics’

such as number of facebook fans, and instead focus

on more meaningful analytics such as engagement

metrics.

© Cloudspotting 2013

Cost: You should at least have an idea of what your

cost to acquire new customers is going to be, to avoid

any potentially nasty shocks in the future.

Thankfully it’s a straightforward calculation: the cost of

all your sales and marketing costs over a set period of

time, divided by the number of customer acquisitions

acquired in that same period.

© Cloudspotting 2013

Staffing: It’s important everyone involved in your team

understands your customer acquisition strategy and

what their roles within that strategy are.

Customer acquisition cannot operate in isolation: you

need developers and designers to respond to user

experience problems and marketing and sales teams

to promote your brand, as well as responding to

customer queries and complaints across various

channels.

© Cloudspotting 2013

Analytics tools and social media are invaluable tools

for helping you identify the key characteristics of your

existing audience: social media pages allow you to

browse your followers’ profiles, tweets, posts, active

times and who they follow; analytics can crunch the

numbers for you.

In combination, analytics and social media provide

both qualitative and quantitative insights in to your

existing audience.

© Cloudspotting 2013

Your target audience is a little harder to understand,

first thing you need to do, is “fish where the fish are” as

KISSmetrics say, in other words, you need to search

for the relevant channels and platforms for connecting

you to your potential customers.

The best way to do this is to come up with a profile of

your ideal user covering things like: age, gender,

interests, lifestyle etc.

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This is where you make a real first impression and

there are a few general factors to do and do well:

© Cloudspotting 2013

1. Use an interesting visual aid

2. Have an attention grabbing headline

3. Strong emphasis on the benefits of choosing you

4. Social evidence or an endorsement

5. An epic call to action

6. Use directional cues

7. Make the next step as obvious as possible

8. Use numbered lists

9. Get your keywords for SEO in to boost organic

search.

10.Above all, keep it simple.

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Ensure calls to action (CTA) are above the fold so

visitors can see them straight away.

CTA’s should be as descriptive as possible so people

know exactly what you want from them, what you will

give them in return and, what the next step is.

When collecting personal details as part of your CTA

only ask for what you absolutely need.

Make all clickable icons big and bright and if your

landing page is a long one, repeat your CTA.

© Cloudspotting 2013

Make it as easy for people to share their interactions

with you to build a viral loop keeping people engaging.

Social media is the spam free way to move social

traffic towards your website, via high quality content,

so engage, entertain and interest your audiences and

identify their pain points and solve them.

Top Tip: all your social media activity should be

working towards driving customers to your bespoke

landing page and new content; so just as your landing

page has a great CTA, so should all your new content!

© Cloudspotting 2013

Clearly there are a number of ways to go about

acquiring new customers, but one thing is a definite, if

you look to engage your audiences you need to: treat

them well, provide a strong product or service and

endeavour to keep in touch with the people you value,

and then they will reward you with their business.

We hope the take away points from our guide on

developing your customer acquisition strategy will be

to focus on quality content, usability testing and

audience awareness.

© Cloudspotting 2013

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