9 Successful Customer Acquisition Strategies for Tech Startups

The SaaS tech industry is experiencing tremendous growth accredited partially to the popularity of cloud based business solutions, but also to the low barriers of entry for solution providers. With global spending on SaaS tech projected to increase to $500 billion by 2023, having a winning customer acquisition strategy for tech startups is critical to their long term success.

The bottom line is that an actionable strategy to acquire new users is essential to build a brand presence, attract new customers, build engaged communities, retain loyal customers, and build a sustainable sales cycle. For tech startups, the customer acquisition process begins with the first contact with audiences.

The go to market strategy is a foundational pillar that provides direction to the ‘customer acquisition strategy’, allowing tech startups to identify customer problems, potential market segments, ideal customer profiles and other aspects to enter a new market successfully.

Customer Acquisition Funnel Explained

The customer acquisition funnel is a theoretical framework that enables SaaS startups track & monitor the productivity of user acquisition & retention campaigns. The funnel is an excellent source of learning & insights to help consistently improve the customer acquisition process.

A successful customer acquisition funnel aims to attract audiences through engaging content and product marketing campaigns. Effective funnels allow customers to go through streamlined customer journeys, improved through consistent customer feedback and data insights.

3 Factors That Can Make Your Customer Acquisition Strategy Profitable

Attracting target audiences to your brand requires careful planning, organization, monitoring and decision making to achieve smaller targets that engage your ideal customer profiles. Here are three leading factors that affect the effectiveness of your customer acquisition strategy:

1. Setup your Goals & Objectives
2. Know your Audience
3. Identify your Marketing Channels

1 – Setup your Goals & Objectives

Determining the goals and objectives of the customer acquisition strategy will identify what you want to achieve from it. Tech startups can set customer acquisition goals around subscriptions, increasing free trial signups, or a mix of the two.

It is essential at this time to determine the customer life time value (CLV) and the churn rate. While CLV identifies how long the customer will stay with your brand, the churn rate identifies exactly how many subscriptions will be cancelled every month.

Setting customer acquisition objectives lays down the framework to identify target customers who will purchase, and identify the right channels to reach them.

2 – Know your Audience

Making your customer acquisition strategy more profitable requires identifying your perfect customers. Ideal customer profiles are created to identify the target audience sub-set who will find your products beneficial and have the willingness to buy them.

Defining your target audience helps understand customer pain points, the solution your products offer, upgrades or changes needed to your products, and the values of your audiences. From here SaaS startups can better develop marketing & sales funnels.

3 – Identify your Marketing Channels

Identifying the right marketing channels that your ideal customer profiles engage and interact through is the last factor that can affect the profitability of a customer acquisition plan. Tech startups can employ a variety of channels to reach out to their target buyer personas.

Email marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization, affiliate marketing, partnerships, and paid digital advertising are all popular customer acquisition models that SaaS startups utilize.

9 Successful Customer Acquisition Strategies for B2B Tech Startups

Successful user acquisition strategies require data driven decision and careful insights, to ensure constant improvement. Since there are multiple strategies to acquire new clients for your tech startup, it is suggested to regularly monitor all your performance metrics such as ROI against all the strategies you create:

1. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
3. Social Media Marketing (SMM)
4. Content Marketing
5. Affiliate Marketing
6. Referral Marketing
7. Product Pricing
8. Collaborate with Like-minded Brands
9. Launch a series of Webinars

1 – Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search engine marketing (SEM) or pay per click advertising (PPC) can also be called the premium version of SEO. SEM uses keywords like SEO to deliver branded product links and content in search results on Google.

Advertisers are charged when a user clicks the ad, thus SEM allows advertisers to set budgets to allow them more control over their costs. PPC results are displayed above organic SEO results and can hence attract audiences who are actively looking for a solution.

Tech startups can develop paid ads for keywords based on their marketing funnel, developing different ad copies for awareness, interest, desire, and conversions.

2 – Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is about optimizing your website to rank higher on search engines. It is probably the most popular technique that SaaS businesses use to acquire new customers.

Keyword research is an essential part to SEO because it helps you find the most intent-based search terms. Then, you can target those search KWs on your website’s services pages and blog posts to gain more attraction and acquire more customers.

Optimizing keywords in content, in Meta tags, in description and other digital aspects of the tech startup provide target audiences to discover your brand through multiple touch points. Another essential aspect is to optimize the performance of your landing pages and website.

Improving user experience not only builds user trust in the brand, but also allows you to develop a more engaging buyers’ journey across the website. Content is the heart of having a sound SEO strategy, and hence your content should provide value while providing audiences the solution for their problems.

3 – Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social media marketing is considered a game changer by professionals when discussing customer acquisition. Social media offers tech companies to engage and display their brand name to a vast audience, promote content by segmenting the audience.

Social media platforms including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. All provide marketers the ability to segment audiences for marketing. This enables brand to interact directly with their ideal customers, while reducing their marketing costs.

Social media marketing is an excellent customer acquisition strategy since it allows startups to listen to their customers and engage with them consistently for feedback. How customer interact with your brand and content is essential to determine conversions later on.

Delivering micro content like blogs, facts, insights, videos, memes etc. This allows marketers to extract crucial insights about audiences, their issues, and developing the right solutions. Social media is also a popular means for tech startups to provide customer services & support.

Responding to complaints and issues before they escalate through social can be a great opportunity to enhance brand recognition and loyalty.

4 – Content Marketing

Content marketing is another very effective and popular strategy companies utilize to acquire new customers. Valuable content increases customer trust and motivates target audiences to make buying decisions.

Usually, B2B startup marketers create purposeful content for customer acquisition throughout the customer journey. Content should be regularly updated to instill loyalty and build an engaged target audience.

Gated content has become quite popular to collect customer information, which also identifies the stage of the user’s journey for different audiences. Using various content types like blogs, articles, e-books, infographics, videos, and social feeds are popular ways to build an inbound marketing funnel.

5 – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing has remained an essential strategy to onboard customers for your startups. Affiliate marketing involves driving user traffic to a brand website and earning commissions for every conversion.

Tech startups can develop lucrative affiliate deals with influencers and professionals to recommend their solutions to their target audiences.

Affiliate marketing provides startups access to new markets and those they can’t enter into a competitive market because of time and budget limitations.

Marketing teams can easily track the success of affiliate campaigns, in addition to mapping more convenient buyer journeys.

6 – Referral Marketing

Referral marketing strategies to acquire new customers are highly cost effective. Tech startups not only require more conversions but also good referrals from their existing customers to be more profitable later.

Professionals debate that referral marketing has the ability to generate demand. In addition, referral marketing builds trust with new audiences, and converts very loyal customers. Referral strategies have the potential to reach more ideal customers while building a lasting brand presence in different niches.

B2B tech companies creatively employ referral marketing programs offering their referring customers and partners discounts, special offers, and other benefits.

7 – Product Pricing

Special pricing strategies to attract new customers and retain existing customers has been a long pursued tactic by tech businesses. Introducing products at reduced or special prices is an ideal way to introduce your solutions to target customers.

A popular strategy that most SaaS providers use is by establishing monthly, half yearly and yearly subscriptions. While the monthly plans are high priced, special savings are offered on the other two plans to acquire customers for longer intervals.

8 – Collaborate with Like-minded Brands

Partnering and collaborating with like-minded brands can be highly beneficial for tech startups to acquire customers without a large cost outlay. Partnering with brands that share the same values and ideas provides access to new audiences, while identifying new problems that your products can solve.

9 – Launch a Series of Webinars

Webinars are a highly engaging way to educate your target customers about their pain points, while offering a solution to solve them. Creating a series of webinars engages target audiences to interact with the brand and learn more about how your products can assist them.

Webinars are a highly cost effective way to reach high quality leads who are actively searching for solutions. In addition to providing access to a huge global audience, webinars create lasting brand awareness in this audience.

Conclusion

Building effective and budget-friendly customer acquisition strategies for your tech startup is simply necessary for survival in the SaaS industry. A winning user acquisition plan includes a mix of different tools to efficiently reach new target audiences through various channels.

But if you’re still struggling to create a flawless customer acquisition plan for your tech product. At Chasm, we assist B2B tech companies with the professional knowledge and skills that help build a successful strategy to onboard new customers.

To know more about our product marketing consultancy, which includes positioning and messaging, demand generation, etc. You can inquire more info using our contact us page. For more exciting reads, you can check our blog section.

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