Top 10 Marketing Strategies to Finally Acquire More Customers

Marketing is vital to gaining more leads and customers. And ultimately, marketing helps you to reach your revenue targets.

However, without the right marketing strategies, you’ll waste your efforts and fail to achieve your intended results.

How do you gain more qualified leads and customers through marketing?

In this guide, we’ll go through 10 strategies you can start using today.

1. Create valuable content for your audience

You’ve probably heard the statement “content runs the web” before. Well, it’s true. 

Whatever type of marketing you engage in, you’ll need valuable content to achieve results. Now, the definition of valuable content will differ depending on who you ask. 

What I’ll tell you though, is to look at it from your audience’s view. To your audience, a valuable piece of content must be able to:

• Provide the needed information about a topic
• Answer a viewer’s questions
• Guide them on how to solve a problem or take an action

With valuable pieces of content on your website, you build trust with your audience and turn some of them into leads. 

Furthermore, you can use content to nurture leads in your sales funnel to turn them into customers. 

What are some actions you need to take to create valuable content? 

Create a buyer persona

Even for a great marketer, marketing to the wrong audience will lead to poor results. This is why you must have an ideal buyer in mind to create a piece of content that can attract them. 

According to a study, personas can make your website 2 to 5 times more effective for your ideal audience. 

Generally, there are 2 ways to create a buyer persona. You can create a profile of the type of buyer you want. Alternatively, you can look at your customer base and create a profile that fits the majority of them. 

See a buyer persona template below from the Content Marketing Institute:

Understand user intent

When a visitor or potential lead views a piece of content, they have a reason for doing so. This is the user intent. 

User intent is usually either of these 4:

• Informational intent
• Navigational intent
• Commercial intent
• Transactional intent

While creating your content, it’s vital to know which intent you’re targeting as this dictates the tone of your content. 

Repurpose content

The written content is popular and common to any website you visit. But are you exploiting other forms of content? 

If you already have written content on your website, you can repurpose to other forms of content to attract more viewers. These forms include:

• Video
• Infographics 
• Podcasts
• Webinars 

With these pieces of content, you can reach parts of your audience that prefer visual content. 

2. Optimize your website to rank high on search engines

Ranking high on search engines is a vital part of your marketing strategy. Because search engines are a source of targeted traffic. 

However, you need to optimize your content for the right keywords and rank for them to get the best results from organic traffic. Here are some points to keep in mind:

Carry out keyword research

Ranking for the wrong keywords may bring a huge amount of organic traffic to your website. But these visitors are unlikely to become customers. 

The first question to ask is: what possible keywords can my potential customers put in the search box? Then you can use keyword research tools to validate the keyword you have in mind or find similar keywords you should target instead. 

For keyword research, you’ll find details about a keyword such as:

• Search volume
• Keyword difficulty
• Click-through rate
• Cost per click (CPC) 
• Paid difficulty

These details will help you decide if a keyword is worth targeting. By the end of your keyword research, you should have a list of keywords you want to target. 

Add keywords to your page

After compiling a list of target keywords, you need to add these keywords to important parts of your page. Some vital parts to have your keyword are:

• URL
• Headline
• First paragraph
• Image name
• Image alt text

After adding your keyword to these parts, you should write your content as naturally as possible. Know that adding too many keywords, that is keyword stuffing, could have the opposite effect of what you want. 

It could get you a penalty. 

See an example from Backlinko of adding a keyword to a page:

Optimize website user experience 

Let’s say you manage to get people to your website. 

But people get a poor user experience when they land on it. 

They’ll simply bounce off and navigate to another website. If this occurs too often, Google and other search engines will push your page down the rankings. 

The two basic aspects to optimize on your website are: 

• Website speed 
• Mobile-friendliness

You can test your website speed with Pingdom and follow its recommendations to improve your page speed. 

The Google mobile-friendly test tool allows you to test how mobile-friendly your website is. You also get recommendations to implement to improve upon this aspect. 

Local SEO

If you run a local business, then you’ll have to optimize your website for people around your locality. They’re always looking for businesses to patronize and showing up for your business terms will give you an advantage. 

Some actions to take are:

• Add your business to local listings: adding your business to local listings like Google My Business, Yelp, and others will help to establish your business’s credibility. 
• Encourage online reviews: before people buy from your local business, they want to know what your past customers think about your service. That’s why you should encourage your satisfied customers to leave reviews about your business on review sites.

3. Begin a guest posting campaign

Whether you’re just starting your business, or you’ve been doing it for years, your business needs more exposure. And you can get it through guest posting. 

When you publish guest posts on other websites, it gives you access to a new, and often bigger, audience. With guest posts, you can establish your authority as an expert and reach more potential leads and customers. 

First of all, you need to find guest posting opportunities in your niche. These are often websites bigger and with an audience similar to yours. 

After finding websites suitable for your guest posts, you can send a pitch about a topic that will be beneficial to their audience and that they’re yet to cover. By doing this, you increase your chances of getting accepted. 

Your guest post should be about providing the maximum value possible for your host’s audience. One good way to capture leads through your guest posts is to link to a landing page in your author bio rather than your homepage. 

See a guest post here on ConvertKit where Brad Hussy explained how he used ConvertKit to sell his online course. 

In his author bio below the guest post, he added a link for readers to subscribe to his free email course. 

Clicking the link takes you to a landing page where you can provide your details in exchange for the course. 

This is one way to capture leads through guest posts. 

4. Connect with your audience on social media

With 3.356 billion users, social media is a platform where you can reach your ideal audience. Added to that, people use social media to find products online. 

For example, The Internet Trends Report found that 55% of people bought products online after social media discovery.

However, the huge user base also means that there’s a lot of noise on social media. 

How do you cut through the noise and capture leads and customers on social media? 

Focus on a few social media channels

Based on your buyer persona, your ideal audience has favorite social media channels where they hang out. You should focus on these few social media websites. 

Because these are the channels that will produce the majority of the results you need. 

Engage with followers

Social media is mainly for interactions. While you want to share content with your followers, you should also interact with them. 

You can do this by responding to their comments, resharing customers’ posts, and liking their posts. This way, you can build a better connection and trust with your audience. 

Share visuals

Over the years, videos and images have become popular on social media. When you consider that the brain absorbs information from visuals 60,000 times faster than text, then it makes sense to use visuals in your updates.

In fact, your audience expects it. In a HubSpot study, 54% of consumers expect videos from businesses on social media. 

Use the right tools

To get the best out of social media, you need the right tools. Some aspects of your social media activities where you need tools are:

• Social media management 
• Social media content creation
• Social media content curation 
• Social media analytics

These tools will help your team collaborate, schedule posts ahead, and carry out other tasks to improve your productivity. 

By using Twitter lead generation cards that help marketers build their email lists on Twitter, Webtrends accelerated their lead acquisition by 996%.

5. Use segmented email campaigns to nurture leads

In most cases, a lead will enter into your sales funnel at the top. But no matter what stage of your sales funnel, you need to nurture your leads until they become customers.

Years ago, you can send a blast email to all your email subscribers. Now, you need to send emails to each subscriber according to their interest. 

With automated email service providers, you can segment your subscribers based on their interests. How do you detect their interests?

Your email software will detect this based on how they interact with your messages. You can set triggers for email sequences during your campaigns.

These email sequences help you to nurture your leads and pull them further into your sales funnel. Ultimately, you can turn these leads into customers.

The beauty of segmented email campaigns is that you can set it up once and it will continue working for a long time.

See an email in one of Jon Morrow’s automated email sequences promoting one of his courses. 

Through this email sequence, Jon Morrow has been able to make more than $10,000 monthly by converting his leads. 

6. Target visitors with Google ad remarketing

Very few people will visit your website for the first time and convert. In fact, Ad Roll estimates that 98% of people who visit your website for the first time will leave without buying.

Do you lose all these unconverted visitors forever?

Not if you use ad remarketing.

With Google ad remarketing, you can target people who have visited your website and left without converting. These people are already aware of your service and are more likely to click on your ad.

When you bring these visitors back to your website, you can present an attractive offer to aid conversion.

You can even go further by using dynamic ad marketing. This is especially useful if you run an ecommerce website to reduce cart abandonment.

Dynamic ad remarketing allows you to send ads based on the product a visitor has viewed without buying. You can then present a new offer that’s likely to bring the visitor back to complete their purchase.

By using dynamic remarketing ads, Sierra Trading Post increased its conversions by 5 times. 

7. Use customer relationship management software to follow up with leads and customers

Why do 91% of companies with over 11 employees use customer relationship management (CRM) software?

One of the reasons is that a CRM tool gives you an overview of your leads, their activities, and their stage in your sales funnel. With this tool, you can schedule future actions of sales reps in following up with a lead.

Another important function of CRM software is that it helps to improve collaboration between your marketing and sales team. Without proper collaboration, it’s difficult for the sales team to close hot leads delivered by the marketing team.

Because the sales team usually lacks some pieces of information about the prospect.

With CRM software, every member of the marketing and sales team assigned to a lead can get all the information needed.

8. Engage in an influencer campaign

One way to reach a larger audience is to start an influencer campaign. Apart from that, influencers have built a reputation over the years in their industry that can be beneficial to your business. 

Due to the trust influencers have established with their followers, their recommendations are trusted and usually lead to more sales for businesses. 

There are 2 major types of influencers you can use for your marketing campaigns. These are:

Micro Influencers

These are influencers with a lower number of followers than popular celebrities. But micro influencers are usually popular in a particular niche where they’ve built expertise over the years. 

Even though they have a lower follower count, they’re popular among their followers. As a result of this, their recommendations are taken seriously. 

If you sell a product in a small niche, a micro influencer will be a better fit for your campaigns as you can easily reach your ideal audience. 

Macro Influencers

These are popular celebrities usually in the entertainment industry. Macro influencers have a wide range of followers due to their popularity. 

Considering this, their followers also have a wide range of interests. The most suitable campaigns for these influencers are for products people use daily like shoes, clothes, food, etc. 

See an example of an influencer campaign by Airbnb where the company provides accommodation for celebrities:

9. Use lead magnets on your landing pages

To capture leads and customers effectively on your website, you need landing pages. And not only that, but you also need many of them. 

HubSpot found that when companies increased their landing pages from 10 to 15, it led to a boost in their lead generation by 55%.

When you consider that landing pages are created to convert its visitors, then it’s an addition that will benefit your business. Despite this, your landing page doesn’t automatically convert its visitors. 

In fact, a WordStream study found that the average landing page conversion rate is 2.35%. To put it simply, there’s a big room to improve your landing page conversion rates. 

One effective way to do this is lead magnets. Lead magnets provide immediate value to solve your visitors’ problem. While creating a lead magnet, you need to make it short and valuable to your ideal audience almost immediately. 

Some examples of lead magnets are:

• Ebooks
• Webinars
• Videos
• Checklist 
• Discount
• Toolkit
• Cheatsheet
• Free trial

With lead magnets, your landing page visitors are exchanging their personal information for immediate value. 

See an example of a toolkit below from Trello:

This will guide a beginner about how to use the tool. Below is another example of a landing page from Bidsketch providing a free trial in exchange for the potential customer’s information. 

See a landing page on Digital Marketer displaying a lead magnet that would attract Facebook marketers:

With this lead magnet, marketers can solve a problem in no time. And through this, Digital Marketer acquired 35,859 leads in 60 days. 

10. Carry out A/B tests on your landing pages

Since there’s no perfect landing page, you need to carry out A/B tests to continually optimize your page for better conversions. 

With A/B tests, you can test different elements of your landing pages and see how they affect conversions. When a test leads to a positive result, you can keep the best variation of your page. 

However, if your test leads to a poorer conversion, you can keep the former version of your page. The best practice is to continually test your landing pages for the period of its existence. 

Another point to keep in mind is that you should only test a single element of your page at a time. This way, you can account for the changes responsible for the change in conversions. 

By carrying out a series of A/B tests on its landing page, TruckersReport got a 79.3% increase in conversion rates. 

When AmeriFirst tested a version of its landing page where the navigation bar was removed, they got a 40% increase in conversion rates. 

Conclusion

When you engage in marketing strategies for your business, your main aim is to capture qualified leads and turn them into customers. 

Of course, you don’t need to use all the strategies outlined here before you get your intended results. But you can go through them and use the ones applicable to your business at the moment. 

And if you want to write more valuable and compelling pieces of content, I offer digital marketing writing services just to meet your needs.