A Blueprint to Energize Your Client Acquisition Plan

As the cost of client acquisition rises, it’s more important than ever to have a robust strategy. If you’re just throwing your budget into poorly performing channels or operating on assumptions, you could burn through your budget without generating any positive returns.

Client acquisition is challenging – and only getting more difficult – but a clear strategy can set you up for success.

Client acquisition strategy

Client acquisition strategy is the plan you have to bring in new clients. Like other strategies, it must be tailored to your business goals.

Acquisition starts at the first contact with the prospect and continues to when they become a paying client. In some organizations, it continues past the purchase to the retention phase.

Because it covers every touchpoint in the client journey, it’s important to consider the full strategy. Even the best strategy won’t get and keep every client, but it’s vital to have a repeatable and scalable strategy that drives new business.

Here’s how:

1. Define the audience

The ideal client and ideal audience are the first step in any marketing endeavor. Depending on the industry and business type, you may be addressing multiple audiences. You should ask questions like:

• What are my client’s paint points?
• What can I provide for my clients with my product or service?
• What are my client’s demographics?
• How do my clients look for information?

These answers give you a jumping off point to learn more about how your clients think and how you can best reach them.

2. Plan your client acquisition funnel

The client acquisition funnel encompasses the client journey, and needs to be unique to your audience or audiences.

If the journey begins with a web search for divorce law or child support lawyers, you’ll take a different approach than if it came from social media ads.

You can then drill down and map the funnel, which may look like:

How many prospects are searching for content that leads them to the website? How many clients come from social media? Which audience do they each fit into, and what type of content are they interested in?

Once clients are on the website, consider what would get them to subscribe to the email list or sign up for a newsletter. What are they looking for?

Now that they’ve subscribed, what content do they want to see? Are they looking for promotions to seal the deal, such as a discount on a product, a free trial, or a free case consultation?

Each funnel is unique, so you need to map it out and then consider where the clients fall off. What could be preventing them from moving forward?

Maybe you’re not addressing the right pain points at the right point in the journey. Maybe you need better call-to-action phrases, or better copy, to convert.

3. Use SMART Goals

SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, Time-Bound) goals are vital to your strategy. With client acquisition, the goal is to bring in more clients, but you need to get more specific and intentional.

The goal isn’t “get more clients,” it’s “I want to bring in 50 new clients by the end of this quarter” or whatever is relevant and realistic to your business. Your goal is specific to 50 clients, time-bound by the quarter, and relevant to the goal of client acquisition. it’s also achievable and measurable, since you can see how far above or below the number you reach by the deadline.

Within your client acquisition strategy, you can set multiple SMART goals, including individual goals for chosen channels or shorter-term goals, as long as they serve the overall goal of drawing clients in.

4. Choose your marketing channels

Client acquisition is expensive, and its costs are only growing. If you want to succeed without blowing the whole budget, you need to focus your efforts on the best possible channels and methods.

If you create a strategy that’s too broad, you could miss out on excellent opportunities on the channels that hold most of your audience. Determine which channels yield the best ROI, the content that performs best on them, and how you can leverage that for success.

You’re not just limited to social media, either. You could use business pages, organic search on Google, and email marketing.

Once you choose your channels, tailor your strategy for the channel’s best practices. Consider:

• The best-performing content
• The audience
• The content your audience prefers
• Your competitor’s activity

5. Ask for feedback

Some business owners suffer from being too deep into their business to reflect on it objectively. But appealing to prospects is all about getting in the mind of the customer, so this is a roadblock to success.

Asking for feedback ensures you have in-depth insights from the perspective of the client, which you can use to validate ideas, rid yourself of assumptions and refine your strategy to target them.

You have plenty of options for how to collect feedback, including client interviews, social media polls, email surveys and more. When you ask for feedback, consider offering something in return, such as a discount or a free trial of your product or service.

6. Keep refining your strategy

You must analyze and evaluate your strategy often to see what’s working and what isn’t, how your clients are interacting with your business, and how your content is performing. If you don’t know any of this information, you’re just wasting your ad spend shooting in the dark.

A lot of factors go into client acquisition, so be sure to consider data like:

• Your clients’ location
• Where your clients purchased your product or service
• How they heard about your brand

Some of your metrics may include:

• Client lifetime value
• Client acquisition costs
• Client growth
• Ratio of lifetime value to client acquisition costs
• Churn rate

Keep your business growing into the future

Client acquisition is an ongoing process, so you need to develop a strategy that attracts a steady flow of prospects and converts them into paying clients. Though it may seem overwhelming, the right client acquisition strategy can attract and retain valuable clients and fuel your business growth.