Clients are the lifeblood of your business, whether you’re an enterprise organization or a fresh startup. Attracting new clients consistently is challenging and can be expensive, especially as client acquisition costs continue to rise.
On top of that, clients are becoming less trusting of traditional marketing methods, especially in the younger generations. They use ad blockers, skip content, and prefer influencer recommendations, making it even more difficult to reach them.
What options do you have for client acquisition? How can you keep a steady flow of clients when it’s becoming more difficult – and costly – to try?
Here’s our blueprint to energize your client acquisition plan.
Understanding the Client Acquisition Funnel
You’ve likely heard of the customer journey funnel or the sales funnel, which are common terms in marketing and business. The client acquisition funnel has a similar premise, and even similar stages, which include:
- Awareness: The client is aware of a need and possible solutions
- Consideration: The client is evaluating and considering the available options
- Decision: The client is prepared to make a decision regarding available solutions
As prospects move through this funnel from awareness to signing on as a client with your business, they learn about your products and services, consider what you have to offer, and make a decision to become a paying client.
It’s up to you to nurture them throughout these stages to close the deal.
Lead generation occurs at the top of the funnel, lead acquisition occurs in the middle, and conversion occurs at the bottom of the funnel. Client acquisition focuses on the funnel comprehensively to create an experience that guides them to the conversion.
Client Acquisition Strategy
Client Acquisition Marketing
Marketing for client acquisition focuses on specific strategies that promote services to prospects. In most cases, this involves both the sales and marketing teams and differs from other marketing strategies in that it’s focused on current prospects in the consideration phase.
Client Acquisition Channels
Client acquisition channels are the channels you choose to attract new prospects. You could waste a lot of your time and resources trying to achieve a broad strategy that hits all the possible channels. Instead, focus your efforts on the high-value channels that have the majority of your audience. Once you perfect your strategy, you can branch out into other available channels.
Your chosen channels depend on your strategy, industry, audience, and marketing budget, but you could consider social media channels, paid search, organic search, and inbound or outbound marketing.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is necessary for virtually all types of modern businesses, no matter the industry. Service-based businesses, startups, and other businesses that may face challenges with client acquisition need to leverage content marketing to attract the target audience and bring valuable traffic to the website.
Here are some common types of content for client acquisition:
- Blog posts
- Infographics
- Guest posts
- Podcasts
- Webinars
- Whitepapers
- Ebooks
- How-to guides
You could also leverage gated content, which is in-depth content that’s essentially free to your audience. All you ask for in return is an email address and a name for an email list, but your prospect gets a valuable resource that addresses their pain points.
Search Marketing
Search marketing can include paid ads or search engine optimization (SEO) tactics that boost awareness and fuel traffic. As prospects search for information that’s relevant to your business, they come across content that addresses their problems and positions you as an industry authority.
For example, a family law firm could create content for potential searches like “what to look for in a divorce attorney?” or “what to expect in a divorce case?” If you have content that answers those questions and appears high on the search engine results page, you now have a potential client aware of your brand and what you have to offer.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing can be organic or paid, but either way, it’s necessary to your business. Consumers expect to find brands on social media, regardless of industry, and having an active presence gives you an opportunity to connect.
If you don’t have a social media presence yet, be sure to start. It takes time to build a following. But there are a lot of social media platforms out there, so do some research to see which ones have the majority of your audience and focus your efforts only on those channels.
Email Marketing
As mentioned, gated content gets you email addresses in exchange for content. This list is valuable to your business, and best of all, it’s yours. Social media followers aren’t owned by you – if your account disappeared tomorrow, you’ve lost your list.
With an email list, you have a list of people who want to hear from you. You can promote content, share feedback requests, offer discounts or incentives, and more. Essentially, you have a platform for intimate connections with your prospects and customers to build lasting relationships.
Build a Robust Client Acquisition Strategy
Your client acquisition strategy will be unique to your needs, but it’s vital that it is sustainable, targeted, flexible, and diversified.
Sustainable
Your client acquisition strategy should be sustainable in the sense that it is repeatable and designed for the long-term needs of your business. When you’re investing in building your strategy, you can rest assured that those investments will pay off in the future.
An example of a sustainable aspect of your strategy is a content marketing plan. You can’t just post a blog, an infographic, and an interview and call it a day. Your content marketing isn’t a quick solution – it’s one designed to drive organic traffic well into the future, justifying the upfront investment.
Targeted
Your client acquisition strategy needs to be targeted to the right audience. Otherwise, it’s virtually useless. Before you create the rest of your strategy, you need to define your audience and client personas.
Consider a client persona, an imaginary client that represents the rest of your audience. If your business has a large and diverse audience, such as a law firm with multiple practice areas such as child support, prenuptial agreements, family law, and accident attorney. You may need to segment your audience to create different relevant client personas.
Once you have an idea of your ideal client or clients, you can craft the messaging and content and determine the best channels to maximize your efforts.
Flexible
A solid strategy is agile. As the business world shifts and pivots, you need to shift and pivot with it to survive. What works today may not work tomorrow, or next week, or next year. Consumers are becoming increasingly skeptical and the landscape is becoming more competitive, but staying flexible ensures you have what it takes to survive.
Diversified
No one client acquisition method or strategy is going to work for every aspect of your business or audience. Don’t put the success of your entire strategy on one channel or method – instead, keep it diverse and ensure that you have multiple options to test, evaluate, and refine. As you learn, you can pour more of your efforts into the options that are worthwhile.
Fuel Your Business Growth
Client acquisition is a must for any business, regardless of size. It’s an ongoing process, but if you get it right, you can fuel your business growth with a steady flow of clients well into the future.
—Author Bio: Maxwell Hills is the founder of Hills Law Group, a premier Orange County family law firm with a concentration on high net worth divorces. Max’s entrepreneurial career stretches back to his teenage days when he had his music used in Grey’s Anatomy and ESPN. Today, Max has used that experience to build Hills Law Group with 0 customers and $0 in revenue to a respected firm in the industry.
Learn more at https://hillslawgroup.com/