Unfortunately, customers no longer trust brands like they used to. Over the course of a few recent years, many entrepreneurs have found that acquiring new customers is getting more and more difficult.
As much as 55% of consumers do not believe the brands they buy from as much as they used to. Moreover, 65% of customers don’t trust ads, while 71% avoid clicking on sponsored posts on social media.
So, what can you do to improve your chances of winning new customers? Obviously, the odds are not very good, but is there something that can help you improve your chances?
Fortunately, there are a few strategies that can make a difference.
Since people are becoming a bit reluctant when it comes to the content they see on social media, your business needs to aim at authentic and organic engagement. This means that your page should publish good content without relying on paid ads too much to get it in front of people.
Paid campaigns can help your target audience find your brand, but your organic posts are vital for keeping them engaged in the long run. For instance, Instagram Stories have become one of the most popular kinds of social media posts (especially among millennials). One-fourth of users use Stories to discover new products and services.
Hence, this organic posting method could be essential in helping your business get new customers.
Also, it’s important to interact on these platforms. To be precise, you should always answer the messages that fans are sending you on Instagram. This will show them that you respect and value them.
If it seems difficult to message fans on multiple platforms, look for a good Instagram DM API. That’s how you’ll improve your customer service and always be available for them. Also, this kind of tool allows you to reply to people on multiple platforms from a single dashboard.
Improve the sales process
A sales process is a set of repeatable steps that a company takes to take a potential customer from the early stage of awareness to a closed sale. When we translate it into a simpler language, it means that you should prioritize your sales process and try to improve it.
For a start, map out your current process. Do this with the informal processes to get a formal understanding of all the steps to making a sale.
Define KPIs and that will allow you to track prospects as they move forward from one step to the next. In turn, you’ll get to measure how many leads move through the pipeline and you’ll know how long it takes to complete a sale on average from the earliest to the final stage.
Of course, you should use technology to simplify tracking your progress. Centralize all your client information into a single database, which can even be a simple spreadsheet.
Once you grow, you will have to turn to a good CRM system. This will allow you to store all important information in one place, help you better manage activities, tasks, and steps, and it will automate the tracking of your KPIs.
Finally, do your best to write compelling proposals. If you have difficulties doing this manually, you could make use of paid or free proposal software. This type of sales tool is an all-in-one closing solution that can help you improve your conversion rates. It will help you create great proposals, track deal progress, and close deals with confidence.
Form partnerships
Build a good partner program. This will help you scale your business efficiently and quickly. Select companies that offer products that compliment your business and you will be able to create relationships not only with potential prospects but with other growing businesses in your industry.
Who knows, maybe some of them will be your future partners.
Partnerships will help you create a strong referral base. However, these relationships cannot be formed over the course of one night.
If you want a fast boost and a quick win in your referral marketing, you should offer rewards for referrals (discounts, freebies, etc.). But if you want to win in the long run, you should look to form meaningful partnerships with good businesses from your industry.
SEO
Your business website is an important touchpoint on your customer’s journey to a purchase. Therefore, organic search plays an important role in driving traffic to your website.
Customer acquisition with the help of organic search is done based on good
However, with Google’s search algorithms constantly changing, businesses are no longer targeting particular keywords. Instead, companies are leaning toward a topic cluster strategy. To be precise, now the emphasis is placed on optimizing for topics.
With search engine optimization making a shift of this kind, it is recommended that you build out section pages for each specific topic.
Final thoughts
There is no doubt that customer acquisition is a crucial element in driving growth and revenue for your business. In order to master customer acquisition, you need to do things differently and better than your rivals.
