Increase acquisition for your business this year

The challenge of winning new business isn’t straightforward, particularly in highly competitive markets. Creating and developing a watertight customer acquisition strategy is vital for ambitious businesses to continue to move forward year on year and enhance their bottom lines.

If you are driven and passionate about scaling up your business this year, these six tactics are a good place to start with generating new sustainable customers for your brand.

Improve email engagement with subscribers

If you have a base of subscribers that are disengaged with your brand and its offering, you might want to try and start the new year by increasing the number of users that open and read your emails. The first port of call should be those who very rarely open and engage with them. You should be able to use your email marketing platform to curate a list of subscribers that received your most recent emails but didn’t choose to open them.

A simple tactic is to resend the same email to this new segmented list of subscribers, but with an entirely different email subject that reaches out to these users. The subject may be tongue-in-cheek or it might be a little more direct, it’s all about trial and error here.

Co-own a content marketing project with another recognized brand

If you want to embark on something bold and ambitious with your brand this year, content marketing could certainly be the way to attract attention and prospects. Ideally, you will seek a partnership with a complementary business, someone that’s not a competitor but can enhance life for your customers with you enhancing theirs in return.

Better still, you should choose a brand that’s larger than yours and already has a substantial reach, both online and offline. Collaborating on a content marketing campaign, whether it’s a shared infographic, a webinar, an app or a video, can dramatically improve your brand reach without stepping on your partner’s toes. A good example would be the collaboration between BuzzSumo and Buffer, which analyzed Facebook posts.

Breathe new life into relationships with lapsed prospects

There’s only so many people you can target when it comes to new business acquisitions. If you feel like you’re running out of people to tempt, why not return to existing lists of potential leads? You might find there are several prospects that didn’t come to fruition in the past that you might be able to tap up now. Their circumstances might well have changed in that time. LinkedIn has always been a goldmine of potential leads for firms seeking to work with other like-minded businesses.

If you worry that you might have lost contact details for LinkedIn targets, you could always activate the Lusha plugin in your browser. This extension pulls up contact details on individuals on LinkedIn found from all over the web—not just LinkedIn—helping you to touch base and turn more lapsed prospects into customers.

Launch your brand’s own affiliate program

You could also create a new affiliate program for your business online. This could work in one of two ways. Firstly, you could go down the conventional affiliate program route, whereby other websites and bloggers receive unique referral links to place on their platforms, pushing your goods or services and they get paid every time someone purchases your products via their links.

Alternatively, you could create an affiliate scheme that integrates your brand with other compatible businesses. For instance, if your products or services are integrated within another brand’s services, each time a customer signs up to your service as a consequence of the partnership, your partners take a cut.

Establish your brand as an authority on external sites

Guest posting relies on contacting the right person, getting links from industry-relevant websites and creating a buzz. Some disingenuous marketers have tried to use it for unscrupulous gains in the past. According to Outreach Knot, genuine outreach is a vital part of increasing your brand’s visibility. It will improve your online presence and boost organic rankings in the major search engines if you do it perfectly.

Focus firmly on websites, brands, and communities that are hyper-relevant to your goods and services. Seek to publish content here that listens to the concerns of your target demographic, provides exciting solutions and educates them, turning prospects into long-term advocates of your brand. GroupHigh calls this process a means of human-to-human connection.

Making more human-to-human connections is a good summary of all the above customer acquisition strategies we recommend, helping you to bring marketing and communications back to a basic level.