As an entrepreneur, one of your favorite days in business is the day you make your first sale — the day a real person (not family and friends) decides to give you real money in exchange for your product/service. As much as the sustainability of your business is determined by more than just one of such transactions occurring, the first time it does occur is a kind of validation that what you’ve been building, your marketing, your prayers, and every other thing you’ve done up to that point is not in vain. However, going from product development to ‘we finally have our first paying customer(s)’ is not magic, it isn’t pulling a bunny out of a hat, it’s a product of understanding your user channels and making the most of data and insights to eventually switch from user awareness to user acquisition.
Understanding the Acquisition Process
When starting a business, it’s very important you understand how things work and how they don’t work as you try to close your first paying customer(s). It is very important you understand the acquisition process.
Although all businesses do not have the same exact acquisition processes (dependent on their size, and/or whether they are B2B or B2C businesses), there are however some usual similarities that show themselves along the way.
It is important that as the founder of your business, to an extent, you’re an expert at the unique acquisition process your business follows. This process will go a long way in determining your style, marketing strategy, and eventually your marketing costs. In this piece, we’ll be trying to go through the steps in a conventional acquisition process, and what you should be aware of at each step.
Acquisition Process Steps
Step 1: Awareness
Your business might as well be sending astronauts to the moon, if nobody knows, nobody knows. The awareness step is although the first step, it isn’t the genesis of the acquisition process. The real first step of the acquisition process is designing and defining your brand identity. What do you want your business to stand for? What do you want your business to represent? What emotions do you want your product to evoke in both the sight of users, and potential users? Who do you want to look at your product and instantly connect with it? This is usually the first step you should take as the conclusions made during this phase will inform and influence your brand logo, marketing language, and every other thing that represents how you want your product/service to be perceived when it’s launched and in the market.
After you’ve designed and determined what your brand is and what it stands for, the next step is to embrace marketing. Marketing is where awareness starts from. A strong and clear brand coupled with an effective marketing strategy is key to making the most of any marketing campaign.
Marketing is primarily about creating awareness, and in that case, being broad. Marketing’s goal is to reach everyone, in the best possible way, and at the best possible time. However, as much as marketing is largely a broader strategy, it must be properly targeted to avoid wasting both precious time and resources.
Understanding the right market channels to use to reach the ideal users of your product is key. It isn’t very smart in my opinion to place and target ads (both physical and digital) for a premium product/service in a low income neighborhood, it also isn’t very advisable to push lingerie ads to guys either, or car ads to kids (we don’t want them messing around with people’s credit cards). You must understand who your ideal users and customers are, where they are, and be extremely deliberate about pushing the right ads and content in their direction. You shouldn’t be promoting on TikTok if youre in the B2B business and your goal is to reach business executives, that’s like looking for good news on CNN (honest joke).
A successful awareness campaign should get people considering your product, or at least in the know that there is someone somewhere providing a product/service of your magnitude.
Step 2: Consideration
In Step 1, you informed the world (or at least your potential users) that you exist, now you’ve got to convince them that you can deliver on the promise you claim you can. Your brand identity will go a long way in making this easier, however, depending on what your business does, one of the easiest ways to do that at this point is aggressive content marketing (whether through articles, videos etc.). People want to know whether you’re really good at what you do, so show them client/customer stories, talk about your expertise in your industry through articles, or even videos, give product walkthroughs that help users understand how to use your product/service better.
A major advantage of this step is that it doesn’t just help you build consideration; it could also act as a way to boost your product awareness. As long as these content remain on the internet, people searching for that solution will likely stumble upon your content, and after consuming, will likely see your product as a better alternative considering the trust you’ve built through your content and consideration strategy.
Step 3: Acquisition
The third step is usually the acquisition step. This is the step that gives us joy as entrepreneurs; this is the part where a customer willingly hands out money in exchange for the use and sale of our product. The Acquisition step is the part where we take those who have responded positively to our awareness campaigns and try to convince them to make a purchase. This is part of the Acquisition process and is chiefly responsible for acquiring new customers and users.
Acquisition in most cases is usually the responsibility of a good sales team. Acquisition helps convert those who have shown interest in your product into paying customers. One core advantage of the acquisition step is that it is possible to interact with users who may never have gone through the awareness phase, and help them become both aware of your product, and willing to buy it now or sometime in the future.
Having enough user insights and data at each step will usually go a long way in helping companies make better marketing and branding decisions later in the future.
Step 4: Retention
After getting these users to use your product, you want to make sure they continue using your product/service, so you need to make sufficient steps to help improve product retention, and reduce user churn. One of the most effective ways to do this is to listen to your users, find out what they want and continue to consistently tweak your product to align with their desires.
In the retention phase, feedback from users is extremely important, and customer success plays a large role in making sure users are satisfied with the service they’re getting, and if they aren’t, finding ways to help them properly communicate the frictions they face, and scaling these frictions to product development teams, or whoever is responsible to find ways to ameliorate the problem, and make the product experience better for the user. The retention phase is a very important part of the acquisition process, because it doesnt just help you retain the users you have acquired (nobody wants to fetch water into a basket), it also helps you turn your users into brand and product advocates. One of the goals of the retention phase is to keep users happy. A happy user will (in most cases) tell others about your product, and is one of the strongest product advocates you can have.
In the customer retention phase, the core goal is to keep the user at the center of all things, and make sure all or most iterative product development revolves around him/her.
Conclusion
Building a great product is really just the first step on the way to building a successful business, finding the right marketing and user acquisition channels and strategies to utilize are key to help maximize your product development initiatives, and help more people come in contact with your product, and find and extract value from using it.
