If you are looking to attract new customers to your business, everything starts and ends with your customer acquisition plan.
Most businesses go into their customer acquisition process with ideas – like running paid ads, doing influencer marketing, and writing content – which are all great ideas.
But without an actual plan, those ideas tend to float from one to another without any real direction.
By only operating on ideas, instead of a plan, you’re shooting into the dark and are making it really hard to figure out what is actually going to help you get new customers.
That’s why you need a customer acquisition plan.
It can help keep your business focused and make it possible for you to track and measure the results of your acquisition strategies.
In this guide, we’re going to help you develop the ultimate customer acquisition plan so you’re never left shooting into the dark and always know where your next customer will come from.
What is a Customer Acquisition Plan?
If you’re not familiar, a customer acquisition plan or strategy focuses on helping you build brand awareness and bringing prospective customers into your business.
The ultimate goal for your acquisition plan is to generate new leads while the goal of your retention strategy is to ensure your existing customers stay happy, reducing churn and ensuring satisfaction.
It’s the outline that your business will use when you intend to attract and acquire new customers.
Which is different from acquisition ideas — like running ads, doing influencer marketing, or creating content.
A plan is comprehensive and covers all aspects of your acquisition strategy.
An idea, on the other hand, is an individual tactic or concept that fits within your overall strategy.
Your acquisition plan includes detailed analysis, budgeting, and performance metrics, where ideas typically do not dive into these details.
To help you see the difference, take a look at the chart below. It includes some of the metrics that you will be defining inside of your customer acquisition strategy:
| Aspect | Customer Acquisition Plan | Customer Acquisition Ideas |
|---|---|---|
| Definition | A comprehensive strategy outlining how to attract and acquire new customers. | Specific concepts or tactics used within the strategy to attract customers. |
| Scope | Broad and encompassing, covering all aspects of customer acquisition. | Narrow, focusing on individual tactics or concepts. |
| Detail and Complexity | Detailed, includes analysis, budgeting, and performance metrics. | Generally less detailed, focusing on creative or tactical elements. |
| Implementation | Requires a systematic approach and is implemented over a longer period. | Can be implemented quickly, often used to test or respond to immediate opportunities. |
| Resource Allocation | Involves careful planning of resources across various strategies. | Resource allocation may be more ad hoc or experimental. |
| Flexibility and Adaptation | Structured but allows for adjustments based on performance and market changes. | Highly flexible, can be changed or discarded quickly. |
| Focus | Long-term customer acquisition and sustainable growth. | Immediate engagement and customer interest. |
| Examples | Market research, setting acquisition goals, budget planning, channel strategy. | Running a social media campaign, offering a promotional discount, launching a referral program. |
You can see that just having an idea isn’t enough when you’re trying to be methodical about how you are growing your business.
Your ideas work great and should be included in your strategy but, when it comes to being able to measure the effectiveness of your strategy, you need to look at key metrics.
When you’re operating on an idea, alone, you run the risk of wasting a ton of money on marketing tactics that may not particularly resonate well with your ideal customers.
You also tend to create inconsistent messaging across platforms which further confuses your potential prospects and makes it harder to generate leads.
And, without clear objectives, it’s nearly impossible to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and know what is working or what isn’t working.
On the other side of that, though, with a clearly defined customer acquisition plan or strategy, you can effectively measure every aspect of the campaigns to ensure you’re staying profitable.
To make sure you’re being as effective as possible in your business, there are a handful of things you want to do while building your customer acquisition strategy.
Define Your Target Audience
For most businesses, the strategy revolves around selling to anyone and everyone with a credit card.
Unfortunately, that’s a strategy that will spread your budget way too thin and likely leave you with little-to-no real results in your business.
By doing that, you’re essentially selling to nobody.
This is why you need to specifically define who your ideal target audience is and understand who the perfect prospect for your offer, product, or service may be.
A target audience refers to the group of people who most likely want to purchase your offer. They are the group of people that you should focus your marketing and acquisition campaigns on.
Your target audience could be dictated by their age, gender, location, income, personal interests, or a wide range of other factors.
To start defining your own target audience, you’ll want to collect information on 3 key categories: their demographics, psychographics, and pain points/needs.
Demographic Analysis
Demographic analysis is a technique used to help you understand the age, gender, and other broad characteristics of specific groups of people.
This data is useful for helping you understand who to market to and for strategically planning your approach and future trends.
For example, a luxury car brand might target individuals aged 30 to 50 with high-income levels.
Or a skin rejuvenation company may target women aged 40-60 who live in the suburbs.
It’s pretty easy to find this information, too.
Google Analytics 4 has a wealth of free information about the different demographics visiting your website.
You can use it to determine the perfect demographics to target in your acquisition strategy.
Psychographic Analysis
Once you know the demographics of your target audience, it’s time to start analyzing the psychographics.
Psychographic analysis revolves around studying consumer behaviors based on characteristics like their goals, interests, desires, values, and lifestyle choices.
Psychographics help you understand your target customer’s values and emotions so that you can create more effective marketing campaigns and messaging.
For example, at ClickFunnels, we understand that businesses have a goal to maximize their ROI so we’ve created a calculator that helps them achieve that goal.
For us, this calculator generates new leads for our business.
Another great example is Liquid Death.
Their Instagram feed brilliantly captures the essence of their psychographics.
It’s a masterclass in knowing your audience: youthful, eco-conscious, and culturally savvy individuals with a love for humor and a penchant for the unconventional.
Each post resonates with an audience that’s unafraid to stand out and be different, mirroring the brand’s own bold stance against a seal of bland and conventional beverages.
To start digging into the psychographics of your target audience, you can visit Reddit forums related to your audience and become a fly on the wall.
This will let you see what problems they’re talking about and how they talk about them.
Then, in your own marketing, you can speak to your customers about how they currently solve their problems, what their big goals are with it, and how you can help them achieve those goals.
You can also check out your competitors and reverse engineer information about your ideal customers based on the strategies they use to target them.
Pain Points & Needs
The next bucket of information you’ll want to define in your acquisition strategy is your target audience’s pain points and needs.
Understanding this can help you write copy and ad creative that speaks directly to those pain points, compelling them to take an action — checking out your website or becoming a new lead.
To give you an example, a childcare center may realize that parents need flexible hours to accommodate varying work schedules and use that information in their advertising.
As another example, check out this ad from ClickMinded:
ClickMinded knows that their audience wants to hire virtual assistants to help roll out their marketing.
They also know that marketing agencies cost thousands (or 10’s of thousands) of dollars per month.
By directly calling out the pain points that their target audience has — being able to effectively train these virtual assistants — their ads are able to generate leads for their business.
They also speak about how they help train the virtual assistants with SOPs, templates, and checklists, to ensure anyone who hires a VA can effectively plan, execute, and scale up digital marketing campaigns.
Identifying Where Your Audience Hangs Out
To get started gathering this information, you’ll want to identify where your audience is already hanging out online.
You want to know where they spend their time so you can become a fly on the wall, collecting key information you can use in your acquisition strategy.
This could include online platforms, such as Instagram, LinkedIn, forums, or Reddit.
It could also include specific influencers, blogs, and websites that you know they frequent.
If they gather offline, depending on your business, you may find them in coffee shops, coworking spaces, local events, or other outlets.
You’ll want to know where they spend their time, though, so you can do research on each of the buckets we’ve just mentioned.
Understanding where they hang out will also open up new avenues for you to advertise when you’re ready to start rolling out your acquisition strategy.
Set Your Goals
After you understand who you’re going to target with your campaigns, the next step is setting realistic short-term and long-term goals.
Setting these goals will help you measure the success of your plans.
It’s also going to help you continuously grow and improve as you gain more insight into who you’re targeting, what makes them become a lead, and what converts them into a new customer.
These goals will become the milestones that you work toward, giving you a sense of accomplishment whenever they are met.
And if you don’t meet them, you know specifically where to start looking in order to optimize and improve the effectiveness of your campaigns.
To get started, you want to use SMART objectives.
If you aren’t familiar with the term, SMART is an acronym used for setting goals.
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time-bound
For a goal to be specific, you want to answer questions like what should be accomplished? Who is responsible for ensuring it is accomplished? What steps will need to be taken to accomplish it?
For measurable goals, you want to know which metrics you’re going to track. You can use the chart from the beginning of this guide as a good starting point.
The next step is ensuring they’re achievable. You want your goals to be realistic by asking yourself whether or not the goal is something that your team can reasonably achieve.
As you’re setting goals you also want to make sure they’re relevant. Is what you’re doing going to help you move forward with the bigger picture? Why are you setting the goal in the first place?
Then, you want to tie them to a specific timeframe. You want your team to be on the same page about when you expect to reach the goal and how long it should take to achieve it.
Inside your customer acquisition strategy, each of these will give you a good starting baseline to build from, ensuring that you’re being as effective as possible in your approach.
To give you an example, let’s assume you’re trying to acquire 300 new customers from the health and fitness market by the end of Q2.
You intend to use leveraged and targeted social media marketing campaigns featuring fitness influencers and paid advertising.
You aim to generate 500 leads through the campaign with a 5% conversion rate, which would translate to a 10% increase from your current conversion rate.
The campaign will be relevant to your goal of expanding into the health and wellness market and will be measured through your CRM system by tracking lead sources and overall conversion rates.
With this as the foundation of your customer acquisition strategy, you now have a set of SMART goals that you and your team can work to accomplish.
You’ve defined the specific goals you want to achieve and have something to measure your success up against.
You’ve also ensured they are achievable based on your past performance and that the goals are relevant to what you’re trying to achieve.
Finally, the goals are tied to a specific time period, Q2 in this case, so you know how quickly you need to work in order to roll out your customer acquisition strategy.
Choose Your Customer Acquisition Channels
Once you have those goals set, you’ll need to start choosing your customer acquisition channels.
An acquisition channel could be anything from social media influencer marketing, paid advertising campaigns, billboard marketing, radio and TV marketing, email marketing, or any combination of those.
Based on the research you’ve done in previous steps, determining where your target audience hangs out, you’ll know where your campaigns will generate the highest return – with the best targeting.
To get started, you’ll want to define your marketing goals.
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What’s Your Marketing Goal?
The first step is deciding which part of your marketing funnel you want to work on.
Then ask yourself a few key questions:
Do you want to attract potential customers by building brand awareness?
Do you want to convert existing warm leads into new customers?
Or do you want to reduce churn and retain existing customers?
Depending on which step you choose, your marketing campaign and acquisition goal will change.
To help you understand which channels may be appropriate for you based on the decisions you’ve made, take a look at the chart below:
| Build Brand Awareness | Convert Leads To Customers | Retain Customers |
|---|---|---|
| Content Marketing | Email Marketing | Content Marketing |
| Podcast Marketing | Social Media (Paid) | Social Media Marketing |
| Social Media (Paid and Organic) | Paid search | Email Marketing |
| Influencer Marketing | Offer Evaluation | |
| Digital PR | Customer Service | |
| Paid Search |
What’s Your Budget?
Then, after understanding what your goal is, you’ll want to determine the budget you have available to hit that goal.
Marketing has expenses apart from just your advertising costs.
Even if you send a simple email to your subscribers, you will likely use an email marketing platform that charges a monthly subscription fee.
Understanding these costs is crucial to ensuring the success of your campaigns.
For example, content marketing is great if you’re low on budget and typically only requires a decent microphone to record YouTube videos and podcasts.
Paid search campaigns, though, require significantly more budget which can become an issue if you’re not generating the revenue (or profitably generating the revenue) to cover those advertising expenses.
What are Your Skills?
Mapping the channels you’ll use with your goals and budget will help narrow down your options.
Once you understand what those options are, start listing them and begin mapping the skills that you and your team have — skills that will make your effort through those options as effective as possible.
You can eliminate the channels that you don’t have the skills for or the budget to hire an external team member or resource to assist in making that channel effective.
Be realistic with where you’re at in business and in the skills you’ve already developed to ensure you’re able to monitor the potential outcomes on the channels you’re using to acquire customers.
What is the Awareness Stage of Your Target Audience?
The key in choosing the right marketing channel revolves around knowing when to offer what and how.
For example, if your audience is already aware that your product exists, it doesn’t make sense to introduce it on a podcast.
Instead, you can speak to the features and benefits of your product and how it stacks up against your competitor’s products or why it makes sense to choose you over them.
You could use email to reach them directly and give them an incentive to buy instead of wasting time and energy hosting a podcast and letting them know the product exists.
To understand awareness stages, take a look at this chart:
| Unaware | Problem Aware | Solution Aware |
|---|---|---|
| If people are not aware of the problem, doing content marketing won’t be of any use… since no one is searching for the problem Go for paid search or paid social media | If people have a problem they are aware of but don’t have any solution AND are searching for it, definitely pick content and optimize it with SEO | If people are aware of possible solutions but not aware that your product is also one of them, then you can use podcasts |
| Product Aware | Most Aware | Customer |
|---|---|---|
| If they are aware that your product exists as a solution to their problem, then you need to build enough trust for them to choose you over others Here, go for influencer marketing, Digital PR, or email marketing | If people are convinced with your product but need to see the right offer to choose you, then go for email marketing | To retain your loyal customers, use content and email marketing. Engage with them on social media. |
Understanding this will help ensure that your messaging matches where they’re at in the buying cycle.
That will ultimately save you time, money, and energy and help you hit your goals faster.
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Nurture Your Leads
The overarching goal for your customer acquisition strategy shouldn’t be just acquiring customers.
Instead, you want to acquire customers and then convert them into advocates for your business.
Nurturing your leads helps you take them from one stage to the next without being pushy about making the sale or getting them to buy.
The end goal is getting them to refer your products and services to other people just like them.
Your leads will pass through different stages before becoming advocates for your business, so you’ll want to understand that each of those stages looks like.
To see what we mean, check out the image below:
Each lead will move through your marketing funnel based on your approach to them.
One of the best ways to nurture your leads through each stage is using automated email sequences.
These automated sequences are a series of emails that are sent out based on specific triggers and user behaviors.
By providing timely messages, you keep your leads engaged and keep your brand top of mind.
The automation lets you nurture leads at scale and keeps your messaging highly relevant to your lead’s current interest levels.
Here’s an example of an automated email sequence:
You can see it uses a mix of informational content, personalized engagement, and promotional offers, all while reinforcing the core values and offers of the Calm brand.
Then, there’s this example from Russell Brunson:
He adopts a storytelling approach to take leads on a journey from where they’re at right now to where he knows they want to go.
Then, the final email is a message to get a free ClickFunnels subscription.
Which, if you haven’t already claimed yours, click here to start your free 14-day trial now.
When you subscribe, you can create your own automated email sequence without the hefty price tag.
As a member, you get access to dozens of professionally designed, high-converting email templates ready to plug into your business.
You can fully customize each email using our drag-and-drop editor to make it perfectly match your branding and marketing goals.
To get started now, click here to begin your free 14-day ClickFunnels trial.
How to Check for Profitability
Then, after you’ve implemented your nurture sequence and have your customer acquisition plan in place, you’ll want to start monitoring it for profitability.
To measure your profitability, you’ll need to calculate your customer acquisition cost — or CAC.
Your CAC can be found by taking your total costs spent on acquiring new customers and dividing it by the number of customers you acquired.
Your total costs involved include everything from your marketing and advertising expenses, salaries of your team, costs of marketing and sales tools, and any other overhead directly related to acquiring a new customer over a specific period of time.
To help you understand the math, let’s assume you spend $50,000 on advertising.
Then you spend $30,000 on salaries for your sales and marketing team.
You also incur $10,000 in costs for your sales and marketing software.
In the same quarter, you’ve acquired 200 new customers.
This would be calculated as:
CAC = ($50,000 + $30,000 + $10,000) / 200 = $450 per new customer.
Then, calculate your CLTV, or customer lifetime value.
This is the value of each customer throughout their entire relationship with your company.
To get this figure, look over the history of your company and determine how many customers you’ve generated and your total revenue.
Then, divide the total revenue by the number of customers you’ve acquired.
For instance, if you’ve generated $1,000,000 in revenue from 500 customers, your CLTV is $1,000,000 / 500 or $2,000 CLTV.
In an ideal world, your CLTV is higher than your CAC.
A good benchmark to follow is a 3:1 ratio, meaning you’re earning 3 times as much from each customer as you’re spending to acquire them.
This equation helps you determine how much you can afford to spend to acquire a customer while still maintaining your profit margins.
As a ClickFunnels member, we help you track the customer acquisition process and monitor your acquisition costs so you can quickly determine whether or not you’re acquiring them profitably.
If you aren’t already using ClickFunnels in your customer acquisition strategy, you can click here to get started now with a free 14-day trial.
Then, before you start ramping up your acquisition, go through each of the steps in this guide to ensure you’re not flying blind or wasting money, time, and energy growing your business.