How to Reduce Customer Acquisition Cost with Effective Search Engine Optimization?
Acquiring new customers is imperative for every company, but it seems to be getting more and more complex. Conventional sales channels not only cost time and money but they also lose more and more efficiency and some of the things that still worked in the 90s now only lead to frustrated salespeople.
Companies therefore need new ways to reach their target customers and to make new customer acquisition effective again. SEO is the first step in drawing new customers’ attention to a company because consumers behaviour is completely different today than they did a few years ago!
Understand consumers – optimize new customer acquisition
Many sales representatives assume that they have to pick up new customers where they are. That is also perfectly correct. But employees in classic sales today often misjudge the question of where exactly the customer would like to be picked up. Because digitalization has changed the behaviour of consumers drastically and contemporary marketing must adapt to this to be successful.
Because the sales talk no longer begins when the nice gentleman is at the door with the sample case! On the contrary, those who attack their target customers too aggressively today only trigger resistance. What used to lead to direct success in acquiring new customers is now perceived as a desperate strategy.
Because today, new customers want to consciously decide for themselves when and where to take action and identify themselves as potential buyers. For modern marketing, this means that the strategies for acquiring new customers have to change completely – because the important question is no longer: “How can I approach new customers?” But rather: “How can I ensure that new customers find me?”
It is estimated that customers today have completed 57% of the sales process themselves before appearing for a company. For sales staff, however, that doesn’t mean that they only have to do 43% of their work! Because the sales pitch begins today digitally.
Customers can only find a company if it is present online. And the more transparently a company presents itself on the internet, the more information it provides, the faster new customers can build trust and an emotional bond. Because that’s what it’s all about today – about trust and wellbeing.
From a sales point of view, every activity on the Internet is already an introduction to a sales pitch to acquire new customers and serves as the first important step on the way to more sales. This first step is building a trusting foundation, but to be able to take this step, SEO must come first! Check out the guide how effective SEO matters to Reduce Customer Acquisition Cost.
No visibility without SEO
Visibility is everything when it comes to new customer acquisition, this applies to start-ups with a low advertising budget as well as to global corporations. Who is not present cannot be found? And since customers today prefer to actively search themselves, so visibility is more important than ever.
However, very few customers still stroll through the city to be surprised. Even those who do it have their smartphone in their hand and use the Google search engine to search for offers that interest them before they turn the next corner while strolling through town.
The focus must, therefore, be on visibility on the Internet begins on the second or third page of a search engine. To do SEO effectively, one needs to understand how search engines work.
The sales conversation with the search engine
A search engine must convince of the added value of a product just like any other customer. To optimize a page, you have to ask yourself what needs a search engine has because Google also want to reach their target customers.
And they do that by displaying the best possible content in response to requests. Because users always use search engines for a specific reason: They have a problem and want to solve it. So good content has to offer solutions and that can happen in many ways.
For example, through specialist articles that underpin the expert status of a company, but which are easy to read. Or through step-by-step instructions that enable customers to solve minor problems themselves.
If this guide worked, the readers will assess the company that provided the content as trustworthy and remember it – so the first step in building trust has been taken and the likelihood that the customer will contact this company if the customer needs competent help with a bigger problem increases.
Search engines love content that helps its users to solve specific problems. But even though the algorithms are getting smarter and smarter, they still don’t see websites the way humans do. Because search engines can only read in what is made available to them as required.
The crawlers are not able to look at videos or photos, nor do they find animations interesting, which website operators might find an original eye-catcher that sets their site apart from other sites. For the programs that crawl pages to classify them as relevant search results.
A website must be specially prepared for the acquisition of new customers so that search engines classify the content as really helpful. And to do this there are proven recipes for getting to the home page with SEO.
Use SEO to address target customers
To acquire new customers and to reach target customers, a website must primarily comply with the guidelines of the search engines. To improve the ranking of a page, various measures have to intermesh, because they all influence the position of a page in the search results.
Keyword-optimized content
Search engines use keywords to determine the content of an article. Keywords are therefore key words that allow conclusions to be drawn about the topic, but experts today have become cautious with specifying the optimal keyword density in percent. So-called holistic content is more important, i.e. holistic content in which the keywords are also varied and sometimes replaced by synonyms.
The placement of the keywords
To help Google assess certain keywords as relevant content, they should appear in the main heading, in the first and last paragraph of the text and variations also in the subheadings of the text.
Readability
Readability is also an important criterion for search engines when assessing content. Long-running texts are not considered to be user-friendly, as many readers skip through the content of an article before deciding whether to read it in full. The programs recognize whether a page is legible from the fact that the text contains subheadings, paragraphs that are not too long and eye-catchers such as lists.
Link structure
From the structure of the links within a page, crawlers can determine whether the page is user-friendly and offers further relevant content on the topic, a big plus point in the race for the best places. Links from other sites are also an important point of reference, because if the article of a domain is linked from other sites, search engines assume that the content is helpful. The site is therefore rated as trustworthy.
Speed, design and length of stay
Small things with a big impact are the loading time of a page and the question of whether the design is responsive, i.e. whether it is also displayed in a user-friendly manner on various mobile devices. The length of stay of the user also allows conclusions to be drawn as to whether the search results were satisfactory. The higher the bounce rate on a page, the more likely it is downgraded as not relevant.
All of these factors play together when search engines rank pages in order to find the best possible content for their users. In this way, system programs try to imitate the reading behaviour of human readers in such a way that they can offer helpful content. It is important to always keep in mind that the programs cannot see. So, you are not able to include photos, videos, podcasts or similar content.
Anyone who accommodates the search engines here and provides image and sound content with the appropriate meta tags and provides a transcribed form of the content will gain a decisive competitive advantage over competitors who do not pay attention to these subtleties when acquiring new customers.
If done correctly, SEO saves a lot of sales costs, because an optimized page appears at the top of the search results even without paid ads, so the visibility improves enormously.
New customer acquisition and social media
SEO is of course the starting point for acquiring new customers on the Internet, because the company’s presence on the web is the basis of all marketing activities. This is where the customer funnel leads, from here the bond with existing customers is maintained and here new customers can convince themselves of the seriousness of the company.
However, the path of a new customer does not exclusively lead through search engines. It is more likely that interested consumers start looking for certain brands when they become aware of them on social media portals. A brand name that you have never heard of is difficult to enter into a search engine.
Companies that are not present on social media channels leave important potential for new customer acquisition and fail to save costs if they leave the free opportunities to gain more visibility unused.
The gentle sales pitch: social selling
Today, customers actively engage in what is known as social listening, which means that they observe the activities of individual companies on the Internet, for example because they search for products on social media channels, become aware of reviews from other customers or because friends share a company’s posts.
Such recommendations are of course free for any company, but at the same time they are priceless, because a friend’s recommendation weighs much more than any advertisement. Marketers should definitely use the possibilities of social selling to increase the reach of their social media pages and thus to gently acquire new customers.
Targeting potential customers on the Internet is now often perceived as an overly intrusive marketing strategy. On the other hand, liking, commenting on and sharing posts is considered a positive form of attention, and this attention is gladly reciprocated.
The first step in acquiring new customers is often already done when sales employees do what they already know from their private online activities! Those who show presence in this way not only appear likeable and human, but also draw the attention of target customers to themselves.
Another important aspect of social selling is building backlinks. The more posts on a website are shared on social media portals, the more attractive the page appears to search engines. So, SEO and social media activities belong together.
The webinar – new customer acquisition without limits
Another way to win new customers is through webinars that can be used as a sales pitch to win new customers without incurring running costs. No sales representative should miss out on this opportunity to acquire new customers digitally, because if properly structured, a webinar can theoretically reach an infinite number of target customers.
In doing so, it has proven to be useful to first let your own expert status through, then to raise awareness of the problem and then to offer the solution to the problem through a product or service. Every experienced sales representative can work with these techniques, only that the user communicates indirectly with target audience via a camera during the webinar.
This form of new customer acquisition only requires one-time production costs, but can achieve an enormous reach through content recycling. A webinar can be integrated into the website and support SEO, it can reach new customers around the clock as a digital sales representative on video portals and video content is shared far more often than other posts on social media portals.
Acquiring new customers through webinars is another cost-effective way to conduct a digital sales pitch, but unlike a personal conversation, it is infinitely scalable.
Conclusion – Effective SEO matters to Reduce Customer Acquisition Cost
Anyone who wants to reach consumer-conscious target customers today and convince them of their products should do SEO, use digital opportunities and use social media portals or channels as multipliers. Visibility is the way to acquire new customers and can drastically reduce sales costs compared to traditional sales.
SEO, Social Selling and Webinars are not only far more effective and cost-effective than classic sales strategies, they are also much more fun for sales employees and new customers feel this joy in their work immediately. The implementation of new customer acquisition via Google and Facebook is much more pleasant for marketers than cold calling on the phone and it achieves motivating results faster that benefit the entire company!
Having a thoughtful customer acquisition strategy is essential. Do want to reach more customers for your brand? If you are looking for more new customers, traffic, sales, quality SEO Strategies, search engine optimization services, content marketing strategies, SEO content optimization, online marketing, social media marketing, digital marketing services, PPC campaign management services and more, Please Explore our SEO Packages!