Every startup faces the daunting challenge of acquiring customers with minimal financial resources.
To secure your first sales, you need either a negative CAC, a credit card with a generous limit, or a patient angel investor.
Here’s how I start businesses and advise clients to lower their CAC quickly.
Narrow Your Audience
Understanding your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is crucial.
To identify your ICP, check out Unlocking Riches: Zeroing in on Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
This understanding will streamline content and campaign ideation and help you target the right audience and market.
Create (Write & Record) Content
In the early stages, you’ll need to trade sweat for equity.
Build a spark file.
I provide a behind-the-scenes look at mine in How I Build My Spark File.
Start writing atomic essays and publish them on Medium, LinkedIn, and your website.
Convert these essays into videos and upload them to YouTube. Don’t worry about editing or creating shorts initially; you can optimize later.
The goal at this stage is to build a substantial body of work quickly.
Acquire Customers from Other Platforms
If you have one, your website is likely months away from attracting visitors and customers. So, don’t rely on it for your first customers.
Instead, go to platforms where thousands of potential customers are already consuming content and seeking solutions—LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and Medium. My list starts with LinkedIn and progresses in that order.
Begin with familiar platforms and then expand and optimize from there.
The strategy is to consistently share your expertise on these platforms. With time and some skill, prospects will start reaching out to you.
Optimize Your Website for Conversion
Although you’ll start on other platforms, your website remains a long-term asset. It will ultimately yield more consistent and predictable opportunities.
Begin by optimizing your website for conversion:
1. Create a survey-style, multi-part lead form for inquiries.
2. Develop lead magnets that showcase your expertise and provide immediate value. These can be gated (requiring an email to download) or not.
3. Include a Call To Action (CTA) on every page, directing visitors to your lead form or relevant lead magnet.
Critical: Always have a positioning statement (what you do, who you do it for, and why you do it better) and a lead form in the hero section of your homepage.
Why?
70% of visitors to your homepage are there to engage with you and your brand (trust me, there is a study specific to this, but I can’t find it at the moment). They’ve likely heard about you elsewhere and are ready to connect. Don’t make it difficult for them!
Those just browsing will land on your content and landing pages (which should also have CTAs). If they reach your homepage, they’re ready to engage.
Publish Content on Your Website
Once your website is ready to generate leads, start populating it with content.
Learn some SEO basics to understand what your market is searching for and create content that meets this demand. Invest in tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush and use their tutorials to get started.
Based on your keyword research and expertise, start a Spark File.
Write, record, and publish content daily. You aim to build a substantial body of work that showcases your expertise and value to prospects.
Use a CRM, Automation, and Analytics
With increased activity, you’ll rapidly increase your contacts, interactions, and discussions. Some will convert quickly, while others may take months or years.
A CRM is essential for managing this and maintaining a low CAC. A well-used CRM maximizes the ROI on your sales and marketing efforts—leads.
Automation in your CRM ensures responsiveness to new leads, follow-up on sales conversations, and keeps you top-of-mind with slow or unresponsive prospects.
Key automation to set up:
- New Lead Sequence: Immediate confirmation of inquiry receipt with a meeting scheduling link, followed by reminders to book an appointment.
- Ghosted Sequence: Gentle reminders to reschedule missed meetings.
- Lead Nurturing Sequence: A series of emails offering valuable insights and keeping your solution top-of-mind.
Additionally, I set up Google Analytics to track traffic and lead conversion growth.
Be Obsessive About Customer Retention
Everything discussed so far can be free or low-cost. However, sustaining this level of effort in the long term is challenging.
As you onboard customers, your focus will be split between sales, marketing, product, and operations.
Eventually, you’ll need to spend money, which will put a spotlight on your CAC.
Here’s a CAC secret: The higher your Lifetime Value (LTV) of a customer, the more you can spend on acquiring a customer.
Therefore, be obsessive about customer retention from the start. This gives you more margin for testing and refining paid customer acquisition. Plus, you can hire experts to accelerate your business by taking on some of your responsibilities.
