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As a lead generation agency, your whole purpose is to help grow your clients’ businesses.
This typically involves targeting potential customers at the very top of the marketing funnel and educating them about your client’s products or services. Indeed, one study found that “creating net new demand in the market” is the #1 priority for B2B marketers.
But there’s another, relatively untapped, audience segment that can yield even more positive results: buyers who are already somewhat aware of your client. There’s no need to spend time introducing your client to these prospective customers — so you can start high-value conversations faster.
Find out all about targeting and converting these audiences in our guide to acquisition marketing, where we’ll cover:
The difference between acquisition marketing and brand awareness
Top acquisition marketing strategies for lead gen agencies
Best practices for building an acquisition marketing strategy
Let’s get into it…
What Is Acquisition Marketing?
Acquisition marketing is about generating leads for your clients by targeting new audiences at the top of the marketing funnel.
However, as we’ve already discussed, there’s one crucial difference — these audiences are already familiar with your client.
At this stage, they don’t have any particular loyalty to your client. They might not even fully understand the benefits of the products or services you’re promoting. And they’re just as likely to buy from a competitor.
But if you can reach out to them with the right messaging, at the right time, through the right channels, you’ve got a fighting chance of converting them into leads.
Acquisition Marketing vs Brand Awareness: What's the Difference?
Acquisition marketing and brand awareness strategies both target top-of-the-funnel prospects.
But they’re not the same thing.
| Acquisition Marketing | Brand Awareness |
|---|---|
| Targets top-of-funnel prospects who have heard of your client’s brand | Targets top-of-funnel prospects who don’t know about your client |
| Focused targeting strategy | Broad targeting strategy |
| Customer-centric messaging | Brand-centric messaging |
| Lower volume, higher conversion rate | Higher volume, lower conversion rate |
As the name suggests, brand awareness is about getting a brand in front of a wider audience. It involves reaching a high volume of potential leads and sharing brand-focused messaging. By definition, this involves targeting people who haven’t heard of the company in question.
On the other hand, acquisition marketing targets prospects who are already part of a brand’s customer acquisition funnel (albeit right at the very top).
In acquisition marketing, the audience is already aware of your client’s brand — but they haven’t taken any buying-related actions, like downloading a piece of content, attending a webinar, or responding to a cold email.
So, as a lead gen agency, you’re not trying to explain who your client is and what they sell. Instead, you’re promoting the client’s product/service with messaging personalized to individual buyers. As such, it’s far more customer-focused than a brand awareness strategy.
10 Essential Acquisition Marketing Strategies for Lead Gen Agencies
Now that we understand the ins and outs of acquisition marketing, let’s consider the different customer acquisition strategies you can employ to reach and convert these high-potential prospects…
1. Cold Email Outreach
Cold email remains one of the most effective strategies to reach and convert new audiences at scale, making it a perfect fit for acquisition marketing.
Indeed, QuickMail’s cold email statistics — based on analyzing 65 million customer journeys and emails sent through our cold outreach platform — found that one-quarter of cold email campaigns generate reply rates of 20%+.
Given that you’ll be targeting people who already know about your client, these responses can quickly turn into high-value conversations.
Bear in mind that if you’re going to do cold email effectively, you need an outreach platform that’s up to the task.
With QuickMail, you can:
Build automated outreach sequences so you never forget a follow-up
Create multichannel campaigns spanning email, SMS, LinkedIn, and cold calling
Personalize everything (not just the prospect’s name) using custom fields
Experiment with new messaging through A/Z testing
Optimize your campaigns based on insights from our advanced analytics tools
And that’s just for starters!
That’s why lead gen agencies use QuickMail to generate results for clients at scale.
Learn more: Testimonial: Scaling To 200 Cold Outreach Clients With QuickMail
2. Email Marketing
Email marketing differs from cold email because it targets people who’ve joined your client’s marketing list, such as by:
Downloading a piece of content
Registering for a webinar
Signing up for a newsletter
In this sense, they’re already leads. As a lead gen agency, it’s your job to transform them from marketing-qualified leads to sales-qualified leads with a genuine, active interest in your client’s product or service.
And email marketing provides all the tools you need to engage and convert them, delivering a return on investment of $36 for every $1 spent.
3. Social Media
Social media marketing is among the most cost-effective lead generation channels, with the average social lead costing $58.
Top social platforms have huge user bases, making social media a good fit for building scalable lead gen campaigns.
It also provides one of the simplest acquisition marketing strategies: reaching out to people who follow your client’s social media channels, but who haven’t bought from them yet.
In our experience, social media posts work best as part of a multichannel lead generation campaign.
For instance, with QuickMail, you can view a prospect’s LinkedIn profile, send them a connection request, then reach out with a cold email — all in the same sequence.
This approach helps you generate higher open and reply rates.
Which, in turn, should mean more leads for your client.
Learn more: The Complete Guide To LinkedIn B2B Lead Generation
4. SEO
Want to know why search engine optimization (SEO) is such a strong acquisition marketing channel?
Because 82% of all searchers — and 91% of younger adults — click search results from brands they’re already familiar with, regardless of where those results rank in the SERP top 10.
And, as we know, acquisition marketing is all about reaching prospects who’ve heard of the brand.
The best thing about SEO is that the prospects you’re targeting are showing genuine intent, because they’re actively searching for topics that are relevant to your client’s brand and product/service. So it typically yields strong conversion rates.
Again, we recommend using it in tandem with other customer acquisition methods.
For instance, you can create SEO landing pages targeting high-intent keywords, then focus on building brand awareness for the best chance of winning the click.
5. Paid Search
The biggest problem with SEO is that it takes time to generate results.
In fact, almost 95% of newly published pages don’t break the top 10 within a year.
That’s why many B2B sales and marketing teams turn to paid search engine marketing instead. You’re still targeting active searchers, but you can rank at the top of SERPs immediately — provided you have the budget.
However, paid search campaigns can get real expensive, real fast.
Per Wordstream, the average Google Ads cost per click (CPC) is $2.69, but it rises as high as $6.75 in some industries.
And higher CPCs typically lead to increased customer acquisition costs.
6. Blogging
Technically, blogging isn’t a digital marketing or sales channel in its own right.
But high-quality content marketing that speaks to common pain points can support your acquisition marketing efforts across multiple other channels, such as:
SEO
Social media
Cold email
Email marketing
And you can also use it to grow your marketing list by embedding lead capture forms in your blog posts.
7. Gated Content
Like blogging, creating gated content — like webinars, e-books, and video demos — won’t generate leads on its own.
But gated content can definitely help you capture leads from other channels, making it a viable part of many acquisition marketing strategies.
For example, online course creation platform Thinkific used LinkedIn ads to promote a white paper about customer onboarding:
When users click the “Download” CTA, they’re asked to hand over their name, work email address, company name, and company size in exchange for the gated content.
8. Referrals
Customer referrals are a powerful source of B2B leads.
Indeed, 90% of buyers “completely” or “somewhat” trust recommendations from peers in their industry, while 85% trust customers of vendors in their industry.
Like many of the strategies we’ve shared here, referral programs work best alongside other acquisition marketing channels.
For example, you could ask your client’s current customer base for referrals, then target those referrals via cold email or social media.
9. Event Marketing
In-person events take time and money to organize.
But the results make it well worth the effort, with 80.4% of organizers saying in-person events are their most impactful marketing channel, and 77.7% of attendees saying in-person B2B conferences are the best place to network.
How do “IRL” events fit into acquisition marketing?
Simple: if a prospect recognizes your client’s brand, there’s a good chance they’ll stop by their stall at a conference.
10. Display Ads
Display ads are visual ads combining elements like images, text, video, and audio, like this example from Shopify:
They’re significantly cheaper than paid search ads, with Wordstream data revealing an average CPC of just $0.63 across the Google Display Network.
Because you can choose where your display ads appear, you can use them to target audiences on sites that are popular with your client’s audience, making them a useful acquisition marketing tactic.
How To Build an Effective Acquisition Marketing Strategy
We’ve outlined a bunch of potential channels you can use to generate leads through acquisition marketing. Now, let’s consider some key steps to implementing your acquisition marketing strategy…
Set Acquisition Marketing Goals
As with any sales and marketing strategy, the first step is to define the specific business goals you’re targeting.
Ultimately, as a lead gen agency, your top-level goal will be to generate leads for your clients.
But you should also identify smaller sub-goals and KPIs to help measure the effectiveness of your acquisition campaigns. For example, you might set targets around key metrics like:
Open rate
Click-through rate
Reply rate
Conversion rate
Time to conversion
Cost per lead (more on this later)
That way, you can optimize your lead gen efforts based on what’s working (and what isn’t).
Learn more: Lead Generation Metrics and KPIs to Track for Marketing Success
Define Your Ideal Customers
Next up, you need to define exactly who you’re targeting in your acquisition marketing campaigns.
Sure, you already know part of the equation: people who’ve heard of your client.
But the further you niche down your target audience, the more effectively you can personalize your campaigns — and personalized campaigns generate stronger results. For instance, emails with personalized body copy see 32.7% higher response rates than those without personalization.
So rather than simply targeting anyone who recognizes your client, you might build prospective customer segments based on:
Industry
Company headcount
Company revenue
Job title
Location
Learn more: Email List Segmentation Strategies for New Contacts
Estimate Your CPL
Before launching your first acquisition marketing campaign, you need to calculate your target cost per lead.
Estimating your CPL can help with choosing your communications channels. To give a simple example, if you’re targeting a rock-bottom cost per lead for a client in an industry with high average CPCs, paid search likely won’t be a good fit.
In that case, you might target a more cost-effective channel like email outreach, social media, or SEO — even if it takes you slightly longer to generate the desired results.
Focus on High-Potential Channels
Last but not least, it’s time to identify the customer acquisition channels you’ll use to generate leads for your clients.
As we’ve shown you throughout this article, there’s no shortage of options here.
But if you’re looking to balance value for money with speed of results, cold email is hard to beat. In fact, email is rated as the most reliable channel for driving B2B leads, while 77% of B2B buyers would rather be contacted by email than any other channel.
For best results, combine email with other channels — like social media outreach, SEO, and paid ad strategies — to ensure your client remains front-of-mind with their target buyers.
Fuel Acquisition Marketing Growth With QuickMail
A robust cold outreach solution is a key asset in many effective customer acquisition strategies.
With a platform like QuickMail in your corner, you can create, test, and optimize automated outreach campaigns across multiple platforms.
What’s more, our AI-powered deliverability tool automatically sends emails from your top-performing accounts, helping you hit more main inboxes and generate more opens, replies, and leads. And with our advanced analytics, you can track results back to the day an outreach message was sent — making it easier to understand what’s working.
