Customer acquisition is the lifeblood of any business. It’s the driving force behind revenue and overall business growth.
It’s also extremely competitive and more expensive than ever — customer acquisition cost (CAC) has increased more than 60% in just the past six years. Sounds daunting, right?
It’s definitely a challenge in today’s oversaturated digital marketplace, where every company has websites, blogs, paid ads, social media, and more. But that same marketplace offers a big opportunity to attack customer acquisition with content — and not just any content.
We’re talking high-quality, user-focused, SEO optimized, unique, innovative content that grabs attention and converts web visitors into paying customers.
The thing is, pretty much every company knows that digital content is important. But far fewer of them are staying laser-focused on creating content that actually performs rather than just going through the motions. Getting smart about your content puts you one step ahead of your competition and acquires customers more quickly and affordably.
Ready to learn how to do it? Let’s get started.
Quick Takeaways
- Great content drives customer acquisition by building brand trust, an important motivator of purchase decisions.
- You can optimize your content strategy for customer acquisition by creating content for every stage of the buyer journey.
- Brands can capitalize on existing content by continually optimizing their best performing posts and webpages.
- Gated content like high-value lead magnets drives acquisition by capturing contact information.
- Social proof is another important creator of brand trust and assures customers your brand will deliver on its promises.
The connection between customer acquisition and content
Like savvy companies leveraging digital opportunities to find and convert customers, consumers are smart when it comes to choosing brands and making purchases. Traditional marketing tactics of the past — catchy taglines, salesy language and the like — are not enough anymore to capture their interest.
This dilemma? It’s why content has become so important to customer acquisition.
Consumers are not just looking for the brand with the best marketing slogan of the moment — they’re looking for brands they can trust. Research has found that 81% of consumers cite brand trust as an important factor in their buying decisions. They rated it above any other company factor or attribute outside of direct product quality and value.
To boot, the same study found that 76% of consumers pay attention to ads from brands they trust, versus only 48% for brands they don’t trust.
Where do consumers go to establish the trust they value so highly? Your content. By creating and publishing consistent, high-quality content, you establish credibility and brand authority, build your brand’s personality, and provide value for consumers that tells them your brand can deliver what they need.
How to ace customer acquisition with content
Align your content with the buyer journey
You might hear that any traffic is good traffic when it comes to website visitors. To some extent that can be true, especially when your company is new and your main goal is increasing awareness. But when it comes to powering customer acquisition with content, you need to get intentional.
That means matching your content up with your buyer’s journey.
As your buyer moves through the sales funnel, the content that best matches the intent of their visit to your website will change. Someone doing their first Google search on a product or service they need is likely looking for more information about the problem they’re experiencing, meaning content like your top-of-the-funnel blog posts would be really relevant.
Someone later in the stages of the buying process might be looking for confirmation that your brand is indeed the one to choose, and that person might be better convinced by a whitepaper or in-depth case study.
Here’s a great visual from Hubspot to help you think more about the kinds of content that belong in each stage:
When you’re thinking about aligning your content with the buyer journey, you always want to think of two things:
- Giving potential buyers the information they need at their current stage
- Including a CTA or other motivator to pull them into the next stage of the buyer journey
Get serious about your blog
Your blog is the foundation of your content marketing strategy. It’s great to know that you need a blog, and by now most companies do. But it’s not enough to just publish content — even if it’s fairly relevant to your industry — and hope it will perform.
Always be extremely intentional with your blog content. Use categories to organize your content in ways that align with your content goals and customer journey.
You can start with SEO keyword research and a current content audit, then build from there. For more on the process, check out our guide to choosing blog categories and content themes.
You can set up your blog for success by combining your content optimization tactics with close attention to backend technical details that help your blog perform, including blog visibility on your home page and main navigation, using article page templates, configuring URLs and more.
Optimize your best performing content
Optimizing your best content is the low-hanging fruit strategy of enhancing your customer acquisition with content. You’ve already done all the work, and your work is already paying off — the content is performing well and driving traffic to your website.
Now it’s time to take it a step further so it converts that traffic into leads and sales.
Here’s how you can find and optimize your best content:
- Visit Ahrefs and search for your domain using the site explorer tool (you’ll need to start a trial to use the tools, you can do it for $7)
- Click on “organic keywords” to access a list of keywords you rank for and their corresponding URLs
Once you can see which content is ranking high, do a deeper dive using Ahref’s other tools or by doing your own research. Be sure they’re as optimized as possible. Mainly, be sure they rank for the right keywords and have tactics in place to capture visitor information (like gated content, CTAs, subscription forms, and more).
Leverage high-value gated content
Gated content, also known as lead magnets, capture visitor information by offering them something extremely high-value in return. Gated content comes in many forms, but it always offers something different and more valuable than what your visitors can access in your free content.
So, for example, if your blog covers why content audits are important, your gated content could be a complete PDF guide to performing a content audit.
Some of the most commonly used (and effective) types of gated content include ebooks, whitepapers, checklists, templates, and how-to videos.
Create videos
Video is currently the most in-demand type of content by online users across the board, and brands are responding accordingly (86% of companies currently use video as part of their marketing strategy). Cisco predicts that video will account for 82% of all online traffic by next year.
The good news? You don’t need to have expensive video production equipment to produce great videos that can drive customer acquisition.
Companies (and most people around the world) are using smartphones to record and share high-quality video content. Simply creating social media stories is an effective way to make your brand visible to customers. As you get better at video (or can afford more resources), you can expand your strategy.
Other exciting video marketing trends you can try include vlogging, live online events, webinars, and user-generated content (sharing video of customers interacting with your product/brand).
Demonstrate social proof
Do you look for reviews and testimonials when you’re buying a product or choosing a brand? So does everyone else! Research shows that 88% of consumers trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations, and buyers often read dozens of reviews before making a purchase.
You can power your customer acquisition potential by highlighting social proof throughout your content. Some of the best ways to do this are:
- Including reviews and testimonials throughout your website
- Publishing case studies that demonstrate your success with other customers
- Sharing user-generated content (like online reviews and product photos or videos)
Social proof assures your potential customer that you’ll deliver on your promises. It is often the deciding factor for a customer considering making a purchase. Integrating social proof content into your customer acquisition strategy makes it more likely to convert leads and drive sales.
Grow your brand with strong customer acquisition content
If you’re ready to publish content that is always optimized to drive results, Marketing Insider Group has solutions. Our writers can deliver ready-to-publish content every single week for a year (or more!) and our Content Builder Service includes a customized strategy to help you deliver it.
Schedule a quick consultation to get started today!
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