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Acquiring new customers can be a daunting responsibility for any SMB marketer.
But, every SMB has plenty in their customer acquisition arsenal. They only need to execute on the skills already in their toolbox.
Here’s how small and medium-sized businesses can gear up to achieve enterprise-level customer acquisition.
For marketers, investing in relationships often means taking cues based on customer signals then responding appropriately.
According to the Nielsen Global Trust in Advertising Report, 83% percent of online respondents in 60 countries say they trust recommendations from friends and family.
A solid CRM can grow with your business as it gathers more complex data about your customers and it can help you listen to customers, build relationships with them, and keep them happy. Ensuring customers are satisfied can spur case studies or trusted referrals, especially if you have a referral program in place.
Take some time to determine where the majority of your customers came from in the past year or two.
How did they find out about you? Through what channel did they first contact you? Did they click on a LinkedIn ad, sign up for a webinar, or subscribe to your email newsletter?
Your existing customers can tell you a great deal about where you should focus your efforts on acquiring new ones.
Once you know where your audience and potential community like to congregate, go there and if you're welcome, join the discussion. By using a social listening platform, you can listen for important mentions of your brand across all networks.
Social media is sometimes overlooked by SMBs, but it’s much more than just a broadcast channel. It's also a place where you can interact with your community and identify influencers who can help expand your content’s reach.
You can even keep a pulse on what people are saying about competitors, giving you a well-rounded picture of what potential customers want.
SMBs have the opportunity to put data at the center of customer acquisition strategies, especially if they aren’t dealing with large, legacy systems common in many enterprises.
This can present a great opportunity to start pulling in data from all departments, like sales and service, to understand what your best customers look like over their lifecycle. In turn, this can inform how you create a strategy for acquiring new customers.
According to our State of Marketing report, marketers said the three biggest benefits of combining email with other marketing channels is improved awareness, higher rates of customer engagement, and improved customer acquisition.
For audiences who seek high-quality recurring content, a drip campaign with promotional CTAs peppered throughout could be a good way to convert more customers.
For those who add items to their cart but never complete a purchase, you might consider implementing abandoned cart emails, especially because fewer than one-third of companies send them. Even this seemingly small opportunity could give you a big competitive edge against enterprise players.
It’s important to have a solid base of quality content for artificial intelligence to create impact. But once you have content to share, it is important that you are reaching your intended audience with content that is meaningful to them at every stage of their interaction with your brand that encourages engagement.
With that in mind, products like Einstein Product Recommendations and Einstein AI can help you feed that quality content automatically to the right people at scale. This can spur customer acquisition efforts without requiring a large team or a lot of manual effort.
For many SMBs, customer acquisition can be an exciting endeavor that leads to positive growth. If you're interested in achieving enterprise-level acquisition, Marketing Cloud can help.
