an infographic showing the client acquisition cycle. There are 5 steps: build an audience, sell to your audience, convert to sale, deliver on your promises, and use results to acquire more clients.

Client Acquisition Cycle: 5 Steps of Client Acquisition

July 22, 2023 / 605 Comments

There are many different ways to acquire clients for your business. So many that sometimes client acquisition can seem more complicated than it really is. Let’s break it down to the basics to simplify the process. Here are the 5 steps of the client acquisition cycle.

Build an Audience

The first step of client acquisition is building an audience that you can promote your products and services to. There are other options, of course. You could pay to promote your products to someone else’s audience (high upfront costs) or promote your products and services on a platform that has an audience (low control of promotion and audience types). However, building an audience allows you the maximum control for the lowest cost.

The audience you want to build will be full of your dream customers. You will likely get other people joining your audience, but you want to focus your marketing and audience building around your dream customers.

The 5 steps of client acquisition is more like a cycle, so when the cycle returns to this point, build your audience become continue to build your audience. Growing your audience feeds new people into your client acquisition cycle, resulting in more clients.

Sell to Your Audience

Your audience does not automatically equal money. You need to promote your product or service regularly to make money from your audience.

One of the biggest mistakes we see businesses making is only promoting their products or services once or twice a month. Often, they are worried about talking about their product or service too much and making their client think they are only after their money. The reality is that your clients know that your ability to make the content they enjoy hinges on you earning a living. Even if they are not interested in your products or services, they will not be turned off by you promoting your product or service.

Also, on social media, your audience seeing your content relies heavily on the algorithm. Even the followers who often engage with your content may not see every piece of content you create. If you are promoting your products and services once or twice a month, your audience may only be seeing one per month or one every second month.

Here are some ways you can sell to your audience:

Create content specifically to promote your product or service.
Promote your product or service whenever you create related content.
Have a CTA at the bottom of every piece of content promoting your product or service.
Run ads in your content promoting your product or service instead of running other ads in your content.

Convert to a Sale

Promoting your content also doesn’t automatically translate to sales. Your content’s job is just to get them to click on the link where they can learn more. From there, you will have mechanisms or processes designed to convert that lead into a paying customer. That will look different based on your business.

An e-commerce business will usually direct an interested lead to a landing page or product description where they can learn more about the product and decide if they want to buy or not. Everything from the website design and images to the copy is designed to get the dream customers to make a purchase. There are also abandon cart sequences and advertising that can get back a lost client.

A service-based business will likely direct an interested lead to their service page or a landing page where they can learn more about the service and decide if they are interested or not. If they are interested, there is usually a contact form so they can enquire. Service-based businesses will usually have discovery calls so both the business and the customer can get to know each other, discuss the process and expectations, and decide if they are a good fit. This is important for the service-based business because they have limited capacity for clients, and so are selective about who they work with. The discovery call process is designed to convert dream customers into clients.

The client acquisition process does not stop once you’ve converted the lead to a sale.

Deliver on Your Promise

The client acquisition cycle does not stop once your lead becomes a paying customer. Your customers’ experiences can make or break your future sales. If they have a good experience, they will rave about you to people around them, and their results can be used to promote your service or product in the future. If they have a bad experience, they will leave terrible reviews and try to warn people off your business.

The basic rule of providing a good customer experience is to deliver on the promises you make in your marketing. They have bought your product or service to achieve that result, and they will be dissatisfied if they do not receive it. This promise may have been given in your marketing, or it may have been given in your discovery call. Pay attention to the promises you make and be transparent with clients about things that may affect their results.

Use Your Client Results to Win More Sales

You want your clients to achieve amazing results using your product or service because when they do, you can use those results to acquire more clients. Those results can be turned into reviews and testimonials, case studies, and social media content to promote your product or service. There are 3 parts to using your client results to win more sales:

Making sure your clients get results (by delivering on your promise and looking for ways to better support your clients to achieve those results)
Encouraging clients to share their results with you (by creating a community where people excitedly share their results, encouraging or incentivising them to share results on social media, and by following up with clients or creating an offboarding process where you take a look at their results.)
Sharing those results in your marketing and content to promote your product or service (updating your landing page or marketing, sharing results in your content like case studies, photos, reviews etc.)

These client results are powerful. They are proof that you deliver on your promises. Case studies, in particular, help clients to see that people just like them who are facing the same problems they face have achieved the results they wish to achieve using your product or service.

Continue Cycling Through the Client Acquisition Cycle

The 5 steps of client acquisition are a never-ending cycle that will continue on as long as your business is in operation. It will continue to bring you fresh leads for your business and produce new marketing content for your channels. There are many different approaches and techniques that are used to acquire new clients and turn clients into repeat clients, but these are the basic steps of acquiring clients for your business.