What is the Customer Acquisition Process in Digital Marketing?

“Customer acquisition is the process of bringing new customers or clients to your business. The goal of this process is to create a systematic, sustainable acquisition strategy that can evolve with new trends and changes.” (HubSpot blog, June 2018)

This definition sets the stage for what the customer acquisition process in digital marketing is and the value it brings. A customer acquisition strategy is the best combination of media and engagement tools that help businesses gain new customers through targeting and online and offline channels.

Gaining new customers can be expensive but companies can work smarter by following the customer acquisition process.

How to get customers via digital marketing

Step 1 – Awareness

Customers can’t buy from businesses if they aren’t aware of them. The goal of this step in the customer acquisition process in digital marketing is to attract strangers to the brand or business in the hope that they will become visitors. This is also where lead generation takes place. A good digital marketing strategy will focus on the specific tools and channels that a business can use to create awareness.

Examples of tools that a business can use to generate awareness of their products and/or services are:

• Social media advertising: Platforms such as Facebook offer incredible advertising solutions – especially for the small business owner as these are so affordable – that allow you to target your particular target market with a great degree of accuracy.
• SEO and PPC: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process that is used in order to get a website ranked more highly on Google for certain key terms. Used in conjunction with Google AdWords, this strategy is a fantastic way of generating awareness for your business.

Step 2 – Consideration

How can you win if you’re not even playing the game? Businesses need to ensure that potential customers take their products or services into consideration when these customers have a problem that the business can fulfill. Otherwise, the consumers will never buy from them.

The goal of this step in the customer acquisition process in digital marketing is to convert visitors into leads and eventually customers. Lead acquisition is the name of the game in this step, and digital marketing plays a massive role in acquiring valuable leads.

Step 3 – Decision

The final step in the customer acquisition process in digital marketing is when the potential customer decides to become a paying customer of the business. (To learn more about how this process actually works, read our article about the digital marketing sales funnel.) The leads go from converted to closed. During this step, digital marketing also needs to be more personalised than for the other steps because you want to give your leads every reason to spend their money with you with special offers and other such packages.

Bonus step – Delight  

Of course, once you have the customer, it doesn’t mean they will stay a loyal customer without some effort from the business’ side. You need to delight and add value to customers constantly, and then they will even go from being just a customer to being promoters!

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

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