Targeting, Advertising, Campaigning, Converting. All of these are the intricate components of market acquisition. It involves all the effort you put to bring your customers to the final stage of making a purchase. Simply speaking, marketing acquisition is the process that helps you convert potential leads into successful retentive customers.

Attracting quality customers towards your brand seems to get tougher each day. Most of your efforts go behind figuring out which marketing approach should you take!

Statistics reveal that in the last 5 years, customer acquisition costs have increased by 50%. Marketing has become expensive and consumers today are not blind followers of a brand. Therefore, enhancing the ROI of your market efforts has to be done smartly.

So, what is acquisition marketing? Is it mergers and acquisition? Or, is it about acquiring traffic/leads/conversions? Does it mean inbound marketing?

Well, marketing acquisition is all of this being a comprehensive procedure that has diverse touchpoints.

Understanding what is marketing acquisition

Marketing acquisition is an approach where you transform a prospective customer into a consistent client. This can be done through effective marketing strategies which help you to maintain a constant influx of customers. The procedure comes with the goal of creating a sustainable as well as a systematic strategy of acquisition which can evolve with latest trends.

Market or customer acquisition proves important for a business of any domain for it –

• Helps to generate a higher ROI by driving the sales growth exponentially.
• Indicate traction of outside parties like partners, investors and influencers.

If a brand is able to attract and convert customers systematically then it achieves a consistent growth rate.

You may ask –

What is the difference between lead generation and consumer acquisition?

The customer journey in the business world includes specific stages of purchasing. When the customers move through this funnel as a part of their buyer journey, they –

• Develop awareness for the brand.
• Add the product or service into their pool of consideration.
• Make a buying decision.
• Becomes a paying customer of your brand.

Lead generation happens right at the top of this marketing funnel. Lead acquisition takes place in the middle and the conversion occurs at the bottom. Customer acquisition refers to this entirety.

ATTRACT

CONVERT

CLOSE

DELIGHT

Marketing acquisition can be viewed in this manner too. It is a method of transforming an individual from a stranger to a visitor to a lead and then to the customer. The last step is to make them by-default promoters of your brand.

A buzzword which usually tags along with this is the CAC or Customer Acquisition Cost. This is the cost related to a new customer or a client acquisition of your business. Marketing events and advertising budgets divided by the roughly relative increase in consumers is the CAC.

You can minimise this cost by selecting the right acquisition channel. Some of them are –

1. Email tagging
2. Republishing old webs content
3. Align search intent for content updates
4. Product integrations
5. Location pages
6. Migrate content on website
7. Lead share-outs
8. Co-branded content curation
9. Viral product mechanism
10.  Social media profiles

The key to acquiring new customers lies in innovative outreach while being in tune with consumer demands. This means you need to diversify your market strategy. If you rely on print or television ads, then shift your resources to online approaches or even the radio. A single shift in marketing strategy can help you reach out to a larger consumer base.

At the core of marketing acquisition lies the urge to drive growth. So, if you desire success then align your efforts with your company goals. Starting from there, extensive market research, respective marketing strategies and resource allocation can help you ensure just that.

Why is marketing acquisition booming today?

CEOs today are concerned with acquisition marketing as it is on the rise. Why is it so important?

• Increasing customer is one of the fastest ways of growing a business and also the most palpable way out to reach short-term goals.
• Acquisition in marketing shall always remain as a driver for businesses. This quips for the main reason of inbound marketing. In fact, inbound tools that prove ideal for attracting potential clients and converting them effective sale points have come up.
• An important aspect of marketing acquisition lies in which channel you choose to reach your target hub so that your value proposition cannot be resisted by them.
• Acquisition booms today as a crucial component that addresses the challenges faced by marketers.
• It is on the rise as it improves the target company’s market performance. Private equity firms pursue this strategy, which has led to increased operating profit margins by at least 2.5% as per market statistics.

Customer acquisition is scalable and sustainable and emerges to be an all-inclusive approach. The target group upon whom you have been working for a while can now be ‘hooked’ by implementing a strategic acquisition model.

Here are the key performance indicators of marketing acquisition –

The types of key performance indicators are:

Actionable – These are the variables which can be modified to enhance business performance.

Directionable – Helps to determine whether or not a company’s results are improving.

Quantitative – These indicators are generally represented in the form of numerical or percentages.

Practical – Integrating well with current company’s current process.

Before you decide upon your KPIs you need to ask these questions to yourself –

• What are your company end goals?
• Why does the outcome matter to the brand?
• How will your influence your business results?
• How can you define whether or not you have reached your goal or not?

These are essential to answer because not all companies utilise the same set of KPIs. However, some of the basic ones you can include are –

Sales growth

Ultimately, the best way of analysing your company’s success is by measuring your sales growth. Once you do this, give yourself some time to weed out the marketing strategies that drive sales. Sales growth measurement is a long term task which can be done with effective planning. It allows you to identify the growth trends as well.

Leads

The more your leads, the more sales opportunities you incur. Moreover, lead generation boosts your sales growth to a large scale. Not every lead gets created equally. You have to familiarise yourself with the difference between Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs).

MQL is a lead who is more likely to become a customer in comparison to other leads depending upon the lead intelligence. SQL proves to be the one which your sales team accepts as worthy for a direct sales follow-up. If you understand the synergy between these two you can employ a lead generation campaign easily.

Lifetime Value of Customer

This key performance indicator proves to be a great way to gauge the ROI of your brand. It also acts as an excellent way to strategise future business goals. With this, you get an idea to determine whether a customer is worth to pursue or not.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

This is the cost that you incur for convincing a potential consumer to buy your brand product or service. Suppose, you spend about $200,000 on marketing and sales in 1 month and close the deal down with 20 brand new customers. Here, your CAC shall be $10,000.

If you have your CAC all sorted out then you can easily set you future goals on how many more customers you shall acquire.

Website traffic – Lead Ratio

You may wonder how many of your website visitors convert and become leads. This key performance indicator is quite helpful as it measures –

• Your website traffic quality
• Conversion rate of the website

You need to get to the baseline and understand what the ratio is currently and can you improve it. You can easily enhance your conversion rate by implementing basic strategies and functions.

Social media reach

Your brand’s engagement rate on the social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and other platforms show how well you are performing. Distribute your content throughout these networking platforms and interact with your potential leads on a regular basis. You can measure this KPI by tracking the growth rate of your followers and likes.

Other KPIs include –

• Email marketing performance
• Inbound link building
• Conversion on landing page
• Visits to your blog posts

Marketing acquisition is not just about procuring new clients. It is a comprehensive approach which asks you to check every pore of the business. The right client or business acquisition strategies can help you upgrade your business to new heights.