How to use Social Media to Improve Customer Acquisition13 min read

The advent of the internet and the increasing popularity of social media continues to change the customer acquisition narrative. In the modern world, users live on the internet; more specifically on social media platforms. It seems social media is slowly becoming a basic need; something that people cannot live without. Statistic from Statista shows that there are over 3 billion active users on social media on a daily basis.

With these numbers, it means that social media can be a powerful place to expose your brand, generate leads and acquire new customers. It is not always as easy as it’s said, but with a few social marketing tips, you can turn around your social media customer acquisition rates.

How to use Social Media to Improve Customer Acquisition 4

Social Media is about Sharing

Web 2.0 is the umbrella term for interactive online applications. They are not about selling; they are about sharing. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are social networks for sharing comments, videos, photos, links and general life happenings. LinkedIn, Viadeo and Weedle are business directories for professional information. YouTube is for videos; Delicious is for bookmarks; Flickr is for photographs; Tumblr is for blogs; SlideShare is for presentations; and Digg is for sharing the best content from across all these sites and more.

While such energetic and enthusiastic sharing may seem a bit on the hippie side for the profit-focused mind, it can certainly pay to get in on the action. The key is to share with purpose and within boundaries, to get people talking about you and using your information in their own online conversations and searches, and to get people talking to you and responding. As well as sharing, be sure to listen and remain responsive throughout online dialogues.

Keeping Social Media Networking Purposeful

Be clear about what you want to achieve – communication with existing customers, reaching new customers, building your brand, finding new staff or suppliers – and select the right social media applications to engage with your target audience. For example, Facebook and Twitter could be good for reaching consumers; while LinkedIn and Viadeo may be the best way to build business networks and find staff.

To enhance relationships with existing customers, find out what they are doing online and join in. Consider your current online marketing activities and how they will integrate. Take a joined up approach by posting links across your online marketing tools – from website to e-newsletter to Facebook to LinkedIn, and back again. Keep your messages purposeful too. Remember it is not about hard sales messages, but sharing useful information.

How can you leverage social media platforms for your customer acquisition strategy?

1. Social ads are still relevant

A research done in 2017 indicated that social ads contribution to website’s traffic from non-customers was 3 times more than customers. These statistics imply that social media users are increasingly taking note of social ads. Use this to your advantage and increase your engagements with your potential buyers.
Most social media platforms offer paid ads. Ride on these ads to promote your content and free offers to increase the number of your subscriber’s leads.

2. Increase your blog traffic by posting links on social media

Posting a link to your blog doesn’t guarantee that new visits on your blog! Surprised? Users may like your content, but sometimes what pushes them to click the link in your request to do so. Therefore encourage this by including a Call to Action in your post. Request them to click on the link to visit your site and get more content. Maximize on the opportunity to request for a purchase of your product or build your email lists for a later follow up on your leads.

3. Maximize on influencer marketing

Influencers are people who have a huge social media following and their opinions are highly respected by their followers as they have over time established themselves as experts in their fields. Due to the trust their followers have established in them, they will be a great tool to vouch for your product and increase your brand awareness which translates to more sales.
Their job will be to provide social proof about the value of your products. To achieve maximum benefits from this approach, ensure your partner with the right people.

4. Encourage your users to be your brand advocates.

When your loyal users give feedback about their experiences with your products, potential buyers will most definitely include this feedback in their decisions to buy your product. Users tend to relate more to a real user experience more than adverts, hence majority will be moved to action by what other people are saying about your product. Therefore leverage on this strategy by encouraging your existing customers to advocate for you by sharing their experiences with your brand.

5. Provision of top notch customer service on social media

The modern-day customer has realized that social media customer service is more appealing as engagements with the brand are almost instantaneous. Indeed statistics show that 60% of customers who raise issues with their brands on social media expect a response in one hour. Leverage on social media customer support to exceed customer’s expectations on a resolution of issues and create a better experience with your brand. Remember the better the experience, the more loyal the customer will be and the better the brand advocate they will be.
After understanding the several ways to leverage on social media, let’s look at the customer acquisition costs associated with different channels as this information will be relevant for your budget.

Customer Acquisition Cost per channel

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For your business to continue growing, you have to bring in a new customer or make an extra sale. The expense relating to this is the Customer Acquisition cost. Just like every other acquisition strategy, you want to optimize your ROI from your acquisition efforts. CAC differs from platform to platform.

1. Search Engine Optimization

SEO is the process of optimizing your website content for higher rankings by search engines. The objective is to design your site and content in a way that users looking for relevant business content will see your site first. To calculate the cost you sum up all your SEO efforts and divide by the number of conversions as per your SEO analytics. Generally, initial set up costs are between $4000 to $10000 and an extra monthly cost of $1000 working with an internet marketing firm.

2) Pay Per Click advertising

PPC is a paid advertising technique in which you provide the keywords or phrases to be used for lookup by search engines. The advantage of this method of customer acquisition is that once the ad has been put up, you can expect almost immediately relevant and targeted traffic to be driven to your site. This results in increased conversion rates boosting your sales and revenue. Initial set up costs range from $4000 to $10000. Additional charges including a few cents anytime your ad being clicked. To measure CAC, divide total PPC spend with the total number of new customers earned.

3) Direct Mail

It’s is the cheapest customer acquisition technique as the cost incurred is around $52 per mail order. Its downside is that it may not be cost effective as potential customers may flag your mail as junk and end up in the trash. In addition, it’s hard to measure your CAC as there are no known ways to establish how many customers you acquire through this method.
It’s important still to keep testing different ideas and see if there’s a way to reduce your CAC. Now that you are now informed about CAC on various channels, it’s time to look into statics.
What are the numbers saying?
Let’s dive into this by exploring the largest social media platform

Facebook Statistics on Customer Acquisition

With over 2 billion users, Facebook is the largest social media platform as at today. As earlier highlighted, by leveraging on paid adverts on Facebook you can drive more traffic to your site. The reverse as well as possible. For example, you can link users to your Facebook page by redirecting them there from your contact page on your website.
Also, share more fun or educational content to increase potential customer engagement and familiarity with your brand. Finally, do not forget to create a wow experience for your customers so that they can turn out to be your brand ambassadors on Facebook.

Statistics

Some interesting facts about Facebook are as below:
The numbers have it! This is a glimpse into the opportunities available on social media. Whatever effort you need to put to leverage on this, do it today! Part of this effort is the customer acquisition cost.

How much do you invest in customer acquisition on Facebook?

Ad spend on Facebook customer acquisition has been on the rise as more brands leverage on the numbers on the platform. It has been established that generally, most businesses’ CAC is less than $10.
On the higher end, a few businesses reported a CAC greater than $100. Behind these numbers, most of the businesses have a story of how it has lowered their CAC and increased engagement with potential buyers. Let’s look into a few of them.

1. Your audience: Who are they?

It is important to know your audience, who are they? What are their pain points? What are their behaviors? By answering these questions you will be able to know how to engage them better, keep them on the platform hence lowering your CAC. After all, those are the most importations objective on a social media platform.

2. Targeting and segmentation

While it’s key to ensure none of your potential customers is left out, it’s equally important to narrow down to your specific audience.
There are a variety of ways to do this:

a) Funnel Segmentation

Isolate the channel or area of your business with more struggles so as to do a better budget allocation.

b) Geo-targeting

Identify the target physical area of your potential customers and focus your ads with matching geo locations to reduce ad expense on physical areas which do not resonate with your product.

c) Interest and behavioral targeting

Analyze data related to your potential customers’ interaction with your ads and as the engagement proceeds, you can put up ads that target customers who have shown an equal level of interest while customizing the ad different for those who have shown little interest.

d) Be testing always

Make testing a continuous effort to measure whether the target focused on is your optimal target and if not keep testing target after another, until you achieve the lowest CAC or the intended goal for your segmentation.

e) Look-alike audiences

Leverage on this strategy by targeting potential customers who exhibit similar behaviors to your existing customers. This way there’s a high possibility that your target audience will easily be converted to customers hence lowering your CAC.

Let’s further explore how to lower CAC with Facebook Ads

Reduce customer acquisition cost with social media

1. Scale your budget well

Increase your ad spend by 20% to 30% in a day as a massive increase may not be effective and you could end up increasing your budget hence increasing your CAC.

2. Narrow down your target audience

A broad audience could be the reason why your CAC is still high! Ensure to combine your look-alike target audience with interest targeting to reduce irrelevant lookalike audience.

3. Use Lookalikes to target a new audience segment

If your CTR is low, you can improve this rate by using Facebook Look Alike feature to create a new target audience segment of the audience who show similar behaviors to your existing audience. Ensure also that your Ad split tests are correctly set up so as to achieve the most optimal Look Alike audience.

4. Ensure your Facebook ad and Landing page have some consistency

If your ads have been performing optimally in terms of acquiring customers, it’s time to work at improving the CTR. Achieve this by creating consistency between your ads and the landing page. Let users have a similar experience while interacting with both; this can be in terms of color patterns, fonts, messaging, etc.
After lowering your costs, let’s look at a number of social media practices that can help improve your customer acquisition strategy

Tips to improve your social media customer acquisition strategy

Engagement improves customer acquisition cost

1. Engaging the target audience using content

To attract your potential customers’ attention, engagement is key. Therefore ensure you create high-quality visual content and unique content that makes your brand stand out. Also, ride on influencers as your social media advocates and incorporate brand memes in your content if this fits with your organization. Keep your customers happy and satisfied by providing a personalized experience.

2. Pay attention to what your target audience is saying

How do they feel about your brand? Why do they feel so? If you understand these two aspects, then you will adjust your marketing strategy to fit that, which will drive fast acquisitions.

3) Avail immediate opportunities to make a purchase

If you are able to convert a potential customer immediately why not take the risk? Ensure that you include such content in the different social media platforms. For example, adding a shop section on your Facebook page.

4) Measure and optimize campaigns in real time

Social media currently incorporates tools to measure a campaign’s impact and success across different channels. Maximize these tools to refine your marketing campaigns depending on your audience’s feedback.
Next, let’s look at tools that can be used to boost your customer acquisition efforts

Social proof

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Have you ever wanted to buy an item online especially, then immediately after checking the price, you scrolled down to the product reviews? That defines social proof. The influence of other peoples actions and attitudes on our own behavior. It rallies behind the idea that if the majority are doing it, then it’s right.
How does social proof impact your customer acquisition strategy?

1) Boosting your sales

Social proof drives faster customer acquisition and lowers CAC in that potential customers easily find comfort and encouragement to buy your product once they’ve read your product reviews.

2) Improves customer experience

Social proof helps businesses to predict how certain moves will be perceived by their customers. Therefore this helps the businesses to align its platforms’ experience to always meet the customer’s needs, giving the customer a better experience.

3) Improves email marketing

Again, due to the insights shared by customers through their reviews, brands are able to get a fuller sense of what is relevant and worthy sharing more consistently. This, therefore, informs the contents of email marketing campaigns.

Create Social Media Boundaries for the Business

Decide who in the business is responsible for your online activities. Social media may be largely free to use, but you and your staffs’ time is not. You need to get the balance right; recognizing that it is time consuming, while ensuring that it doesn’t become time wasting.

Have a strict policy on who can represent the business online and the type of information and commentary that is and is not acceptable. This means no negative comments and no selling, but lots of sharing of useful information and constructive dialogue. If you are opening up your business to social media networking, you will need to put a policy in place on personal use too as this activity does come with a health warning – it has the potential to be highly addictive.

Conclusion

Social media is a powerful avenue for customer acquisition and if properly utilized can help you acquire more customers at a lower cost. It is crucial to keep the needs and expectations of your ideal customer in mind so as to achieve maximum benefits from your social media customer acquisition efforts. Remember, if you are not doing it, most probably your competitor is!

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