Handbook for Startups: 10 Free Customer Acquisition Strategies

What are some of the major pillars of a successful startup? These are highly effective acquisition, engagement, and retention of customers at all stages of a startup lifecycle from the idea through to IPO.

With this post, we kick off a series of blog posts for startup founders devoted to the best practices of startup marketing full of low-budget marketing tips that won’t break the bank and will help establish a unique brand identity and acquire new customers.

Today we are going to cover all things customer acquisition. At the end of this post, you can download a handbook with the summary, as well as exclusive best-performing pro tips and advanced hacks.

Tip 1. Produce high-quality content and optimize via SEO

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is widely known as a set of processes aimed at optimizing website, content and links so they can all become easily findable by search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc). As a result, a website or piece of content will receive more visitors from a search engine (“organic traffic”) when they rank high on the search engine results page. These visitors can then potentially be converted into customers.

To Do List

✅ Create new blog posts around questions and terms your ideal customers are searching
✅ Create educational content
✅ Combine general content with industry-specific one
✅ Rewrite old content to meet SEO's latest recommendations
✅ Use high-quality visuals
✅ Create interactive content (infographics, quizzes, challenges, calculators)

Key Performance Indicators to Monitor

Number of page views, website visitors, number of active and new followers, keywords rankings (increases or decreases), average session duration, and number of comments among others.

For pro tips & advanced hacks please refer to the Handbook at the bottom of this post.

Tip 2. Register your company on High-traffic Online Directories

Take advantage of comparison and review sites

Consumers regularly visit online directories when searching for specific products or services. Such websites have high traffic and strong domain credibility among search engines, so there is a good chance that the directory page or your company will show up on the first page of Google. Also, the more popular and trustworthy links lead to your website and vice versa, the higher your Google PageRank is. In addition, conversions are typically better for such leads, as they are high-intent customers.

To Do List

✅ Sign up and register your company profile on all relevant online directories both general and industry-specific
✅ Claim and verify your profile
✅ Read best practices on how to fill in your company profile and generate relevant content
✅ Encourage your customers to leave reviews for your products and services
✅ Check competitors’ profiles and analyze their activity on the platform

Key Performance Indicators to Monitor

Reviews volume and quality, website traffic by source, NPS, customer referrals, click-through rate, bounce rate, lead-to-customer conversion, and call-to-action (CTA) performance among others.

Tip 3. Make Linkedin Work For You, Not The Other Way Around

Linkedin hacks that still work in 2022

• Auto viewing* (available via third-party software) allows to auto-view select people using the search filters, resulting in connection requests from targeted people and boosting content impressions.
• Companies and people web scraping* (available via third-party software) is a great and efficient way to export lists of targets in convenient formats (csv, xls, JSON, etc).
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator 1-month free trial is granted to all new users, some can also capitalize on this and save $1,000 per seat.
• Use Google to scrape LinkedIn — because Google indexes all LinkedIn, you can find anyone on LinkedIn via Google, no matter if you are connected to them or not. This is especially helpful if you reached your search limit on LinkedIn. Use relevant Google boolean operators such as “intitle:LinkedIn”, “profile NOT qualification” etc.

*please note, auto viewing and scraping is prohibited by LinkedIn T&C, you can be banned for it.

To Do List

✅ Make your company page public, also make sure your blog posts are also public, it will allow LinkedIn to index these pages and promote to interested users
✅ Optimize your content on LinkedIn for Google SEO to increase the chances of receiving organic traffic from Google SERP
✅ Create your company hashtag, use it in every post and follow it to monitor public engagement with it
✅ Use BOOLEAN operators, which allow to narrow or expand keyword searches to help find very specific results

For pro tips & advanced hacks please refer to the Handbook at the bottom of this post.

Tip 4. Create Compelling Press Releases To Pitch Media

Great way to Increase your startup legitimacy

Press releases are great for SEO (increases backlinks), especially if you optimize them for specific keywords and phrases that your target audience is searching for. Press releases are generally great for company/startup launch, securing funding, announcing new hires, new product launch or product updates, new partnerships, new location opening, award winners, statements or declarations, and more.

To Do List

✅ If you feel creative, you can create your press release from scratch, otherwise, I’d recommend using publicly available templates or searching for available relevant ones to use as a reference
✅ After the press release is ready, you need to think of ways how to distribute it
✅ One of the options is to use press release distribution services (most are affordable for SMBs and startups)
✅ Another option (a bit more tricky) is to scrape emails and contacts of journalists and cold email outreach

Top Performing Headline Action Words

Confirms, Reveals, Proves, Launches, Empowers, Enables, Allows, Announces, Rolls Out, Shows, Releases, Publishes

Other Smart Ways To Acquire Customers For Free

5. Claim & Verify Your Business on Google, Bing, Apple, Yandex, etc.

6. Work With Reviews

7. Run Email Newsletter

8. Do Guest Blogging

9. Form Cross-Promotion Partnerships

10. Launch Your Own Referral Program

For details and other exclusive tips please refer to the Handbook below.

There are some obvious tradeoffs of time and efforts required to use the aforementioned tools and strategies, still, they are well-suited for early-stage startups and those who bootstrap, being an effective way to engage customers, build and maintain online reputation, boost sales and make informed decisions.

In the next posts, we are going to discuss top tips and advanced hacks for customer engagement and customer retention, stay tuned.