Display Advertising
Display advertising refers to placing visual advertisements on websites to attract new customers. It can be done either programmatically (an automated fashion in networks such as the Google Display Network) or through direct purchases of ad space from websites.
When it comes to Display Advertising, the audiences you target and the websites you place your ads on matter. Focusing on the websites that drive the greatest performance is a key component of any successful display advertising strategy.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing has many uses as part of an overall content marketing strategy. When you’re considering social media marketing, you should keep in mind there are two main methods: organic and paid.
Organic social media helps you showcase your business’s voice and personality, and it gives you an outlet to share other content you’re using as part of your customer acquisition strategy. “Organic social media” simply means that you’re posting to the audience you’ve built and not using paid advertising to expand the audience further. Instead, you’re relying on your followers to help you get your message out by liking, sharing, and engaging with your posts.
When you start to turn your posts into ads, you’re looking at paid social media advertising. Paid social media advertising helps you to reach your target audience through ads on your social media network of choice. Without a doubt, your future customers are already out there hanging out on one of the main social media networks, and through targeting social media ads, you can help them learn about who you are and turn into paying customers.
Search Marketing
Search engine marketing (SEM) is one of the easier methods to identify consumers who have clear interest in checking out products like yours. Because SEM allows you to target specific keywords, you can show up when very specific queries are entered into Google and other search engines. The key is to know what topics people are searching for at different stages of the sales process, monitoring search data as your guide.
Let’s say you’re an outdoor retailer that sells hiking shoes. Someone who is just becoming interested in hiking might search for – beginner hiking shoes. Someone who has been looking into shoes for a while, knows exactly the type of shoe they need, and is ready to buy might search for – narrow slick-rock hiking shoes size 11.
There are two main ways you can reach these audiences: through organic search engine optimization (SEO) and through paid search marketing.
With organic SEO, there is no exact science to getting your website or content to rank first for a search term. But most best practices focus on making your content as easy as possible for search engines to read, decipher, and index. So if you were that outdoor retailer, you might create a page dedicated to “Beginner Hiking Shoes” and use techniques like including that phrase (also known as a keyword) into the title, adding alt-text to your images, and linking internally to other pages on your website to help boost your organic SEO
Content Marketing
Content marketing is an effective part of a online customer acquisition strategy for almost any type of business. One reason it’s effective is because there are many different ways you can use content marketing; so you can find the best method of content marketing to draw in your audience.
When you’re creating a content marketing strategy, you’ll want to focus on two things. First, make sure that every type of content you’re creating provides valuable, helpful information to your audience spoken with your brand's voice. Second, focus on topics help your business show up in relevant and helpful search queries. This provides organic pathways for consumers to discover your company.
The most popular types of content marketing are blogging, e-books, guides, templates, and videos.
Affiliate Marketing
With affiliate marketing, you offer compensation to a partner when your partner generates traffic, leads, sales - whatever you decide - on your behalf. Affiliate partners can range from large blogs to influencers to discount websites. Your ideal affiliate partner may differ depending on your buyer’s behavior and where they are in your sales process.
Affiliate marketing can work as part of your customer acquisition strategy by helping individuals move through your sales process. As we mentioned, this could be by paying affiliates to give you leads, who you can then convert into customers through an email follow-up strategy. You could also focus on only paying affiliates when they make a sale and acquire your customer for you.
Email Marketing
Email marketing has been around for awhile, and there’s a reason. It’s a direct line of communication to consumers and a valuable component of any customer acquisition strategy.
The first step in email marketing is to actually get the qualified individual’s email address and information. You can do this in a variety of ways. You could:
Create helpful content that requires an email form submission
Offer a discounts to anyone who signs up for your email list
Host a giveaway on social media gated by an email capture form
Once you have someone’s email, congrats! You now know that they are interested in your company. As long as you follow US CAN-SPAM laws, you can market directly to them and share information about new products or sales. Through email marketing, you’ll also be able to learn more about these individuals’ interests by monitoring click-through rates on different email components.
Online Marketplaces
Online marketplaces such as Amazon and other eCommerce retailers can help you acquire customers in a couple ways. Not only can you sell your products where consumers are already shopping, you can also leverage opportunities to advertise and generate awareness where you might not have before.
Many businesses fear selling on Amazon out of concern that lower margins will cannibalize their overall revenue. While an important concern, the insights you generate from Amazon search behavior and your Amazon ad performance can helpfully influence the ways you advertise in Google Search as well. By understanding how your customers buy on Amazon, you can more informedly run ads in other channels that drive consumers to your site and allow your own eCommerce site to play nicely with these online marketplaces.
