A Guide to Online Customer Acquisition

The current global meltdown has greatly made an impact in the manner companies do business today.  While some businesses find ways to cut marketing costs in order to survive, others sustain their budgets and turn their finances to more efficient means of marketing their products.

Recently, marketing approaches are shifting from brand awareness and client retention to customer acquisition.  The 2009 Marketing Priorities and Plans survey by BtoB Magazine proves this, yielding 62.2% of respondents making customer acquisition as their top marketing goal in 2009.  Only 20.6% cited customer retention as their top marketing goal, 12.4% for brand awareness, and 4.8% for other marketing goals.

The survey also indicates that online marketing will be the most utilized media platform in 2009, with 66.5% of marketers planning to increase their online spending.  Strategically linking this trend to the goal of customer acquisition leads us to the online marketing objective of increasing the number of unique visitors to our websites.

As an integral component of any web driven business, below are the basic online tools geared to drive traffic to your website:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) considers how search engines work and what people search for.  Optimizing a website involves editing its content and HTML coding to increase its relevance to specific keywords.  This process improves the volume and quality of traffic from search engines (Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN, etc.) via organic search results.
2. Banner Advertising attracts traffic to a website by linking to the website of the advertiser.  Web banners function the same way as traditional advertisers although its results for advertisement campaigns may be monitored real-time and may be targeted to the viewer’s interests.
3. Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC). Websites that utilize PPC ads will display an advertisement when a keyword query matches an advertiser’s keyword list, or when a content site displays relevant content.  The advertiser pays the host only when their ad is clicked.
4. E-Mail Marketing is a form of direct marketing that uses electronic mail to communicate to an audience, enhance merchant relationships, encourage customer loyalty and repeat business, and acquire new customers.
5. Affiliate Marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice where a company rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.  Similar to a referral program, affiliate marketing uses one website to drive traffic to another.

In today’s economic climate, it is even more vital to keep marketing efforts a priority and intact. If you have a website as marketing tool, turn it into a profit generating mechanism – and the best way to start is getting your market into it.