For B2C startups, customer acquisition strategies are something that need to change, grow and evolve constantly. Typical SEO, social media and all the other regular stuff from the book has almost never been the driver of growth.

Growth hacking strategies for startups evolve every day and you need to ride the wave. However, there are some methods that we have consistently tested and have provided results for different types of businesses.

Here is a detailed infographic that explains which channels to use for B2C customer acquisition. You can read about all the strategies in detail below the infographic.

 Embed this infographic by pasting the code :

<p><strong>User Acquisition ( B2C) Infographic By Marketing Masala.com</strong><br /><br /><a href=’https://www.marketingmasala.com/customer-acquisition-strategy-b2c-startup/‘><img src=’https://www.marketingmasala.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/User-Acquisition-B2C-startups.png‘ alt=’User-Acquisition-B2C-startups’ width=’1600px’ border=’0′ /></a></p>

1. Remarketing Ads

Most companies treat growth as new customer acquisition. However, improving your conversion rates is equally important and that is exactly what remarketing can help you with.

Remarketing is a process of targeting people who are stuck at some level of your conversion funnel (for example, cart abandoners) and need to be pushed further (example- make a payment) with a tweaked marketing message.

Remember when you checked out that product on Amazon but never bought it? And then that particular product followed you around on all ads across your web browser. That is exactly what remarketing is all about.

Why do you need remarketing?

If you have users who came to your site but did not signup, went to the cart but did not buy, received an email but did not open it, welcome to the world of remarketing.

As a startup founder or marketer, one of your key roles would revolve around moving people further in the funnel. You might be doing a lot of landing page tests, ad copy rotation and changing targeting of your ads. However, to make sure that customers move further in the funnel, you need to tweak your marketing messages differently for everyone who is stuck at different levels of the funnel.

How to do remarketing the right way?

On the internet, you can find a lot of advice regarding Facebook marketing, Google remarketing, AdWords remarketing and what not.

However, all remarketing activities need to follow this process

1. Setup a retargeting code on your site. This can be derived from Google Adwords or Facebook Business Manager.
2. Setup custom audiences on these networks that you want to target via your remarketing.
3. Select the custom audience that you want to target while remarketing.
4. Keep a custom message for different audiences. For example, someone stuck at the cart page for more than 7 days can be offered a coupon code displayed through a remarketing ad.
5. Analyze results and compare the cost of acquisition.
6. Keep iterating on a weekly or monthly basis till you find the right fit.

2. Referral discounts

One of the best user acquisition channels is undoubtedly word of mouth/referral marketing. From a growth hacking perspective, you should be taking leverage of this and driving referral discounts in a scientific fashion.

How Dropbox rocketed their growth with referral marketing?

Dropbox, as you might know, is a cloud storage provider. In its early days, the company had scaled to a level but was still struggling with exponential growth. Their first growth hacker, Sean Ellis started out the following

Adding a referral option right in their signup process helped Dropbox go from 100,000 users to 4,000,000 in 15 months.

Dropbox used to spend $250 + to acquire customers for a $99 product. Imagine how well referral marketing helped them.

How to do drive some great referrals?

The key is to understand how to time it. You ideally want to ask someone for a referral when they have been using your product/service for a significant time which is credible enough to prove their active engagement with your company.

• Referrals can be driven either by remarketing ads targeted to existing customers and offering discounts for the same or asking for referrals within the product.
• Make sure you understand your customer journey within your product and show the referral ad/popup after the right time. For example, targeting people who just came to your eCommerce store will probably not be effective. However, targeting all the people who have purchased more than twice a month should be targeted with a referral discount via an ad or an email

3. Building search engine traffic the right way

 Most people understand SEO  the wrong way.

Here is how B2C startups need to rock their SEO strategy and optimization:

• Understand which content is in demand. Using Google Keyword Planner and KeyworTool.io, try and understand which keywords are people looking for and where competition is less. For example, here is a research I did when I had to write something about startup marketing ( the highlighted keywords are the ones that I selected finally)

• Build an amazing piece of content. Make sure that the content is not just made for the purpose of SEO and rankings, but to actually provide great value to someone. Be as descriptive as possible (long-form content works best), use the most amazing images you can and of course, format it right
• Promote your content to the right people: Most people get stuck here. They believe that producing great content is all that is needed for rankings. However, that is not the case at all. Promoting your content the right way is super important.

Email and social media outreach to influencers, bloggers and journalists works best for content promotion.

Here is how a pest control company was able to produce great content and do the right promotion for it: SEO case study

Want to take your business to the next level? Enroll for free growth hacking course and become an expert growth marketer. Enroll Now!

4. Social media conversations

You can get a lot of information on social media marketing, social media engagement and all sorts of social media tools on the planet, but one of the most important growth hacks in the B2C space is engagements on social media.

The key here is to sound human and genuinely engage with the audience without making it look like a self-promotional outreach

One of our clients was a recipe delivery company that sends recipes and ingredients at your doorstep. Here are some snapshots on how we used Twitter marketing to interact with them and drove direct orders with no ads at all.

How to do social media conversations the right way?

• Identify your target audience on social media. People use hashtags and keywords all the time. Using tools like Hootsuite, you can track the hashtags people use in their social media updates and start interacting with them in a genuine fashion.
• Ask for a review and not a sale. Ask people what they think of your product or service or blog posts. Never try to do a hard sell the first time. People will feel much better if you ask them for an opinion on your product rather than buying it. If they like it, they’ll definitely buy it.

5. Conversion rate optimization

A lot of companies keep wondering where their marketing went wrong whereas the actual case was that their product had certain issues because of which customers were not moving further in the funnel.

You might have heard a lot about creating landing pages the right way, however, the point is to understand data and analyze where people are leaving your website/app and then fix the issue with that.

How to take care of your conversion rate optimization?

• Understand how users are interacting with your website. Most companies keep pushing in more money but never really understand where the problem lies with their product. You have to understand what might be the issue with your website/app and then fix it. For example, a company that we were working with was facing a high card abandonment rate. We helped them see that as their product concept was new, people were not really sure about the credibility of their company. We decided to show customer testimonials on the product page in a bold way and conversions went much higher in one week.
• Keep testing with different landing pages. Tools like Unbounce can help you create different copies of your landing page in minutes. You should be always be testing by sending an equal amount of traffic to different pages (that you think might work well) and understand the conversion metrics from there. Whatever works, you need to go ahead with that.

Got some more questions about startup marketing? Hit me on shivankit@marketingmasala.com or Twitter