You may have heard of customer acquisition... but have you heard of user acquisition?🧐

If your business is just beginning or maybe starting to struggle a bit, user acquisition could be the very thing it is missing.

Whether you’re a website owner, an app developer, or a marketer working for a large company, user acquisition is an important element of any advertisement strategy.

This article is your ultimate guide to user acquisition and everything that comes with it.

  • What is User Acquisition?🤷‍♀️
  • Acquisition Marketing 🤝
  • Identify The User 🕵🏻‍♀️
  • Develop The Marketing Strategy 📝
  • Acquisition Channels 📲
  • How Is User Acquisition Measured? 🧐
  • User Acquisition Tools To Consider👀
  • 5 Ways To Improve Your Strategy ✍🏼
  • Great User Acquisition Examples🙌
  • To Summarize 💁🏻‍♂️
  • Important disclosure: we're proud affiliates of some tools mentioned in this guide. If you click an affiliate link and subsequently make a purchase, we will earn a small commission at no additional cost to you (you pay nothing extra).

    What is User Acquisition?🤷‍♀️

    User acquisition represents the literal acquisition of new users, which are to be converted to customers following their initial customer engagement.

    Implementing it is a sure way to increase your average revenue.

    For example, offering a free trial to someone will make them a “user,” while a post-trial subscription will turn them into a “customer.”

    The broad strokes of user acquisition vary depending on the type of product or service you want to market and monetize.

    Acquiring new users inevitably comes down to making sure that more and more people know about your brand and want to use it.

    You can implement two different types of user acquisition. Paid user acquisition and organic user acquisition. Both are highly effective types and which one you may choose to use depends on your budget and time frame.

    Organic user acquisition is free but it may take longer, whereas paid user acquisition is expensive but can be effective on a short time period.

    That being said, let’s take a deep dive into user acquisition and explore the ways in which you can monetize your brand going into 2023.

    Acquisition Marketing 🤝

    acquisition marketing - main with a megaphone

    Let’s start by defining what acquisition marketing is and how it relates to user acquisition.

    Acquisition marketing is the act of promoting new products and services to a new audience.

    The aim of acquisition marketing is to pique a user's interest, grow your user base, and then eventually for those valuable users to become customers.

    As we’ve mentioned, user acquisition is different from customer acquisition in the fact that it predates it. In order to convert someone into a customer, they first need to be made aware of your brand and services.

    For example, if you incentivize a person to create an account on your website, they become a “user,” not a customer.

    However, this opens the door for them to make a purchase, subscribe to your service, or otherwise engage with your quality content, making them a “customer.”

    Ultimately these two types of acquisitions work together to increase your average revenue📈.

    Now that we know the difference between them let’s learn how to identify the best users and customers for our brand.

    Identify The User 🕵🏻‍♀️

    First off, you should take good care to define who your target audience really is.

    Start by auditing your own business portfolio and creating a list of your products/services.

    What type of service can you provide to users around the world? What makes your brand different from others on the market?

    Learning to identify who isn't and is a potential user for your brand will save you a lot of time and resources during acquisition marketing. Some of the questions you can use as references when identifying your users are:

    • What are the gender, age, and social status of your ideal user? (Example: female, 18-15, college student)
    • What everyday issues do they struggle with? (Example: time management, communication, etc.)
    • What benefits do they gain from using your brand? (Example: better organization, less social anxiety, etc.)
    • What communication channels do they use frequently? (Example: Facebook, Instagram, email)

    Develop The Marketing Strategy 📝

    Once you settle on your ideal user profile, you should aim to cater to their content expectations as best as possible.

    Different users will prefer different content types depending on the communication channels they frequent.
    the steps to developing an effective marketing strategy

    In order to develop an effective marketing strategy you should:

    1. Set realistic goals and KPIs
    2. Define your vision and how the strategies you intend to use in order to achieve it
    3. Mobilize yourself and your team to reach these targets
    4. Keep the strategies you have implemented going
    5. Allow those strategies enough time to work
    6. Grow your business!

    Ideally, you should cover as many channels as possible with your user acquisition campaigns, depending on your budget (more on that soon).

    Some of the content marketing types you can create with the goal of user acquisition include:

    • Blog posts (News articles, opinion pieces, tutorials)
    • Video content (Tutorials, demonstrations, interviews)
    • Audio (Podcasts, interviews)
    • Images (Infographic content, photos, graphic design pieces)
    • Downloadable PDFs (Tutorials, eBooks, presentations, reports)
    • Surveys (User feedback, user experience, brand development suggestions)

    Once you settle on the content types you will create for your user acquisition strategy, you should define your publishing approach. It’s best to adopt a strategic, periodic publishing approach to avoid confusion with your potential users.

    For example, you can publish written content on Tuesdays and Fridays and then post visual social media posts on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

    Organize your marketing around a strict schedule to condition users to expect new content your user acquisition effort will take off. But, where should you publish content?

    Acquisition Channels 📲

    An important element of success in your user acquisition strategy lies in its delivery channels.

    Which communication channels should you use to reach your target audience in the most convenient manner?

    In this regard, budgeting plays a large role since you will rarely have enough resources to market your product/service everywhere on the web.

    Thus, some of the choices you should consider pursuing in order to acquire users include:

    Social Media Channels 👩🏿‍🦱🧑🏽‍🦱

    Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn are great sources of new users. These platforms allow you to inexpensively share content quickly and present it directly to potential users.

    Some of the content types you can incorporate onto a social media platform and into social media marketing plan include written posts, live video, multimedia, and giveaways.

    You can even use social media to create target adverts to get your content out to more potential users that haven't stumbled upon your feed yet.

    The benefit of using social media is in the fact that active users have autonomy in whether or not to commit to your content👀

    To help you to keep on top of your social media marketing we suggest using one of the many tools out there on the internet - like PromoRepublic for example.

    A huge pro for using social media channels is that people use their mobile devices on a daily basis and are, therefore, constantly exposed to your user acquisition strategy.

    User acquisition via mobile app is a growing trend as people become increasingly reliant on their devices.

    SEO Content 💻

    Writing blog posts, opinion pieces, and articles about trending topics in your industry on your online platform is an amazing way to humanize your brand and acquire users.

    To start, ensure that your website has a dedicated blog section and a content writer on board.

    You can write about a plethora of topics, create how-to guides, and generally express your opinions on pressing industry matters📄.

    Each piece of content you write should be optimized for SEO with proper keywords and formatting to fit into Google’s algorithm.

    Luckily for you, there are plenty of SEO tools out there that make this once tedious process easy and efficient.

    Once users “Google” anything related to your niche, your content is likely to show up in recommended search results and therefore those people can be added to your user acquisition.

    PPC Advertisement 💲

    Pay-per-click advertisement correlates with SEO but only to a degree.

    This acquisition channel represents a paid form of advertisement which takes full advantage of global search engines such as Google or Yahoo.

    Sometimes organic traffic just isn't enough.

    That is when a targeted PPC advertising campaign on Google Ads comes in handy.

    You can write short 1-3 sentence marketing pitches and publish them at the top of search result pages in your target territories.

    Subsequently, users who fit into your user profile will be presented with your PPC and gauge whether or not to click on the ad.

    The value of PPC is that you only ever pay for actual “clicks” toward your website, making it a budget-friendly user acquisition channel.

    Influencer Marketing 🤩

    Reaching out to influencers who are likely to use your product/service will often result in mutually-beneficial marketing strategy creation.

    Depending on the type of services you offer, explore which social media and industry influencers would be willing to work with you.

    In exchange for monetary compensation or free services, these individuals will promote your brand to their followers for a certain period.

    Judging by their follower base, this can be a great user acquisition strategy as people tend to trust the recommendations of influencers they follow.

    Referral Marketing🗣

    Referral marketing and having a referral program means that current customers are encouraged to find new users for you on your behalf.

    This is particularly powerful when launching your brand or company.

    But how does it work?🤷‍♀️

    All you need to do is set up a referral program whereby you offer your customers something in return for every user they bring to your website. Incentives usually include freebies, coupons, or discounts.

    You can get current customers to tag their friends in your social media or blog posts, by saying if they tag X many people they get Y, or even giving customers a unique link to share with their friends and family that flags you every time it is used, if their link gets used a certain number of times by unique IP addresses then they get rewarded.

    Email Marketing 📨

    email marketing

    Lastly, email marketing is a tried and tested marketing strategy that always works in your favor.

    You can use email-marketing tools to help build your mailing list, which makes this strategy infinitely easier.

    You can get hold of the email addresses of potential users and current customers through newsletter subscriptions, polls, and giveaways to gather relevant contact information efficiently.

    Avoid purchasing a ready-made email list since this will likely result in your brand being marked as spam by global mailing services.

    Write email content with the intent to present your product/service to potential users in a professional and transparent manner.

    Sweeten the proverbial pot by adding a discount coupon or a free trial to the email offer, and your user acquisition efforts will bear fruit.

    How Is User Acquisition Measured? 🧐

    You have a content marketing strategy in place, and you’ve chosen which acquisition channels to publish on – now what?

    👉While you can go into user acquisition “blind,” it’s much smarter to measure the effectiveness of your strategy.

    An acquisition report will give insight into what works and doesn’t work about your marketing approach, allowing you to adjust the user acquisition strategy on the fly.

    To get the best picture of how your marketing is performing, you should define two groups of goals to track going forward:

    Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) 👏🏼

    Key performance indicators represent the de facto goals that your marketing team can track and analyze in regard to content marketing.

    Luckily for you, there are tools like Google Analytics that do the heavy lifting for you here.

    KPIs are typically used in long-term marketing campaigns and represent very objective indicators of how well content is performing.

    You can use the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely) methodology to define goals for your user acquisition strategy since it will help make your goals numeric, time-sensitive, and, most importantly – objective

    Some of the KPIs you can incorporate into your user acquisition strategy include:

    • # Of emails sent
    • # Of social media posts created
    • # Of content pieces published
    • # Of users acquired
    • # Of users converted into customers

    Customer Acquisition Performance Indicators 💁🏻‍♀️

    Once you create a set of KPIs to track, you can move on to customer acquisition performance indicators.

    These are more complex measurements that cannot function independently from KPIs. The reason for this is simple – customer acquisition always follows user acquisition, not the other way around.

    Customer acquisition performance indicators will give you a good sense of time and resources spent to convert each user into a customer.

    For example, there is no sense in publishing five pieces of content that only acquire two users and convert only one into a customer.

    The customer acquisition measurements you should consider tracking are thus as follows:

    • Cost of customer acquisition (CAC) – money spent on acquiring a single customer
    • Lead close rate – the percentage of users converted into customers
    • Marketing ROI – money spent on content marketing compared to sales
    • Social media conversions – social media users converted into customers
    • Email conversions – email recipients converted into users and into customers
    • Lifetime customer value – recurrent spending of a single customer over month/year

    User Acquisition Tools To Consider👀

    Tracking the above-mentioned KPIs and performance indicators may be difficult without a proper tool to do so.

    As such, you should consider investing in a specialized user acquisition tool to help alleviate the difficulties of the tracking process. Each of these tools has a specific niche that they cover better than others.

    While some focus on heat map analysis and analytics, others will allow you to engage users and service their needs directly.

    Make sure to check each of them out before you commit in order to find out which one suits your brand and user acquisition strategy

    • EngageBay: a CRM tool used by sales, marketing, and customer support teams. Complete with marketing and email automation as well as helpdesk and live chat software.
    • Moosend: an email marketing tool for sending emails, automation, list management, audience management, and email analytics tracking
    • Outgrow: a tool that allows you to create interactive content for your marketing campaign
    • Hubspot: a CRM tool complete with a marketing hub, sales hub, service hub, CMS hub, and operations hub.
    • Wunderkind: a multichannel marketing tool specifically designed for retailers, publishers, and the travel industry.
    • Hotjar: a behavior analytics tool that reports on customer behavior once on your website and provides you with website heatmaps
    • Drift: a revenue acceleration tool geared towards facilitating and creating conversational marketing and sales.

    All of these tools can help you to streamline your user acquisition process.

    5 Ways To Improve Your Strategy ✍🏼

    Continually improving your user acquisition strategy will allow you to raise the performance of your content marketing strategy and income generated from sales.

    With that in mind, we’ve outlined several practical ways in which you can improve your strategy and learn to use your available resources more effectively.

    1. Repurpose Old Content With New SEO 👀

    Once-published content, can easily be repurposed periodically with updated SEO elements to become quality content.

    Having search engine optimized content will also allow your pages to rank higher on google and to therefore be seen by more users.

    Your blog posts can be updated with new search keywords, hyperlinks, and multimedia before being shared on social media and mailing lists.

    This will breathe new life into your content at a fraction of the initial price it took to create.

    Likewise, it will showcase that you are willing to fix/improve old content for users who may be interested in becoming customers.

    2. Integrate Products/Services Into Content 👨🏾‍💻

    You can integrate your brand’s business portfolio into relevant content intended for marketing.

    This is what is commonly referred to as a native advertisement, and it can significantly improve your user acquisition efforts.

    For example, create blog posts about social media marketing if you are a company that can provide users with social media marketing services.

    Remember to “pull” users into using your products, not “push” your product onto them.

    Mention your own services and products in a carefree manner as a great solution to the contemporary issues plaguing the industry

    3. Collaborate On Guest Posts & Social Proof 👥

    Inviting reputable industry professionals to write blog posts on your website can be a great boost to your brand’s image.

    Interviews with prolific industry representatives or satisfied clients can also add to your brand’s value in the eyes of potential users.

    Reach out to your B2B and B2C networks and see if you can gather content volunteers for user acquisition marketing.

    Social proof, as well as guest posts written by other professionals in your field, can significantly improve your user acquisition efforts due to newly-established trust.

    Social proof is the act of getting customers to write about your product or service or to even review it so that other users can see that this is a product/service worth investing in

    4. Set Up An Affiliate Program 🥰

    Users will be more inclined to convert into customers if there are long-term benefits they can look forward to.

    One such example is the creation of an affiliate program that will encourage customer loyalty. Users who choose to purchase products/services can gather points toward certain rewards if they refer your brand to their social circles.

    These rewards can range from branded goods and apparel, free products, discount codes, and other mutually-beneficial perks.

    Give your users practical reasons to stick with your brand, and they will be more inclined to spread positive word of mouth about your company.

    5. Periodic Discounts & Sales 🏷

    As a general rule of thumb, you should lower the entry price for your products/services periodically to incentivize conversion.

    Users who may be short on cash will be more inclined to make a purchase if the price of entry is momentarily lower than usual.

    You can also post discount codes on your social media or share them with your followers so they can give them to friends or family.

    Themed sales centered on holidays, seasons, and other time periods in which people feel more generous with spending can work well in your favor.

    👉 Black Friday & Cyber Monday are two good days to jump in on this trend.

    While it may seem counterintuitive at first, lowering your prices for brief periods will help your user acquisition efforts tremendously.

    Great User Acquisition Examples 🙌

    To cap things off, let’s take a quick look at several brands which handle user acquisition in a creative manner.

    Challenge yourself and try to spot which brands fit into what user acquisition strategy based on what we’ve discussed so far.

    Without further ado, what are some great user and customer acquisition examples out there?

    Amazon – Email-Based Acquisition 💌

    As the world’s greatest eCommerce platform, Amazon has learned to take advantage of its users’ behavioral patterns.

    Instead of using cold emails which may or may not target the right needs of an individual, they rely on website-based user interactions for data.

    Users who search for certain queries on Amazon will sooner or later be met with a discount code to encourage them to make the purchase. Or they will be sent recommendations about those particular goods at a bargain price

    The same strategy extends to cart abandonment and other interactions with goods, which didn’t result in sealed purchases.

    This level of personalization in email marketing has helped Amazon retain its place at the top of the eCommerce industry.

    amazon email based acquisition offer of a discount
    This image is from the author's personal email

    Dropbox – Referral-Based Acquisition 🗣

    Cloud-based storage platforms have become the new norm in recent years.

    Dropbox has decided that they would differentiate their platform from competitors such as Google Drive by giving away free storage space as referral gifts.

    While other contemporary platforms only allow for a mandatory subscription when it comes to storage space improvement, Dropbox is more pro-consumer.

    This has resulted in successful user acquisition with a very low barrier for entry for cloud storage users across the world.

    a website page on Dropbox which shows their referral based acquisition strategy
    Source: Dropbox

    MailChimp – Social Proof-Based Acquisition 🐵

    MailChimp started as a simple email marketing platform and evolved into a centralized omnichannel marketing service over the years.

    With the shift in services came a change in marketing approach and user acquisition.

    MailChimp has transformed its “About Us” page to include social proof content, which is about “You, not us.”

    This is a genius move, which is so obvious that it’s shocking that it took this long for a brand to adopt such an approach.

    MailChimp has centered its user acquisition on the notion of “it’s all about our customers,” and it has proven successful for them so far.

    a website page on MailChimp with social proof about their product
    Source: MailChimp

    H&M – Influencer-Based Acquisition 🌟

    As a world-renown apparel retailer, H&M doesn’t have to put that much effort into user acquisition to generate revenue.

    However, they do so regardless in order to maintain a positive brand image and to engage with their loyal followers around the world.

    The brand is known for its social media marketing, which revolves around influencers and their use of H&M products.

    Users trust influencers, and influencers get free goods from promoting H&M to their followers. This simple but effective strategy has allowed them to market their products at minimum cost and reach a wide range of demographics via social media.

    the social media feed of H&M showing the use of The Weekend as a influencer
    Source: H&M

    To Summarize 💁🏻‍♂️

    No matter the scale at which you operate or the industry you belong to, adopting a user acquisition strategy makes complete sense.

    Find the best, relevant content types and channels by which to reach your ideal customers before moving on to full production.

    Make sure to give users enough incentives to convert into leads and provide you with their email addresses before you move onto customer acquisition.

    While not every user will convert, those that do will make your acquisition strategy worthwhile for the continued growth and revenue generation of your company.