Finding Customers for your Product

What is Customer Acquisition?

Customer Acquisition Strategies are key components for businesses across all verticals. Whether you are running acquisitions for a B2C (Business-to-consumer) luxury e-commerce store or generating leads for a small B2B (Business-to-business) manufacturing company. Customer acquisition in its most basic form is how a company generates revenue. Without customers, there is no revenue.

Customer acquisition while it is generally the most important aspect of every business is also one of, if not the most difficult things to get right. Between finding your ideal customer and which channels are going to be the most successful and efficient for your business, it leaves a lot of variables to consider which can cause costly consequences when looking to acquire customers.

Finding Customers for Your Product

The first thing you should always start with when determining who to target is the problem solved. You should always ask yourself what problem does my product solve? No matter the product, everything should solve some sort of problem whether it is a tangible or intangible problem. For example, weed killer would solve the physical problem of weeds in a lawn whereas a luxury t-shirt would solve a problem related to a cognitive feeling of belonging or social status.

Often times a product can solve multiple problems and you can test which problem-solution combos work best for your product. For example, using the luxury t-shirt example, you can test two product solution combos to see which is more effective.

“This shirt will instantly improve your social status” the problem is that a user wants to be a part of a higher class and owning this shirt provides that. Another combo could be: “everyone will want to talk to you in a shirt that makes you look this good”—focusing on people who may go out and not feel very confident but this shirt can fix that.

Testing different problem positioning is really key to seeing what your target audience is going to respond to.

Once you have discovered one or more problems your product provides a solution to, you can start to dial in who exactly has the problems that your product provides a solution for. Going back to the weed killer example, we can start to dial in what people will need the product. Starting with demographics, age, and gender are really not applicable to this type of problem. Sure there is a higher likelihood that someone in their 30s and 40s might buy more weed killer but the problem can be experienced by a 21 year old who is renting a home with a yard, too.

So rather than looking at demographics for this problem, we would look at a likelihood based on other factors. First, homeowners or home renters are key, we want to focus in on people that would have a yard on their property; and while there are methods for targeting homeowners, you may miss a decent segment of users if this is your only method. So we must dig deeper—including parents with young children who are likely to be playing in a yard.

Additionally, we can create audiences based off of search intentions. If people are searching for weed killer, we can build ads depending on the searchers. Furthermore, we can look at geo-targeting areas that are more likely to experience weeds.

While determining which methods you will use to dial in who is likely to be interested in your product, you will find it isn’t a perfect process, and along the way you will likely discover audience interests or demographics you never thought would want your product. Being adaptable and able to identify opportunities for improved or expanded targeting is key to successfully evolving your customer acquisition efforts.

Using Creative to Find Key Audiences

After Apple’s iOS14 update, targeting highly specific audiences on platforms like Meta became much more difficult. This will continue to be the case as the major technology companies prioritize customer privacy.

Once you have completed the above exercise outlining your initial audience hypotheses, your organic and advertising creative will be the biggest lever you have in determining who is actually resonating with your product and brand positioning.

This means you should test variations of your hooks, headlines, actors, etc. within your creative. Based on the leading indicators of success from your ad sets (CPA, CAC, ROAS), you will start to see which audiences will be the best investment for scaling up.

Effective customer acquisition hinges on a deep understanding of the problem your product solves, guiding you to identify your target audience beyond mere demographics. In today's privacy-focused digital landscape, leveraging creative strategies and adaptive targeting becomes crucial. By continually testing and refining your approach, informed by key performance metrics, you can pinpoint and connect with the most responsive audiences, driving your business growth.