Here’s what you should know about Customer Acquisition on Social Media

Customers, customers, customers. Every business wants more, but few actually know how to attract them and not die trying.

Okay, that was extremely dramatic, but you get the idea: Regardless of if you’re a content creator, a new-to-business brand, or a market veteran, you need customers. That’s just a fact.

However, there’s a growing feeling of discomfort around customer acquisition for brands, what it is, how to measure it, and of course, the newest and best performing strategies.

And that’s because not everyone knows what they’re dealing with. That’s okay, though, because we’re sharing what you need to transform your social media into your secret weapon for customer acquisition in a few paragraphs.

We’re here to help you increase your brand awareness, even if your service is the most niche-y there is.

What is customer acquisition?

According to Hubspot, customer acquisition is the process of onboarding new customers or clients to your business. Pretty straightforward, not many questions about that.

In other words, customer acquisition is about brands and individuals implementing a strategy to attract new consumers to their funnels, allowing them to grow their client base, and therefore, their revenue.

More clients, more money, everyone’s happy. And that’s it (or not?).

Actually, according to Shopify, customer acquisition is the process of finding and persuading prospective customers to buy from your business in a way that is both measurable and repeatable. And there are some fascinating points to touch on from this definition.

First, the importance of being able to measure the effectiveness of your strategy.

If you can’t measure it, you can’t optimize it, after all.

That’s why, regardless of what you do, you must be able to measure what you’re doing if you don’t want to burn some serious cash.

Second, it must be a repeatable process. That means you must be able to predict the effectiveness of your strategy after measuring it. This will allow you to plan, tweak if necessary, and scale your brand consumers.

And third is the persuasion factor. Because, let’s face it, if your offer or content sucks, you won’t get people buying or consuming your service.

How do brands acquire customers through social media platforms?

They always do, in case you were wondering.

Every caption, post, story… It’s all about staying relevant to capture their prospects’ attention in a heartbeat.

In fact, there are incredibly clever ways to achieve this without misleading everyone. And that’s what the greats do – making marketing feel like it’s not marketing.

For example, according to Pew Research, 81% of Americans say they use or consume YouTube content almost every single day (as for 2021). And in case you were wondering, we do, too.

That means, by consuming their favorite video content from their favorite content creators, they are also sharing vital data for these creators or brands to optimize their criteria and implement winning customer acquisition strategies.

All great, but, how?

Well, our friends at SalesForce say there are 4 incredible ways to use social media data to create winning strategies for customer acquisition. Let’s go one by one.

First, social listening. Which, in simple words, is conducting a deep study of what topics your audience is engaging with or talking about so you know how to position yourself to increase your brand awareness.

Sounds like a spy game, but without cheating. We’d say it’s a great way to provide value while staying relevant with topics your audience is interested in. Win-win.

Second, we have content marketing. Good ol’ content marketing.

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, content marketing is about sharing relatable content over social media channels as a strategy to increase engagement across your audience.

At Curastory, this is something we like to call Creator Ad Reads, where you can purchase advertisements done in the creators’ voice that is embedded organically pre, mid, or post-roll within their videos and then repurpose that content onto your brand’s social media channels.

That almost speaks for itself, but, in essence, it’s an incredible way to keep your audience entertained and engaged to transform them into customers or consumers in the near, mid, or long term.

Third is urgency creation. This applies to almost everything around the internet, but we’d say that it’s crucial for social media nowadays. For example, some brands use shop sections in their profiles to give immediate access to viewers, so they can buy right away without leaving the app. Clever.

And, fourth would be measuring. We won’t go back at it again in-depth, but it’s basically studying and implementing audience feedback to improve your campaign’s or content’s performance. All while tracking as much as you can (within privacy laws).

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Best practices for customer acquisition on each platform

And now, let’s dissect the best practices on the four big platforms we use daily: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

Let’s start with Facebook.

As you know, Facebook hasn’t stopped growing since it’s launch (circa 2004), and now almost every person has an account.

This means, it’s most likely that your targeted audience is there, and very active on it.

But, to get them, you must apply some best practices. As Entrepreneur says, not being afraid to give something away for free now and then.

To leverage Facebook for customer acquisition, you need to use your organic or repurposed content post wisely, and a great way to do that is also supporting the incredibly powerful word of mouth. You know, the “tag a friend” old strategy which is still insanely effective.

Then, we have Instagram. The most visual platform of all mentioned.

According to Inc, Instagram stories are the BIG thing for customer acquisition in this particular case. Why? Well, because Instagram stories have a HUGE reach, and it’s purposely placed on the top of the feed for more visual excitement. That means, by showing your content or product in your stories, you’re getting free promo in front of thousands.

Now, for YouTube, the story is a bit different. Here, it’s all about content.

In fact, 1 billion hours worth of content is watched every day by over 2 billion users worldwide. Talk about power.

That means, your content (or repurposed user generated content) must be fire to reach the masses. But that’s also an important benefit: it’s free, it allows you to reach a huge audience, and video content is the present and future of marketing and advertising as a whole.

And, last but not least, we have LinkedIn.

Like Penta says, there are essential things to consider to implement customer acquisition strategies and increase brand awareness on LinkedIn, like keeping your profile updated, for example.

See, people find exciting thought leaders by conducting simple searches on LinkedIn’s explore bar, and getting traction there isn’t as difficult as most people think. The key is to share relatable content that spreads like wildfire, with LinkedIn users being highly engaged if the thought leader is of interest to them.

And you can also get found by using specific keywords across your profile, too. So LinkedIn should be on your to-do list if it isn’t yet.

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How to measure customer acquisition?

There are many key performance indicators to consider when measuring your customer acquisition strategy.

For example, Act mentions two key indicators to consider, which are the conversion rate and the customer acquisition cost.

Conversion rate is a widely used metric in marketing, and it’s the result of dividing the number of conversions by the total number of visitors. That way you’ll know if your message is compelling enough, or needs some work.

As for the customer acquisition cost, the story is similar. It’s the cost associated with your customer conversion journey and everything related to it in terms of costs. It usually equals the total of your expense divided by the number of new customers. Pretty simple.

How you track these depends on the customer acquisition method you are using. At Curastory, we calculate the return on advertising spend of your Creator Ad Reads as a ratio against how much you spent on those ad reads.

The importance of customer acquisition

So, we’ve talked about definitions, use cases, and key performance indicators to consider so far, but, the million-dollar question is… Why is customer acquisition so important?

Because your return on investment depends on it, that’s why.

If you can’t get a reliable, consistent, and repeatable way to measure and optimize your content in order to get new clients, you’ll struggle to pay the bills, which in turn will make it hard to focus on creating new content.

It’s a tough one to swallow, we know. But it’s not all that serious.

As a matter of fact, customer acquisition strategies are natural and straightforward for those who enjoy creating content, and by following each platform’s best practices, it should be easy peasy.

But, the most important reason why you should focus on customer acquisition is what happens next… customer retention.

That’s where the true magic happens.

By retaining customers, you’re building a loyal consumer base. You’re creating fans.

And it’s less expensive to have repeat customers buying than increasing your marketing budget to attract new customers every single time.

Some examples of brands that have a great customer acquisition strategy on social media

Class recognizes class, fam.

That’s why we’re gonna explore some of the most epic customer acquisition strategies we’ve seen on social media, like what Sony’s Playstation often does on Twitter.

Playstation is one of the world’s most-followed brands on the platform, and it’s because they mix engaging content with teasers, collabs, and so on. In this case, they took the hype around Shohei Ohtani’s awesome MLB campaign to promote their new video game.

Another great move came from Youtube’s star Mr. Beast. This content creator went full Willy Wonka promoting his Feastable chocolate bars, and actually invited some lucky winners to his chocolate factory. Sounds familiar?

And, for the finale, Facebook’s best-performing ad of all time: Purple Mattresses. Yeah, a mattress company. But, no wonder why – this content is literally unskippable.

In short, customer acquisition is a lifesaver

And by following these tips, you’ll rock your customer acquisition strategy to the next level.

Got any questions? You can always reach out.