Cost of Customer Acquisition has increased by 50% in the last five years. Gaining new customers is a big challenge for all types of businesses to grow.
But when it comes to B2B businesses usually the buyer’s journey is very long and tedious. And a long journey means more customer acquisition costs.
To acquire new customers you need to deliver a lot of value to your customers, establish your expertise, and ultimately build a certain level of trust as a brand. Because if there is no trust, there is no business.
Customer Acquisition is simply the process of attracting new clients to your business.
B2B businesses use various marketing strategies and methods to bring in new and regular customers to maintain steady growth. The most important factor to consider when talking about customer acquisition is the customer acquisition cost.
The Customer acquisition strategies of the companies depend on their budget. The bigger brands have a large pool of budget to spend on acquiring their customers while a small startup can’t do that.
It compels organizations to come up with uniques and cost-effective ideas to gain new customers.
Here I am categorizing the Customer acquisition strategies into two parts, one is the traditional techniques and the other one is using the new-age technologies that a lot of people have no idea.
Customer Acquisition using Traditional Methods –
- Leverage Your Network
Everyone has their network and when it comes to customer acquisition there is no better way than leveraging your network.
“Your network is your network,” Warren Buffet once said and it is true in acquiring new customers as well. Get in touch with your network and tell them about your product or services, maybe some of them are looking for you.
It is considered as one of the best customer acquisition strategies as your leads are already familiar with you. Being familiar means there is a certain level of trust, which is the most important factor for anyone to decide on doing business with you.
- Content Marketing
Content Marketing is known as one of the most trusted customer acquisition strategies. It is a cost-effective way to acquire new leads.
Content Marketing is very crucial to build trust and establish yourself as an industry leader.
It is used for lead generation by 83% of the B2B Marketers.
Research by Content Marketing Institute says that content marketing generates three times as many prospects as outbound marketing but costs 62% less.
It is the main reason why 93% of B2B companies say content marketing generates more leads than traditional marketing strategies.
- Social Media
Everyone is one the social media. No matter what your target audience is, they are on one or the other platform. And when you are targeting B2B companies they are for sure on some social media platform. Leverage this opportunity.
For customer acquisition through social media, choosing the right platform is essential. You need to find the platform that your target audience is using.
Linkedin is an exceptionally good platform for customer acquisition. More than 80% of leads generated through social media comes from LinkedIn.
- Leverage the Power of Business Communities and Networking groups
Communities are going to be the next big thing in the business world, especially for B2B companies.
There are already many business communities building up around some platforms like Whatsapp, Facebook, Slack, Telegram. You can join these communities to participate in the discussions. These business communities have people from many business domains.
The main objective of these communities is to solve each other’s problems. In these communities, some people need a particular service or product and on the other hand, some people provide these services or products.
Customer Acquisition using new age Technologies –
- Intent-Based Marketing –
Intent-based Marketing means is basically targeting your market campaign to the audience showing the buying intent online.
Wouldn’t it be great to target only those people who are looking for a solution or service that you provide?
It is the basic principle of intent-based marketing. It is cost-effective as well as a powerful way of customer acquisition. The leads generated through intent-based marketing are high-quality leads. Thus it’s easier to turn them into your customer.
Intent-based marketing allows you to get an insight into what your target audience is searching for on the external websites. This intent of the buyer can be used to make him or her your customer easily. Actually, 67% of B2B buyers do internet searches before purchase products.
- Account-Based Marketing
It is a focused strategy of B2B marketing in which the high-value accounts are targeted to turn them into your customers. In an account-based marketing both marketing and sales team collaboratively.
They find out high ticket clients or key business accounts and then design the whole marketing campaign to target these accounts, through multiple channels to close the deal.
Isn’t it a great customer acquisition strategy to focus the marketing campaign on target high ticket clients.
But is it really worth it?
According to ITSMA, about 85% of marketers who measure ROI describe account-based marketing as delivering higher returns than any other marketing approach!
- Performance Marketing
It is a new way of advertising backed up by the new age technology in which you only need to pay when desired actions are completed.
Isn’t it amazing to pay only when you get results?
Performance marketing allows you to do that. You only need to pay the price if your desired action is performed by the customer. The desired action can be engagement, traffic, lead, impressions, or whatever you want.
It is a revolutionary strategy for customer acquisition taking online paid advertising to the next level.
Performance marketing was born to cure the two biggest problems of marketers, to decrease cost per acquisition and increase ROI.
The new age technologies are disrupting the traditional ways of customer acquisition. These strategies are more effective and cost efficient as compared to some of the traditional methods because these are driven by the power of data.
These are the top 7 customer acquisition techniques that are very effective and result driven for any B2B company.
Did I miss any of your strategies better than these? Would love to know your strategy of customer acquisition as a B2B company.