21 Top Customer Acquisition Strategies to Attract New Customers
Finding new ways to acquire customers is difficult. Perhaps you’ve been doing things in a set process for so long that you don’t know how to shake it up a bit. Or maybe you feel as if you’ve tried so many new customer acquisition techniques that your marketing efforts have now been completely exhausted.
How do you attract customers to your business? No matter what your situation, we have 21 simple-yet-effective strategies for you to try out today. Cover photo by: Kristin Hardwick
1. Make sure you’re certain of your target audience
Look at demographic data about your current customers and check to see if it aligns with the customer you’re trying to appeal to. If you’re appealing to the wrong crowd, you’ll be missing out on customer acquisition.
2. Consider remarketing content
There are a number of remarketing tactics that are especially useful for bringing in a new audience, including retargeting your existing customers or generating ads that relate to specific on-page engagement. Remarketing can help you save time, and is also generally a lot more effective. You know it worked in the past, after all.
3. Find a similar audience to your current customer
Everyone has their ideal customer type, but is it possible that you’re missing a similar customer that you could also target? Look for people who are buying a product that’s indirectly related to yours – it’s more likely that they’ll also consider buying your own product.
4. Offer giveaways
Everyone loves a giveaway – who wouldn’t want the opportunity to try a product free of charge? Doing giveaways often will help you entice new customers who are interested in your brand.
5. Become familiar with engagement metrics
If you want to cut down on ad spend, having a solid understanding of your engagement metrics will help you to do so. You need to know exactly what your audience has responded best to, which will teach you about their main preferences.
6. Engage with emails
When a potential customer visits your site, ask them if they’d like to sign up receive emails about deals and offers. You should find tens of customers who’ll be tempted to purchase your products when you’re offering a good discount.
Related: 5 Ways to Improve Your Email Marketing Conversions
Photo: Burst
7. Share content to external sites
Relying solely on ads for Google search ranking is a bad idea – you want customers to find you organically too. Spreading the word on relevant and authoritative sites will help you to do this. If you’ve never guest blogged before, this handy guide by Neil Patel is a good place to start.
8. Find out your customers’ interests
You can’t read your customers’ minds, so the second-best thing is to find out what they’re looking for on the internet. Search Quora for commonly asked questions related to your product or industry, or check out related Google searches. You can then tailor your products towards customer demand.
9. Map your customers’ locations
It’s a good idea to be familiar with where your customers are shopping from, as a sales trend in one area may indicate that you should put particular focus on advertising to customers in that location.
10. Don’t forget about lead generation
Lead generation can provide a significant improvement to organic traffic that should help you to win new customers with minimal effort. Take a look at this list of the best lead generation tools in 2021 if you’re after inspiration.
11. Set up an affiliate program
Affiliates take some of the hard sales work off you, and an affiliate program is nearly always a good way to improve customer acquisition.
12. Update and republish existing content
Think your old content has seen better days? Rather than deleting it altogether, just update the content to make it relevant to today. This may include updating your keywords, considering that many customers now make voice-searches on Google rather than typing into the search bar.
13. Improve your SEO
Your SEO is affected by a whole host of factors, including your website’s internal and external links, your keyword use, and even the speed of your website. If SEO isn’t your strong point, consider hiring an expert to handle it for you. When you’re ranking highly on Google, you’ll have a much better chance of being noticed by customers.
Related: How to Increase User Engagement With Video, Photo Content
Let’s get more specific. How do you attract customers to your restaurant business? These next 8 strategies are particularly ideal for restaurants and other businesses with physical locations on the hunt for a fresh set of loyal customers and more walk in traffic. Especially during the Covid-19 lockdowns, this advice can be useful for brick and mortar businesses.
14. Create a business app
Offering an app to your customers can help you to appeal to a new audience with their own unique preferences. Building an app nowadays is affordable and easy – you don’t need to know how to code to get started. Even better, as a restaurant, you can use an app to take orders, reducing the need for waiter service.
15. Establish (and maintain) a social media presence
Not everyone is going to search for your restaurant on Google, but when you promote your delicious-looking dishes on social media, you may find customers who are keen to try your food soon as they discover you.
16. Connect with influencers
There’s a reason why influencer marketing is so popular these days: it works. Influencers have a unique way of connecting with their (and maybe one day, your) audience that you’re not able to do. If you have a local food influencer with a big, passionate audience, reach out to see if they’re keen to promote your restaurant.
17. Don’t be afraid to use paid advertising
Though it’s typically harder to win customers for your restaurant through paid ads than through organic traffic, that doesn’t mean you should rule them out entirely. Use Google Ads to produce a number of different campaigns and keep trying until you find an ad that sells.
18. Offer an unmissable deal
On the subject of ads, the easiest way to successfully use them to win new customers is to offer an unmissable deal. Look at the mattress-in-a-box industry, for example – the majority of these companies offer 100-night sleep trials, where you can return the mattress for free and get your money back within this period if you don’t like it. Why not offer a “love your meal or your money back” offer? That way, there’s no risk-taking involved to a new customer.
Photo: Taduuda
19. Don’t forget Facebook ads
Google ads are expensive, which is why most restaurant businesses choose to combine them with Facebook ads to reduce marketing costs. You can find a whole different crowd of local food lovers on social media than you’d find on Google.
20. Use existing customers to promote your brand
Finding customers yourself is an unavoidable part of the job, but there are plenty of ways you can make your customers do the hard work for you, too. Reach out to loyal customers who dine regularly at your restaurant and offer them a special offer or discount if they leave you a review.
21. Market offline
Finally, though there’s a huge focus on digital marketing nowadays, don’t forget about marketing offline! Stickers, flyers, and radio ads are still great ways to attract new customers today. As a restaurant, you can get really inventive, offering free samples of your dishes at a local food market to entice a hungry crowd.
Author bio: Izaak Crook is the Head of Marketing at AppInstitute, a SaaS App Builder platform that allows anyone to create their own iOS and Android app without writing a single line of code.
