Published on: 22 January 2024
Last Updated on: 04 November 2024
In the dynamic world of business, where attracting and retaining customers is the heartbeat of success, investing in a robust customer acquisition strategy becomes not just important but pivotal. For B2C brands, this strategy isn’t just a checkbox; it’s the very essence of their marketing initiatives. They stand at the crossroads where tradition meets innovation, recognizing that while tried-and-true methods are the foundation, the ever-changing landscape demands a fresh perspective—a stylish remix of the classics.
B2C customer acquisition is the linchpin, the gateway to creating a customer base that not only fuels short-term growth but lays the foundation for enduring relationships. B2C brands acknowledge this, making customer acquisition their numero uno marketing initiative. However, in this fast-paced arena, strategies, much like fashion trends, have a way of evolving. What once captivated the audience may now seem commonplace. The challenge lies not just in adhering to the familiar but in reinventing the approach, putting a contemporary spin on iconic methods.
Marketing is akin to a fashion designer crafting a new collection—retaining the essence of what works while infusing creativity and innovation. Whether it’s through leveraging emerging technologies, embracing data-driven insights, or redefining storytelling, the goal is to ensure that the customer acquisition strategy remains not just effective but captivating. As B2C brands step into the limelight of customer acquisition, they understand that the runway is dynamic, and staying en vogue requires constant evolution and the courage to breathe new life into the timeless art of attracting and retaining customers.
Win Customers With Proven Strategies
For B2C startups navigating the competitive landscape, a successful customer acquisition strategy is the compass that points toward sustainable growth. Here are five proven strategies that have consistently delivered results:
Content Marketing Brilliance
Develop engaging and valuable content that speaks directly to your target audience. Whether through blog posts, videos, or social media, content marketing establishes your brand as an authority in your industry, attracting and retaining customers over the long term.
Social Media Mastery
Leverage the power of social media platforms to connect with your audience. Create compelling content, engage in conversations, and utilize targeted advertising to reach potential customers where they spend their time online.
Referral Programs With A Twist
Encourage satisfied customers to become brand advocates through innovative referral programs. Offer incentives that go beyond the traditional discounts, providing unique perks or exclusive access to foster a sense of community around your brand.
Influencer Collaborations
Partner with influencers who resonate with your target demographic. Authentic collaborations can introduce your brand to a wider audience and build credibility through trusted voices in your industry.
Seamless User Experience
Ensure that your website and overall user experience are seamless and intuitive. A user-friendly interface, easy navigation, and a secure purchasing process contribute to positive customer experiences, enhancing the likelihood of acquisition and retention.
Conclusion:
Regardless of the strategies employed by B2C startups, the heartbeat of sustainable growth lies in recognizing and appreciating the customers’ significance. Beyond the intricacies of marketing tactics and engagement strategies, the fundamental principle is clear—prioritize customer value.
Ankita Tripathy loves to write about food and the Hallyu Wave in particular. During her free time, she enjoys looking at the sky or reading books while sipping a cup of hot coffee. Her favourite niches are food, music, lifestyle, travel, and Korean Pop music and drama.
Content marketing has been around for quite a long time, and it is the go-to marketing strategy for many businesses nowadays. But everybody uses it, and the results they get are more or less along the same lines…in terms of the time they take to materialize.
What if you’re looking to get better results from your content marketing endeavors? What if you want to do some smart work rather than hard work?
In this post, let’s take a look at some answers to this question.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is basically defined as the type of marketing that involves creating and publishing/distributing content to a certain audience. The purpose of distributing this type of content is to increase awareness of the product/services so that they can be sold more. While “content,” in this context, refers to the content of all types, mostly written stuff is utilized for marketing purposes.
This type of marketing takes different shapes and forms.
Some people can engage in content marketing by writing and publishing blogs regularly. Others can utilize their product pages as a medium to engage in marketing, i.e., by making the descriptions and the visuals, etc., appealing and attractive.
Actually, instead of mentioning them here somewhat haphazardly, let’s look at some of the content marketing methods in detail before moving on to the tips.
What Are Some Common Methods Of Content Marketing?
Here are a few of the common ways in which content marketing is employed.
Blogs: Blogs, especially when created by a professional writing service, have a key role that goes beyond just advertising products or services. Their main goal is to educate and engage readers. This approach helps grow a brand's readership and audience. By providing valuable and informative content, the brand naturally attracts more people. This isn't just a marketing strategy; it's about genuinely helping readers. As more people find the blogs helpful, they start to trust and follow the brand, leading to increased business opportunities. With the help of a blog writing agency such as Compose.ly, brands can consistently deliver high-quality content that connects with their audience.
Emails: Email marketing is technically a marketing strategy on its own, but since it almost always utilizes content of some sort, it can also be mentioned in content marketing. In an email marketing campaign, individuals are reached out separately by the brand. These emails can either inform the recipient about some sort of new product release, a sale or a special discount, etc.
Newsletters: Newsletters are technically emails, but they are not like other messages that are typically used and sent in an email marketing campaign. While the latter, for the most part, directly promote the offerings of a brand, newsletters are geared toward educating the readers. You can think about them to be a type of hybrid between a blog and a typical email marketing message.
E-books: While this one is a more elaborate step than what brands usually do, it is a good way to engage in content marketing.
Now, with all that out of the way, let’s take a look at some tips that you can follow to get better results from your content marketing endeavors.
Tips For Getting Better Results From Content Marketing
As we mentioned earlier, while content of all types can be employed in content marketing, written content is the most common…and perhaps the toughest to create. That is why our tips will be geared towards it in particular.
Don’t Write Like A Robot, And Don’t Write For Robots
In that rather wordsmith-is line, we’ve summed up one of the most important principles of writing online content.
Firstly, when you write content for marketing purposes, be it of whatever type and kind, you should make sure that your tone is friendly, communicative, and human-like. Mind you, there are exceptional cases where a totally opposite tone would be more suitable, but we are talking about the common cases here.
This is what we mean by not writing like a robot.
Here is what you can do to make your writing tone fall into this criterion. Of course, depending on the situation at hand, some of these tips may not be very applicable.
Try and refer to the reader as “you” and yourself as “I” or “we.” This is one of the basic and simplest ways to make your tone look more natural and human-like.
Since you have to make your written content look more like a conversation than a piece of written text, you should reduce your overall use of passive voice. People hardly use passive voice when they speak. I mean, I could have just said, “The passive voice is hardly used by people when they speak,” but I did just make my point.
Keep sentences short. Keeping your sentences short can also give a natural touch to your writing and make it more reader-friendly.
The second part of our tip was Don’t write for robots.
We should actually clear this up a little before moving on.
Nowadays, a lot of content marketing is done via search engines. When people write blogs, they channel them to their readers via search engines. The same goes for a lot of other types of content, like product descriptions and e-books, etc.
Now, in a bid to make their content look nice to the search engines, a lot of people can end up making it look too mechanical, erratic, and awkward for human taste.
Consider the following example:
We offer the best ramen in Tokyo. Our quality ramen store in Tokyo is very good. Buy quality ramen near me in Tokyo. (Note the atrocious keyword usage)
Good content? For the search engine, maybe. For the reader? It’s just gibberish.
You have to avoid doing this sort of stuff when writing content for your audience. You should strike a balance between making the content appealing for SEs as well as your human readers.
Do Proper Research…And Use It
When it comes to content marketing materials such as blogs and newsletters, your aim should be to provide reliable and educative content to your audience. This can only be done if you do proper research and then utilize it when writing the content itself.
In this part, let’s look at how you can do research properly and what benefits you can get from it.
Here are some things that you can do for effective research:
Look for popular and reliable sources on the internet. Before you start gleaning information from anywhere, you should establish its reliability first.
Once done, be sure to find out relevant facts and figures to add to your content. This tip is, of course, subjective. In some types of content, adding facts and figures may not be very suitable. However, it can be a good idea in things like blog posts, emails, and the like.
If you find yourself in a situation where you have to use some material from a source verbatim in its actual form.
(More important than implementing theoretical and conceptual information is the utilization of the data you get from audience research. In other words, you should conduct audience research and then use the details that you find to adjust your content as per the needs of the audience. When we say “audience research,” we basically refer to using analytical tools to find out necessary information and details about your audience, such as the details about their age, gender, location, and so on.)
Now let’s look at what benefits you can get by doing and incorporating research into your work.
Authority: When your content is backed with research, it comes off as authoritative. For example, when you present a stat for a certain situation or occurrence, it looks more grounded as compared to an opinionated guess.
Up-to-date information: Conducting research can also get you in touch with up-to-date information. By not researching your material before writing it, you can get stuck with old, outdated information that can neither help you nor your readers.
Value: When your content is based on research, it provides value to your readers. For problems, it can provide solutions. For choices, it can provide expert opinions.
This sort of content is a lot more potent in building a better readership and for growing your brand.
Aim For Content Perfection
Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.
Vince Lombardi
It’s a bit of a dramatic way to start off this heading, but it does make the point that we want.
No content is perfect because perfection (least of all in written content) is not achievable. But if you aim for the bullseye, you can land somewhere close to it.
That is why you should make all the effort possible to remove all types of imperfections from your content.
Grammar errors: Grammar errors are by far the most common and most harmful errors that you can make in your content. You should be proactive about avoiding such errors during the writing phase. And once you do write the content, you should take steps like proofreading the content and using an online grammar checker to weed out the remaining ones.
Clunky readability issues: Readability issues, such as confusing words, long-winded sentences, and weird phrase choices, can also adversely affect the quality of content. you can remove these types of imperfections from your content by using an online AI-driven paraphrasing tool. A good AI paraphraser can improve the readability of the provided content during the rephrasing process.
Plagiarism: Plagiarism is like the diamondback of content imperfections. You can’t spot it quickly enough, and it can kill the quality of your write-up without you realizing it. Removing this imperfection is necessary and tricky at the same time. The best way to go about it is to use an online plagiarism checker and then analyze the results to take the steps you need.
Conclusion
A lot of brands do content marketing nowadays. But, to bring yourself a cut above the others, you have to follow some best practices. We’ve outlined a few of those in the post above.
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In the world of e-commerce, there are many practices, concepts, and techniques that can help you boost your revenue and enjoy some extra profits. One of the least mentioned category of mistakes in this manner - and yet one of the most important - focus on the mistakes related to the assortment.
In other words, these mistakes include all the wrong moves that e-commerce store owners are making during the buying process. The real trouble of these mistakes is the fact that many are unaware of their real cost.
This is why we have decided to guide our readers in on the dangers of improper assortment planning - and how it can be fixed. The key, as you will notice in the sections below, is to optimize the process of buying inventory and therefore match the customer demand in a perfectly precise way.
Mistake #1: Using Excel to Track Your Buying Process:
One of the biggest mistakes that e-commerce owners make is the use of Microsoft Excel as a way to track their buying. Even though this seems as a logical way to organize your buying process, spreadsheets are generally a bad way to organize your information.
Speaking of, anything that contains information in categories (added manually) has to be automated. In times when e-commerce owners are experiencing a magnitude of orders online, adding buys manually is time consuming - which is why it needs to be automated.
Mistake #2: Improper Arrangement of Clusters:
Clusters are the next mistake we are focusing on, and one that is tremendously big nowadays. The main way in which e-commerce managers are making it is by assigning every store to a single cluster - which needs to be reorganized.
More importantly, products need to be clustered at a product class level, and use the information in quantities (before the assortments are bought). By doing this, you can link the buying process to the actual allocation and eliminate problems before it’s too late.
Mistake #3: Inter-Store Inventory Balancing:
If you ever caught yourself in a situation where you are losing sales in on store due to your lack of stock for a particular item, you are probably having the same product sitting and collecting dust on the shelves of another store (if you manage more than one store).
At this point, the best way to solve this problem is by a simple trick - which does not involve the purchase of new inventory or the elimination of the inventory in one store so that it can be moved to another.
Alternatively, you should use a smart predictive analysis engine and a tool that is known as “Inter-Store Inventory Balancing” to analyze every single influencing factor of your retail supply chain. As an advanced form of analytics, a tool like this will recommend the optimal inter-store transfer schedule so that you move merchandise from one store to another (from low to high demand).
Mistake #4: Going Big (Instead of Going Custom):
A lot of multi-channel retailers are nowadays focused on the “best rated” programs and solutions for optimizing their assortment planning. And while in most of the cases programs like these are built to last and cover as many aspects of product assortment as possible, they usually lack the functions that are needed in specific situations.
For example, these programs often fail to calculate hundreds of algorithms on the kind of Big Data that today’s omni-channel retail products are able to churn out on a daily basis. Therefore, the general conclusion that we can all take from this mistake is to properly analyze your needs and implement a solution to analytics that works for you as you scale your business, is end-to-end integrated and coordinated between your merchandising and marketing.
Final Words:
At the end of the day, we all must accept the fact that mistakes linked to product assortment happen all of the time - and there is no harm in admitting that.
As a retail expert, however, you should always be able to know how to fix them. Your assortment needs to be consistent, scalable, matching your needs and optimized for your specific customers.
This is what proper assortment planning is all about. Ultimately, it is what will help you determine how much of your merchandise should be placed on your shelf. The end result of proper planning goes a long way - mostly resulting in increased sales and improved customer satisfaction.
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According to HubSpot, in 2019, 75% of the world's companies used content marketing and found it more efficient than other ways to attract customers. Small businesses with up to five employees predominate among them. The fact is that young companies with budget deficits, in contrast to large market players, prefer to invest in useful content, offering users detailed and objective reviews.
Popular sites for content marketing:
Blogs on a store's website or a third-party site;
video channels;
thematic forums;
affiliated websites.
A blog on an E-Commerce site may include product reviews, sales leader ratings, interesting case studies, recipes and application examples, detailed answers to customer questions, stories about creating a product line and other useful content that will show your expertise in this subject.
YouTube channel is an absolute must-have for shops, whose products can be spun in the hands, show in work and express their impressions. For today YouTube is a search engine where you can find answers to almost any questions. Tell your customers which bike is best for the city and tires for the ice. And you'll notice how customers will reach out to you.
Thematic forums and partner sites are the right places to post quality content, where you can demonstrate expertise in your niche.
User-generated content of the E-Commerce
E-commerce is an excellent platform for generating content by users and customers. Reviews, Q&As, photo and video reviews of products provide an opportunity to receive unique and useful content almost for free. It's enough only:
simplify registration;
add authorization through social networks;
abolish premoderation;
motivate users to communicate and express themselves;
ask to bark, share in social networks;
provoke discussion;
to give bonuses for comments or reviews.
The advantage of content marketing can be considered an increase in the image and customer loyalty due to the trust in the expert opinion of the store. With the same level of traffic to useful content and to the selling page, the content gives the best conversion into sales. If your niche is not yet engaged in content marketing, you have a great opportunity to become an expert and leader in their field.
The disadvantage of this method of attracting clients in high labor costs and the long-lasting effect of investments. But during the regular publication of quality materials, the cost of each client involved is constantly falling, which makes content marketing profitable in the long term.
Criteria for the effectiveness of content marketing
Google Analytics, together with E-Commerce reporting, allows you to track all quantitative and qualitative indicators of content marketing efficiency:
viewings;
malfunctions;
time on the site;
number of subscribers;
likes, reposting, comments;
returns to the site;
lids and sales;
conversion rate;
marketing costs.
Sales and lids are just one of the criteria for efficiency. Much more emphasis is placed by experts on the involvement of the audience, which is subsequently converted into sales.
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