Competition is fierce online and digital real estate is continuously tougher to compete in.

As such, it is imperative that companies understand their place in the industry and accordingly plan, optimize, and compete to the best of their ability in this digital arena. With that comes the understanding of your target audience, user stages and digital strategies for acquisition at each level.

A focused investment in quality and effective marketing strategies with the aim of helping you define your vision, mission, and business goals. Take the time to outline the steps you need to take in order to achieve these goals you have set in place.

A well-established and profound digital marketing strategy will be the backbone of your company’s growth and will help reiterate and communicate your unique value proposition.

The stages your users find themselves in will help you organize your marketing messaging since the way you will engage them will vary depending on what stage they are in the user journey. Depending on the assets and needs of your own business, you may find yourself targeting all stages or the most important one. 

 

Here are 4 User Stages and Digital Strategies For Acquisition:

 


USER STAGE: EXPLORATION

As users search and explore answers to their pain points, your focus should be on creating, publishing and promoting quality and relevant content that creates an inbound flow to your website/blog and makes you a reliable source. In addition, it’s important to also build a branded content strategy with different personas and content that resonates with that particular profile.

 

USER STAGE: DECISION MAKING

In this next step, it’s essential to create clear user journeys. Determine how your users make decisions and how you can influence their decision to your app.

It’s important to understand the 5 steps in a consumer decision-making process: a need or a want is recognized, search process, comparison, product or service selection, and evaluation of decision.

 

USER STAGE: DOWNLOAD

It is important to continuously capitalize on your marketing investment while improving conversions. Through the entire user journey, you must reduce friction and simplify the necessary steps to ultimately improve download conversions.

That being said, you should use several marketing techniques such as email, remarketing, influencer marketing, in-app messaging, push notifications, and other proven strategies to further drive conversions.

 

USER STAGE: RETENTION

Of all the components of the user lifecycle, retention is probably the most important metric and is the direct factor when you compute the lifetime customer value (LTV) of those users acquired. It’s one thing to have a user download your app, the other is for them to continue to use it.

Thus, maximizing user retention is critical; otherwise, you jeopardize all your marketing budget and efforts. Keeping your users coming back will continually result in a greater ROI. For this to happen you need to create ways to re-engage inactive users and offer incentives for them to want to continue to use your app.

The onboarding experience must be smooth and exceed their expectations, and it is highly important to try to engage your users within the first 3 days to build a relationship and avoid churn.

 

Choosing the right path for you and your company will certainly depend on your app and your audience.

Remember, creating a digital strategy for user acquisition to clearly define your processes is just the starting point. You will need to analyze, execute, optimize continuously, as well as re-visit your digital strategy plan to make sure you are on the right path.