A Complete Guide to Customer Acquisition

Customer acquisition is such an important component of scaling your online business. Customer acquisition is the process of attracting strangers, calculating their needs, and converting them into customers and fans - a crucial process for any creator looking to grow their brand and make a living online. Let's break down the basics of customer acquisition, how to calculate it, and provide you with a step-by-step guide to developing a winning customer acquisition strategy. It's time to level up!

Customer Acquisition: Your Brand's Foundation

Customer acquisition is all about acquiring customers for your business, and then maximizing customer retention. Think of it as the journey someone takes from discovering your brand to following you and eventually supporting you or making a purchase. It's not solely about making sales, though - it's about creating a loyal fan base that supports you over time. Customer acquisition sets down the foundation for longer-term customer relations that help your brand grow. 

Customer Acquisition Channels

Customer acquisition channels are the various paths through which potential customers find you - places where they first meet your brand and/or products. An omnichannel experience is a great thing to strive for: offering a consistently branded experience across all of your marketing channels, making sure that your logos, colors, branding images, and content marketing are similar, with small adjustments for the different platforms and devices you're using. This gives a cohesiveness to your brand, which translates into both professionalism and reliability from your customers' point of view - and that can translate again into another method of customer acquisition - customer referrals and positive word of mouth!

Some examples of customer acquisition channels include:

Social Media 

Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are where you can engage with your audience directly on a regular basis to build awareness and hype for your brand and show off your personality. This includes both the creation of compelling posts and content marketing, and interaction with those who comment on your posts or share them with others.

Search Engines 

Search engines are a top resource for brand discovery and customer acquisition, so ensuring that your sites have solid SEO (search engine optimization) is an excellent place to start! Making certain that your keywords are relevant and on-trend will help new people find you in a way that's pertinent to them.

Email Marketing 

Sending targeted newsletters and promotional emails can both help convert new people into acquired customers and fans, and can also give you a wealth of information as to where your prospects are coming from, so you can better calculate where to put your content marketing.

Blogs

With good SEO, your blog can be yet another marketing channel for customer acquisition, as it's a deeper look into you, your brand, and your products. Customers often like to purchase from people or companies they "know," so making it easy for them to find your blog makes it easier for them to get to know you and your brand.

Events

Meeting fans and customers in person is a great way to win them over. While the focus of an IRL (in real life) event shouldn't necessarily be hard salesmanship (which might actually drive people away), chatting up your potential new fans is a great opportunity to both get to know them, and to share more about your brand, products, and anything else you're working on - these are all worthy steps toward customer acquisition. Feeling like they're part of your growth is a positive for customer retention and loyalty!

Customer Acquisition Funnel

The customer acquisition funnel represents the steps that a customer takes from knowing nothing about you to becoming a superfan. Here are the five steps of a basic customer acquisition funnel:

1. Awareness

It has begun: you've caught your potential customer's eye! This is when they discover you via a marketing channel like, for instance, a social media post, YouTube video, or a Google search.

2. Interest

Your customer is intrigued, and they want to find out more about you and your brand. At this stage, they might start following you, comment on one of your posts, or sign up for your email list.

3. Consideration and Intent 

Your potential customer is now considering signing up for a paid membership to your content or buying your merch. This is where specific factors on your end, like great socials posts, compelling merchandise photos and descriptions, high quality content marketing, and a friendly vibe can help convert them over.

4. Action 

Congrats! Your new customer has made a purchase or signed up for a subscription or membership with you. Follow up with great customer service, and possibly a new customer perk like a loyalty coupon or even a video thank-you message, like the ones you can send out through your custom Fourthwall site!

5. Loyalty and Retention

You've got 'em in the door - now keep them there! Continue posting engaging content and top-drawer merchandise (like the kind you can design and sell on Fourthwall!), use your data and metrics to calculate which posts are most effective, and maintain ongoing engagement to further keep that customer retention and turn your new customers into long-term fans.

How to Measure Customer Acquisition

Measuring customer acquisition starts with calculating and understanding the business metric of Customer Acquisition Cost, or CAC, and utilizing that cost formula info to determine how profitable your efforts currently are. Put simply, CAC is the total cost of acquiring one new customer.

To use the cost formula to calculate your CAC per acquired customer, total all of your sales and marketing expenses for a specific period, and then divide that total by the number of new customers you acquired within that period (cost of sales + cost of marketing ÷ your new customers = CAC.)

To keep your CAC low, consider these tips:

• Content is king: create engaging, high-quality content that attracts eyes so you can acquire customers, and then maximize engagement and customer retention.
• A/B testing: pull maximum efficiency out of your content marketing - find out what works best for customer acquisition by testing different versions of your promotional materials and ads.
• Optimize spend: Make sure you’re getting the most bang for your buck toward customer acquisition by monitoring the performance of your promotional materials and ads, so you can more accurately calculate where to best allocate your budget.
• Focus your socials: Identify which of your social media platforms are bringing in the most customers or new fans, and focus the bulk of your content creation and content marketing efforts there.

What Is a Customer Acquisition Strategy?

A customer acquisition strategy is your game plan for attracting new customers. It guides all of your efforts, ensuring that you reach the right people in the right way. Without a customer acquisition strategy, you’re left at the mercy of chance - but a well-thought-out, smartly calculated strategy helps you focus your efforts and resources efficiently. The key steps of your customer acquisition strategy work together in harmony to get you more hype and better results.

How to Develop a Customer Acquisition Strategy 

Identify Your Audience

Know who you’re targeting! Define your ideal customer by demographics, interests, and behavior. The more specific you are, the better. This helps you identify your customers' needs and preferences, so you can workshop how to fulfill them within your brand. Knowing your customer also helps create a better "customer community," so that your engagement with them is both more authentic and more targeted; your customer acquisition strategy will continue to evolve as you and your brand grow.

Define Your Goals

Simple but effective: set clear, measurable customer acquisition goals. Do you want to increase your social media followers, add to your memberships or subscriptions base, or sell more merch? Having specific goals helps you stay focused, and assists you in more efficiently scheduling your content and calculating how much time and funds to spend on promotion/ads.

Plan Your Campaign 

What works on Instagram might not work as well on TikTok - so it's time to tailor your content to each platform. As mentioned earlier, keeping a consistent branded experience is key to giving your customers and fans confidence in your professionalism; it also shows off that you've got something interesting happening, and they'll be more likely to want to be part of it! Whether you're making all of your own posts or collaborating with other brands or influencers, plan customer acquisition campaigns that suit each platform's unique audience and features, while keeping your branding cohesive everywhere you go. Consistency also extends to scheduling - make sure you have regular posts often, so your fans and customers see that you're active.

Track Performance Metrics 

Monitor how your customer acquisition campaigns are performing. Use analytics tools to track key metrics like your CAC and calculate your conversion rates. Having this data will help you adjust your strategy based on what the data tells you - for instance, customers who have engaged with or purchased from you more than once are more likely to come back again, so offering incentives like discount codes or secret sales can help insure customer retention.

Attract, Engage, and Convert Your Customers With Fourthwall

Fourthwall makes customer acquisition easy for creators. Fourthwall's platform lets you launch your own website, and offers seamless ecommerce integrations, including your own shop, payment gateways, shipping, fulfillment, and inventory management. Fourthwall also provides powerful data tracking tools, so you can see what components of your content marketing are working for customer acquisition and which ones are not. And there are plenty of fun tools to amplify your hype, from video thank-you notes to socials links, plus a whole range of beautiful customizable merchandise.

Whether you’re a YouTuber, TikToker, Twitch streamer, musician, or any other type of content creator, Fourthwall helps you attract, engage, and acquire customers more effectively! So if you're ready to take your customer acquisition to the next level, sign up with Fourthwall today and start growing your brand like never before!