Acquisition Strategy: How to Grow Your Sales the Easy Way

Want to generate more leads and close more sales? Looking for an automated process that does the heavy lifting for you?

In this article, you’ll discover a marketing strategy for acquiring new customers.

How Customer Acquisition Can Transform Your Business

Let’s think about where the money is on social media. 

Here’s a clue: it’s not in the posts, likes, comments, or shares. Those are all great vanity metrics but they don’t mean anything for your bottom line. 

The real truth is that 20% of the effort on social media accounts for 80% of the results. That 20% comes from the ads and clicks that actually funnel customers into your business. You don’t want followers who hang around on your profile forever. You want viewers who convert into paying customers. 

You can improve that 20:80 ratio dramatically by creating a customer acquisition machine. With this strategy, you never post without a monetization goal in mind. You can track the exact percentage of viewers who become leads and leads who become customers. And, best of all, you can scale up your results without scaling up your effort. 

The Customer Acquisition Machine

The customer acquisition machine has three steps. Each step brings a specific benefit to your social media marketing strategy. 

These three sections, in the right order, will turn total strangers into loyal customers as fast as possible. You can leverage them to scale your business: 1 customer means 10 more. It’s not quite autopilot or passive income but it’s much less labor-intensive than posting aimlessly. 

1. Traffic. This phase focuses on getting as many viewers as possible. It scales up your audience fast by focusing on the content you’re best at. 
2. Lead mechanism. Next, you’ll start qualifying those viewers as leads. This is where the real magic of understanding and converting customers happens. Your big list of potential leads gets a lot smaller but a lot more valuable.
3. Sales mechanism. Finally, you’ll be ready to sell to those leads. If you’ve completed the first two phases correctly, then these will be the easiest sales you’ve ever made. 

Before we dive in, let’s get one thing clear: To acquire customers, you need all three steps, and you need them in the right order. If you try to cut corners, you’ll find yourself working harder, reaching fewer people, and failing to convert them on the same scale. 

#1: Generate Traffic and Raise Visibility

We’re calling this step “traffic” but it could just as easily be called “eyeballs.”

Eyeballs on your content mean attention. And attention—when it’s directed and nurtured in the right way—means sales.

So your first task is to attract as much traffic (or as many eyeballs) to your content as you can. You need a high traffic volume so you can sift through and find the most valuable, qualified leads for your business.

Find Your Best Traffic Sources

Start by identifying the traffic sources you’re best at.

For some marketers, it’s YouTube or TikTok. For others, it’s Facebook and Instagram. You can incorporate other sources, too. You should always consider your social media strategy as part of a wider customer acquisition strategy. 

Make a list of your strongest social media platforms, post formats, and topics for content. These are going to bring you the high volume of content you need to succeed at customer acquisition efforts. 

Choose a Mechanism to Scale

Next, identify the specific mechanisms you can leverage on each platform to reach more people. Here are a few mechanisms that you might already have access to or could think about using:

• Social media ads
• Affiliate deals with other brands, creators, or influencers
• Owned lists on social media, such as Instagram DM lists or Close Friends
• Email subscribers
• SMS or WhatsApp subscribers

The most effective customer acquisition machines use a mix of paid and organic sources. Why?

First, most people won’t be ready to convert after seeing just one of your ads. It’s much more likely that they’ll see an ad, interact with some of your organic content over time, and then finally be ready to move to your lead mechanism.

So you can think of it like this: paid customer acquisition channels help you scale fast in the short-term. Organic content helps increase your conversion rates in the long-term. 

What’s more, you may not be ready or able to invest a lot into paid ads just yet. That’s OK; you can focus on organic content to build a small initial audience and then scale up when your business starts pulling in more money.

Or the opposite could be true: business is thriving so you’re cash-rich and time-poor; in which case, it makes more sense to focus on paid sources over the more laborious organic content. Only you can tell what the right mix of traffic mechanisms is for you.

#2: Develop Your Lead Mechanism

Congratulations! You’ve identified your traffic sources and mechanisms. That was the easy part!

The second step of the customer acquisition machine takes the most work to set up and succeed with. That’s because converting is the hardest thing to do on social media.

Every social media marketer knows this. If you get attention without conversions, then your business will never go anywhere. Real success comes from owning your audience and being able to nurture them toward a sale.

But to do that, you need an effective lead mechanism. 

Types of Lead Mechanisms

Chances are that you have some kind of lead mechanism already set up. You’ve got a link in your Instagram bio that leads to a landing page with an email pop-up, right? 

If you’re still using that strategy, then it’s no surprise that your conversion rate is low. Customers are bored with those tactics. What’s more, those outdated tactics don’t offer the kind of unique value you need to convert customers in 2023.

Instead, focus on lead mechanisms that people will really want. Things like: 

• Free training such as a webinar, masterclass, or mini-course
• Case studies that educate or inspire
• Access to assets such as templates
• Direct video sales letters that make the case for your business

All of these mechanisms share two key features. As well as offering real value, they also have a much greater effect than the effort it takes to create them. For example, after you spend just a few minutes recording a video sales letter, you can use it to reach hundreds or even thousands of leads. That means you can scale up fast.

What Data Do You Want? 

Your leads will guide people toward the next step of the sales funnel—filling in a registration form so you can assess each lead and contact them again. Your lead mechanism empowers you to take your time nurturing leads and making sure they’re the perfect target for your business. 

But the specific types and quantity of data you collect will depend on how warm each lead is. 

In most cases, you just want to ask for the essentials: name, email, and maybe phone number. Most people consider that a fair exchange for the kind of valuable lead magnet that you’re offering. 

If you want more data, you have to offer more in return or spend more time building trust and connection with your leads. When they’re ready, you can ask for more qualifying details such as company size and turnover.

Example: Lead Mechanisms in Action

Let’s go through an example of how the lead mechanism might work for a service business using video sales letters.

We’re going to focus on video sales letters because they’re simultaneously one of the most effective and undervalued lead mechanisms available. 

A video sales letter only has to be a few minutes long. It hits a few key points that make an unanswerable case for your business.

1. Why the viewer should listen to you. What promise is your business making to them?
2. Social proof that you can deliver on that promise. Think case studies, testimonials, and customer quotes.
3. The method you use to deliver. Make sure you save the most valuable point for last so people keep watching.
4. The challenges customers will face if they try to follow this method alone. Think about potential risks or losses or the expertise, tools, or labor required.
5. Finally, offer to solve their problem by doing all of the work for them!

Let’s look at the marketing business Scaling With Systems. Their traffic sources cover both email and social media. Traffic gets driven toward a single lead magnet—the video sales letter—which potential leads can access by sharing their name, email, and phone number. 

This squeeze page has a conversion rate of about 30%. Seventy percent of the traffic from social media and email won’t share their data so they’ve automatically disqualified themselves as leads.

But that doesn’t mean that Scaling With Systems wants every single person who watched the video sales letter as a customer. There’s another step. 

The video sales letter leads to another squeeze page, this time framed as an application form. It asks for more detailed information such as the lead’s industry and monthly revenue. Then, if the lead is qualified based on their answers, they can book a sales call. 

The second squeeze page has a conversion rate closer to 1%. But it’s still worth it because that 1% has a very, very high chance of becoming paying customers. 

Let’s recap. This customer acquisition machine works because it can process a huge number of potential leads, completely automatically. Result: a highly qualified list of hot leads that will take barely any effort to convert. 

#3: Optimize Your Sales Mechanism

You’ve made it to step 3! Here’s the best part: if you got the right volume of traffic and you processed it through the right lead mechanism, then 95% of your work is already done. These leads are ready for closing. 

Because you’ve refined your list of leads so effectively, you can afford to close these sales individually. Actually get on a sales call, connect with the lead personally, and you’ll see an even higher conversion rate. 

Whether you take all of your sales calls personally or you’ve scaled up enough to need a sales team, here are four golden rules to improve your close rates:

• Never book a sales call for more than 24 hours ahead. You want those leads fresh and hot!
• Create a document of common objections and how to handle them. Review this regularly and use it actively.
• Keep optimizing your sales offer based on each call and customer feedback. Refine your lead mechanism, be ready for objections, and learn what your customers respond to best.
• Use proposal software so you can send contracts over instantly and professionally. This goes a long way to building trust and locks in sales fast!

Remember, you put all of that hard work into creating a lead mechanism. You owe it to yourself to have a sales mechanism that never misses.

Your move…

With a customer acquisition machine like this, you can turn social media viewers into customers in less than 2 weeks. That’s 10 times faster than most B2B customer acquisition strategies—and this method can work for a smaller team, too!

Other Notes From This Episode

• Connect with Michael Stelzner @Stelzner on Instagram and @Mike_Stelzner on Twitter.
• Watch this interview and other exclusive content from Social Media Examiner on YouTube.

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