Customer acquisition in the digital age

Customer acquisition, or the process of finding new buyers for your products or services, has always been a key goal for entrepreneurs and business leaders. After all: without it, the revenue required to turn a profit wouldn’t come through the door. Even the most successful businesses engage in customer acquisition on an ongoing basis, and from TV advertising to leaflets there are many possible ways to approach the task. But what does this look like in the digital age? This article will answer that question by suggesting some key ways of getting hold of new customers over the web.

Social media

As a business, being on social media is a wise move – and when you consider how popular it is with consumers, it becomes pretty much essential. Facebook’s Stories function alone, for example, has 300 million active users every single day, and many other social networks boast similar statistics. Paid social media marketing is often effective given the demographic targeting options, while it’s still possible to go viral if your organic, non-paid content is well-designed and well-executed.

Search engines

And, of course, search engine optimization (SEO) is still a big deal. Valentino Vaschetto has pointed out that this is the sort of technique which can attract both computer-based and mobile searchers – and with Valentino Vaschetto also pointing out that link-building (or the practice of securing links from other quality websites) can deliver results, there are clearly many different ways to approach the SEO world.

Reputation management

Something that many of the world’s most successful corporations realized early on is that the customer acquisition process often begins much earlier than the point at which a customer sees an advert or picks up a leaflet. If you’re planning to buy a bottle of fizzy drink, for example, you might respond to a TV advert for Coca-Cola. But your knowledge of Coca-Cola as a reputable brand will probably have been acquired much earlier – perhaps when you read about it in a newspaper article, or even heard about it in conversation.

As a result, it’s crucial for any company which wants to plant the seeds of brand loyalty in customers’ minds to act early. This sort of reputation management used to happen primarily in physical sources, such as newspapers. In the digital age, it now happens in a much wider range of places – including websites. By issuing emailed press releases about product launches and scheduling marketing events with web-based journalists, you can ensure that your public relations are positive online as well as in print.

With so many digital opportunities for customer acquisition now available, there’s no excuse for not making the most of the web. You could go for social media options, for example, or traditional search engine optimization techniques. And no matter what choice you make, don’t forget to also take a long-term view and implement some basic reputation management techniques as well in order to keep brand perception as positive as possible.