Customer acquisition is the strategic process of bringing on new clients or customers to your business. A good customer acquisition strategy is necessary for business growth and keeps employees, leaders, and investors happy. Customer acquisition, along with demand generation, sales enablement, and client retention, is a major component of a revenue generation plan.

The goal of building a customer acquisition strategy is to create a repeatable, sustainable process that will generate new revenue predictably over time.

There's a lot that goes into an effective customer acquisition plan, but for most growth-minded B2B companies, the essential elements of a good strategy are the same. Allow plenty of time (3-6 months) to work on your strategy internally, involve the right partners, and select the right technology tools. 

Here are the key steps to follow to create a customer acquisition strategy that will set you up for success in 2019 and beyond.

When it comes to segmentation, many companies lean on the basics, splitting up their email database by industry, persona, and/or stage of the funnel. But why stop there?

Marketing automation tools like HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot make it easy to create lists based on actions and engagements taken by your website visitors. When you augment this data with offline touch points logged in your CRM, there are an endless number of trigger combinations you can use to segment your audience and deliver highly-customized marketing and sales campaigns.

Websites can serve a number of different purposes. But, if your B2B website isn't helping you to acquire new customers, then it's not doing its job.

Almost all companies have a website, which is a great start. Some even look really nice. But just having a nice-looking website isn't enough to generate leads and acquire new customers for most businesses. You need to take a strategic approach to attracting visitors, converting leads, and closing customers in order to truly impact revenue growth in real life (IRL).

Sales and marketing leaders should leverage their most valuable digital asset to generate leads and acquire customers, and your website has the potential to be your most powerful sales and marketing tool. This is true even for companies that handle the majority of their sales process offline - on the phone with a sales rep, for example. 

Regardless of your industry or audience, the elements required to turn your website into a lead generation and customer acquisition tool are essentially the same. Implement these steps to start using your B2B website to generate leads and close customers.

Automated email campaigns, also known as nurture campaigns, are a powerful way to accelerate revenue growth across your entire marketing and sales funnel.

Nurture campaigns are a wise investment because they can usually be built using assets you already have, and they require fairly low maintenance to maintain and optimize post-launch. These campaigns work hard for you in the background, freeing up your sales and marketing teams to work on higher-priority opportunities or more strategic initiatives.

A nurture campaign is made up of a series of automated email messages that are sent to a specific audience according to a pre-established schedule. You can design these automated email campaigns to generate growth in a variety of ways, for both sales and marketing teams. These campaigns are easily built with marketing automation software.

Explore six automated email campaigns that accelerate growth across the entire funnel, from warming up marketing-qualified leads to getting a second chance with deals you've lost.

Marketing automation software offers enormous benefits to marketing and sales teams, but it's not a magic wand. To be successful, you need to have the right tool in place to support your team's needs and goals.

When your team is stuck using a marketing automation solution that isn't a good fit, you fail to see results, and your team gets frustrated. Who can blame them? Left without a good marketing automation tool, they're at a crippling disadvantage, and their competitors have an easy edge.

Read on to learn three common signs you're using the wrong marketing automation software, and learn how to find a better solution for your organization.

Many sales teams sheepishly admit they’re not the greatest when it comes to following up with trade show leads.

I get it, believe me. When you attend an industry trade show, your time there is a whirlwind of introductions, conversations, and contact info exchanges. You come back with an overwhelming stack of business cards, set of notes, and host of new LinkedIn connection requests. Not to mention the stack of unopened emails in your inbox and other work that has piled up while you've been out of the office.

To be clear, highly-qualified leads that are ready to make a purchase right away are not usually a problem. Where many sales teams fall short, though, is in the follow-up, management, and nurturing of qualified trade show leads who are not ready to buy just yet.

Luckily, this is an area where marketing automation tools like HubSpot can really shine. Here’s how sales, marketing and technology can work together to master the art of trade show lead follow-up and turn trade show leads into customers.

One of the major components of conversion optimization is measuring visitor engagement with your website content, capturing actions like page views, email opens, CTA clicks and form submissions to score and analyze.

While these basic pageview analytics tell us how long a visitor is on a page, they don't tell us what they were doing on a particular page and which specific content they found engaging.

In other words, analyzing page views, CTA clicks, and form submissions only tells part of the story of your visitor's experience, but omits most of the details. Fortunately, there is a tool we can use to measure on-page engagements and visitor actions that lead to conversion - events.

Sales teams often face a special set of challenges. Technology has fundamentally changed the way that people buy, and sales teams in every industry are feeling the impact. Cold calling is often ineffective, and many other traditional sales approaches are returning diminishing results as well.

With constant pressure to hit their numbers, sales teams start to panic, and performance starts to dip. As a sales leader, you must act quickly to resolve the issues your team is facing in order to improve sales performance. 

Your first step should be diagnosing the problem that your team is struggling with. Read on to explore four of the most common struggles of sales teams and ways to solve them. 

A poorly put together marketing plan will generate poor results, even if it's perfectly executed by a top-notch team.  

Marketing teams often don't realize they are stuck with a badly designed marketing plan until they are months into execution, when results have ground to a halt or even tanked. As a result, a tremendous amount of time, energy and resources are wasted.

Whether you’ve created your marketing plan in-house or you’ve hired an agency to help you, you can quickly identify whether you’re working off of a sub-par marketing plan that is destined to disappoint if you know how to spot key red flags.

Here are five of the most common signs that a marketing plan is destined for failure.

Too often, companies make the mistake of laying out their website page architecture in a way that makes sense to them, but not to their visitors. The results are confused prospects and lost sales opportunities.

When a user lands on your website, you need to provide them with a clear path to take the action that you want. Don't leave anything up to chance or ever make your users guess what action they're supposed to take.

Use these tips to optimize your web page architecture for best results.