Marketers in all types of businesses across various industries know just how hard it can be to acquire new customers. In this article, we are going to explore some proven ways of generating new customers and ultimately adding more to your bottom line.

A solid strategy for acquiring customers is a vital component for any successful business. It’s something that you need to work on if you want to grow your business in a meaningful way.

Having said that, one of the hardest aspects of scaling your business is to figure out the channels that are most sustainable when it comes to bringing in new customers.

Also, it’s important to realize that some acquisition channels work for certain businesses but not for others.

How to Find the Best Customer Acquisition Channel for Your Business

There are various frameworks that you can use to help you identify the best channel to pursue, but it ultimately comes down to a bit of trial and error, particularly if you’re new at this and don’t have any historical data that you can work with.

So the best way to proceed is to take any of the following customer acquisition tactics and test them out in your business to find the one that delivers the most value.

But before you get started, it’s important to ensure that your business goals are set and that you have a clear idea of what you would like to achieve.

This will help you in understanding what’s working and what isn’t. So, without further ado, here are 11 ways to get large volumes of new customers.

1. Boost Content Rankings By Updating and Republishing Old Posts

The aim with this tactic is to generate increased numbers of organic search traffic to your blog using improved keyword rankings. Most blogs that publish a lot of content regularly have tons of posts sitting deep in their archives.

A post that was written in the previous year(s) will quickly drift down to page 10, 20, 30, etc.

The deeper a page goes in your site’s architecture, the lower its share of the internal PageRank and unless that page has lots of back-links from other web pages, it is not going to rank well in the search engines.

The solution is to update such posts to the current date and then republish them.

By bringing posts back to the first page of your blog feed, you give them a huge PageRank boost.

You could even add extra content to those posts, update all references and stats, and then re-promote that post to your audience via email, social media, and communities (thus earning even more back-links from other sites and boosting your SEO).

2. Pay to Email Other People’s Subscriber Lists

If you want to attract a lot of highly targeted traffic to your site, then you can actually pay to email subscribers on other people’s lists. One way to do this is by sending a dedicated email where you promote your product.

Another is by having a substantial mention of your product within an email.

The method you choose depends largely on your business goals and budget.

Both of these tactics work, but you have to decide which one works better for your campaign and budget. You can use ad platforms such as BuySellAds, or you can reach out to extremely relevant publications online.

Most of them have a specific email dedicated to advertising inquiries.

You can email them to find out the following information before making a decision:

• How big their email list is
• The type of people who subscribe to their list
• Their typical campaign open or click rates
• The ad options that they offer (eg. dedicated email, product mentions, etc.)
• How much they charge for each method

3. Align Search Intent to Your Content Upgrades

The goal here is to get more people who come to your site through organic search to download your content upgrades. You can achieve this by identifying which pages on your site deliver the highest numbers of organic traffic.

You can use your analytics platform to find this information.

Next, you have to determine which keywords are used the most by the people who land on that content. Google Console will give you all this data.

After you collect it, use it to create a content upgrade that those people will actually want. Your content upgrade should be directly related to at least one of those keywords.

4. Industry, Location and Feature Pages

The objective here is to increase the amount of high-commercial-intent traffic by ranking for keywords that are related to particular industries, locations or individual features of one of your products.

Organic traffic with high commercial intent (people actively looking to make a purchase) is more valuable than traffic from informational queries (“how to… etc.”) but it also comes in much smaller numbers.

Some of the best queries to target that won’t be too competitive for your business to rank for include:

• Industry-specific queries, eg. ‘real estate CRM’
• Location-specific queries, eg. ‘used generators, Little Rock AR’
• Feature-specific queries, eg. ‘text editing software’

Choose any of these that are relevant to your particular business and come up with a list of as many potential keywords as you can, then build out web pages to target each one.

5. Come Up With Co-Branded Content and Share the Leads

If you can join up with another brand and co-create content, then you can both promote it and dramatically increase your overall reach and the leads you generate.

This is a very effective strategy, but your success will largely depend on how well your business’s products complement what the other business offers.

So, think of other businesses that have a large reach among the same audience that you target, but make sure that they don’t compete with you directly. Are there any businesses offering products that yours have synergy with?

If so, reach out to them and both of you will be able to share in a greater yield of leads.

6. Drive Down CPC on Facebook Ads By Seeding Engagement Metrics

The aim here is to lower the amount that you are paying per click on your Facebook ads without lowering the quality of your site visitors. Social proof is a great way of increasing ad engagement.

Ads which contain lots of likes, shares, reactions and comments get clicked a lot more than those with less engagement or none at all.

Some ways of getting engagement on your ads include:

• Initially running your ad only to your page fans on Facebook and including a call to action to comment
• Doing the same thing outlined above, but this time running the ad to your site visitors via custom audience
• Targeting ads to areas with extremely low CPC such as Brazil, Philippines, etc. to seed initial ad engagement metrics

7. Build Virality Into Your Products

The goal of this tactic is to generate new customers using a mechanism which allows your current customers to bring in new users without you increasing the cost of acquiring customers by much.

To do this, you have to build ‘virality’ into your products.

The term virality refers to being able to scale up new customer acquisition without raising the costs associated with generating those initial customers.

Paid ads are a perfect example for this because as you increase your customer acquisition costs, you’re also increasing the number of users you generate.

The goal here is to keep costs constant while increasing user acquisition, and it’s typically through having a current user bring in a new one.

A great example of this is Dropbox and their built-in referral system where you get more storage space by referring a friend to their service.

8. Create an Affiliate Program

With this tactic, you’ll be able to generate a lot of new customers via incentivized referrals.

While there isn’t a cookie-cutter approach when building an affiliate program, there are a few basic things that you should consider:

• What is the maximum payout that you can give to your affiliates and still make a profit
• How are you going to compensate your affiliates? (Per click, per sign-up, or per activation, etc.)
• What system are you going to use to track affiliate referrals?
• Who’s going to be interested in becoming an affiliate for your business?

Being able to run a successful affiliate program will offer you a ton of benefits that go beyond your conversion goals.

Your affiliates will be talking about your business and this will ultimately have a huge positive impact on your other customer acquisition channels.

You can use affiliate software like OmniStar or Post Affiliate Pro or you could even use pre-built platforms like ClickBank, JVZoo, and CJ Affiliates that advertise your program on their networks.

9. Answer Questions on Quora

Going on Quora and answering questions that are relevant to your business or products will help you generate lots of qualified referral traffic to your site. Quora is a social network that is question-based.

People there ask a lot of questions about a myriad of subjects, and anyone can provide answers.

This is a great platform that provides marketers with the opportunity to acquire traffic through the content they create on the site.

But how do you find the right questions to answer so that you get the best return on your investment of time?

• Use SEMrush to conduct a search on Quora.com
• Go to ‘Domain Analytics’ and find the ‘Organic Research’ tab
• You will be presented with a list of all the top-ranking questions on Quora

You can then conduct a search for any keywords related to your particular content and sort your results by search volume.

Within the URL column on the platform, you now have a number of relevant Quora questions that drive the most organic traffic to the site, and these are the ones that you should prioritize when you begin answering questions.

When you answer questions on Quora, don’t just post links to your content as that will come across as spammy to the moderators. If your content is flagged as being unhelpful or spammy, it will be removed.

10. Get More Engagement From Previously Unopened Emails

The objective here is to increase the number of subscribers who actually read and engage with your emails by specifically targeting the people who didn’t open the emails that you sent them. To do this, resend an email to all those people 48 hours after the previous email that they didn’t open.

Use a totally new subject line that is focused on just those subscribers.

Doing this helps you increase your campaign open rates without it seeming as if you’re spamming your readers’ inboxes with the same email.

11. Build Content From Unique Data

This tactic will help you earn back-links, traffic, and press coverage to your content. Most marketers know that simply throwing money into content marketing doesn’t guarantee that you will get the required results.

A better strategy, in the long run, is to focus your content marketing activities on bigger plays. Earning mentions in top publications in your industry will net you a load of traffic, but you have to source original data for that.

That type of content gets a lot of attention from big sites and journalists, especially if they can use it to tell a much wider story. The boost that you get in traffic and links will have a huge impact across your entire site.

Luckily, this doesn’t have to cost a lot of money which means that small businesses and start ups can benefit from this tactic just as the big brands do.

Wrapping Up

As previously mentioned, some of these tactics will apply to your business, but others won’t be relevant. Pick the tactics that you think will work best for your business and test them out.

Each of the tactics mentioned in this article is designed to test specific things within individual channels to help you discover new opportunities for business growth either within channels that you’re already utilizing or ones that you’re yet to pursue.

So get started now and find new ways of winning new customers.

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PlanetBizOp.com

->Steven

Updated: Originally published September 16th 2018