Acquiring new customers: 5 step guide to find and attract new customers

Anything new is fantastic. New challenges, new day, new customers — there is a sense of curiosity coupled with a tingling need to find joy in this journey. Out of the lot, new customers are the best kind. They make you feel happy in the process of making them feel happy. You want them to feel connected, related, and pleased with being a part of your already existing family. All of this resulting in one big jackpot — ‘Growth’.

Acquiring new customers is a single magic bullet that everyone aims for in a business. It’s important, it’s profitable, but it’s not a cakewalk. There are multiple strategies out there in the market to help you crack your customer acquisition game. Even before we get into decoding a strategy, it’s imperative that you understand your product-market fit, think about the demand that your product has, and work on a couple of other steps to find and attract new customers—five steps to be exact. Let’s dive into those five steps right away.  

Setting context: Know your ‘who’ and ‘what’

Setting the context for your business in terms of understanding who your new customers are and what problem you are trying to solve for them gives you clarity on the way forward.

Not knowing your new customers is like aimlessly firing a shot in the air. Every acquisition strategy should start with knowing your audience. Yes, you are solving a problem, but who is it for? Who are the ones willing to pay for the solution that you are offering? Understand your who and know more about them.

Know your customers

Source: Keepitusable

This step is going to help you deliberate your product-market fit. Product-market fit is achieved when you have made something that people want. You know that you have achieved product-market fit when 40% of your users would voice out their disappointment about the prospect of your business ceasing to exist.

Once you have identified those people, you need to dig deeper to understand ‘what’ they use your product for. For example, if they were to hire this product for a job what would it be. By answering this question, you will have an idea of what your product is used for. Subsequently,  your product features can align with helping people complete that job.

Position your ‘why’

The next question you need to ask yourself is around your brand’s story.

Every brand has a story, a reason for existence— a ‘why’ factor. A story is an endless source of motivation. A brand story should communicate the value of the brand, what it stands for — the emotion, value and the culture of your brand. Your story forms the basis of your content marketing strategy. It is the foundation of your brand voice.

This should be the answer to why your new customers would want to pick you — your unique selling proposition. This is what will help you connect and resonate with your new customers.

Here’s how you can come up with a brand story in three easy steps:

  1. Formulate your value – Reverse engineer and connect the dots to understand the inspiration behind your brand’s existence. What is the story of the founder? Why was this brand built? What’s the core value that blankets your brand?
  2. Build your brand voice – Think of five adjectives that come to your mind when you think of your brand. Map these adjectives to answer the question — if your brand was a person how would you describe that person? That’s your brand voice.
  3. Articulate the story – Marry your brand voice with the brand value and attach a logical flow or structure to it. Think in terms of cause and effect. Think in terms of ups and downs. Think in terms of value behind success, failure, and goals. That’s your brand’s story.

Market your value

Get your top-of-the-funnel marketing strategy sorted. Your marketing strategy should include a content strategy for branding, copy for website, your brand story, onboarding content, pricing plan and so on. Your marketing collaterals should cover the value that’s communicated. Talk about things that your new customers can achieve using your product or service — right off the bat. Talk about benefits in terms of time, effort, and revenue. Articulate your story around ‘why’ and keep reiterating the story.

One of the best strategies that people are following these days is to communicate the company’s culture code and market it as their value in addition to the benefits offered in terms of the product and service. Companies like Netflix, Buffer, and Uber talk a lot about why they stand out in terms of their culture and that gives us a sense of the value of the brand. After all, like they say happy employees are a reflection of a company with good values and value is what resonates well with customers. An interesting survey revealed that by marketing a company’s culture of happiness, one can expect better brand recall and virality.

Market your value

Your content should act as your lead magnet, pulling new visitors into your website. Your website should then contain engaging and persuasive information that would convince your visitor to try your product. You should have compelling content like case studies, testimonials, documents talking about how you can use the product to attain an outcome. It’s imperative for you to define the problem and solution clearly along with the benefits in terms of before using the product and after using the product.

The fishing net: Enable conversations on your website

Your website visitors are your hottest leads. You can try to experiment with different ways to make visitors visit your website, but it is highly tricky to make them try your product and convert into your customers. This is where a live chat tool comes in handy. Did you know that live chat boosts your conversion rate by 45% if used in the right way? By leveraging features that allow you to send contextual in-app messages at the right time, allowing users to browse through FAQs easily, having a bot at off-business hours, a live chat stands as one of the most useful solutions to capture leads and also engage with them.

Live chat

The best part about using a live chat tool is that you can achieve so much with this one tool. Live chat is versatile enough to help you with lead capture, campaigns, customer engagement, support, and retention. You can use a live chat to collect 360-degree feedback at any point. You can use it to trigger automatic responses for repeat questions. Having a live chat tool is like employing the world’s best sales agent who can find, attract, nurture, and support visitors and efficiently convert them into potential new customers.

Be the cog –  Make it easy for your customers

Having integrations with other products in the marketplace is another efficient way to easily attract your customers. Brands are shifting towards offering packaged solutions in collaboration with other products in place of just selling their unique features. The kind of benefits that you can derive from integration is unimaginable. Customers easily shift towards products that provide integrations with other products that they have already been using to ensure seamless transaction of data and context.

For a customer it is easier to find the missing pieces of a puzzle than try to build the puzzle with your offering. For example, if your product is a marketing automation tool, ensure that you have integrations with more than one sales product, an engagement product, support product, a messaging solution and so on. This way, your product can be a part of a holistic experience rather than a standalone solution. As you enable these integrations, it’s important for you to build some collaterals and help documents to help your customers get a better idea of how to use these solution packages to get maximum advantage.

It’s a marathon, not a race

Remember that the process of attracting customers is a marathon and not a race. You build a strong foundation, construct your strategies and plan your acquisition journey before you start executing the plan. Be fast and steady!