The Acquisition Accelerator Series - Part 1: Advertise — Make Every Dollar Create Demand

Heres the fastest way to grow your business. And its a secret no one has ever told you.

Are you ready?

It's get more customers. Mind blowing stuff, I know. And then get them paying you for longer. If you are REALLY good, you may even get them to pay you more. 

But the vast majority of business owners aren't actually very good at it. So they spend their time fixing problems they are already good at fixing (operations, delivery etc) in an effort to avoid the thing they actually need - more feet in the door and more credit card details.

In this series, I am going to go over 23 ways to reduce one of the most important business numbers, which is Customer Acquisition Cost, by definition, Customer Acquisition Cost is what you pay for an actual customer - not a lead. 

How to Identify Your CAC (The Brutal, Simple Way)

You only need two numbers:

1. What you spent to acquire customers
   (ads, sales team wages, referral bonuses, software, outreach costs — all of it)

2. How many customers you actually got from that spend

Then you divide:

CAC = Total Acquisition Spend ÷ New Customers Earned

If you spent $5,000 and got 25 customers: CAC = $200.

If your CAC is too high, you don’t have a marketing problem, you have a business model that’s dying in slow motion.

If your CAC is low and predictable, you have a money machine — put $1 in, get $5 out. You should do that as much as you can providing you can handle the demand. 

So now we know what it is, and how important it is - let's reduce it. 

The first place we reduce CAC is though advertising.  Here are the components we can effect with our efforts.

1. Ad Creative

The first place we need to look at with our ads is better creative. This can be challenging for most of us as we don't really know what good creative is. There is a simple way to know.

Good creative is what the audience responds to.

So what this means it isn't what you like or think the customer will like, it is only identifed through 2 ways:

1. Testing a ton of creative and seeing what works.
2. Using organic assets that have already worked and monetising them.
   
   

That is really the easiest way to do it. In the first example, you use data and testing, in the first model you use a proven asset. Both work. The challenge is deciding what to do. Here is my rubric. 

1. If you have more money than profile - use paid advertising and testing multiple creatives. Up to 30 per campaign. Meta likes it. 
2. If you have a ton of already viral content -use that. Double down on what works. 

With the 2nd option, since the creative already works, you need to optimise the mesaging. That brings us to...

2. Ad Messaging

This is referred to as ad copy. It is the words we write that tell our prospects what to do and what to expect and what benefits they will receive if they use our product/service. 

Now there are tons of books and courses on how to write good copy. I won't even try to teach you here. But there are a few key things to look at.

1. Don't reinvent the wheel. A lot of people think they are significantly smarter and funnier than what they are. If your product has some key things that seem to work for lots of other people in copy (eg fast fat loss in fitness and clean without the effort in cleaning services) it would behoove you to use that.
2. Test a ton - if you have winning creative, retest it with 5-10 different pieces of copy. One will be a clear winner. 
3. Easy to understand language. Keep it simple. Jargon and excessive verbiage won't impress your customers, it will just confuse them (I hope someone enjoys the irony of that sentence). 

If you keep doing that you will have a winner.

3. Targeting

Targeting has changed in recent times, with the introduction of AI allowing the creative and copy to do a TON of the copy. However, what this means is we need to pick the right people. We do this in a few ways.

Service based businesses: Start with location. Get his right as you only have a certain customer radius, although this will change with the service - for example a specialist will have a bigger radius than a barber.

Use retargeting: This is what we do for all our clients in the Ascend programs. We do a ton of different custom audiences and retargeting people who have seen your stuff before, creating new lead lists an existing customer/follower lookalike lists. This can significantly drop CAC as people are already warm to you and your offer.

4. Right Place

You need to be in the right place. Offering menopause services on Tiktok may not be a winner, You need to advertise and be seen where your ideal client is. Here, i highly recommend service based businesses look at other real life locations that are complementary to what they do so their customers see them and connect the dots.

An example of this is a after school care or after school extra-curricular activities advertising in a school newsletter. The parents are looking for stuff for their kids, so be where they are. 

For digital based businesses, platform omnipresence is ideal, with a greater distribution of content/advertising being what is ideal for your ideal customer. An example of this would be a recruitment agency being present on LinkedIn rather than Pinterest - neither platform is bad it's just where are you more likely to see a return. Seeing people try to sell sex toys on LinkedIn though would also be incongruent (in most cases).

5. Right Customers

What i mean by this is different levels of customers need different offers. If you have good creative, messaging and targeting you WILL find the right people. Now we need to hit them at the right aprt of their journey. We break customers into 3 levels: top, middle and bottom of funnel. 

Top of funnel: They don't know who you are. We need to get their attention by an offer that they would be stupid saying no to (explained below) and also making them familiar with our brand. This means engaging, informative and proof building content.

Middle of funnel: These customers have seen you. They are starting to trust you due to repeated exposure. They need to see your core offer repeatedly and more proof content and also content that demonstrates you having the expertise to solve the problem they have. 

Bottom of funnel: These customers have clicked on an offer. they need to be enticed back in with scarcity, a bonus, urgency or a risk reduced offer to overcome their scepticism. 

6. Offer

If your offer sucks - no one will buy it. An offer should do four things.
 

Solve a Dream Outcome: It should give them what they really want — the ideal result they’re trying to achieve.

7. Perceived Likelihood of Success

They should feel extremely confident they feel that you can help them get that outcome.

8. Time Delay

There shouldn't be a long time to get a result. The shorter the better.

9. Effort & Sacrifice

If you make it easy and change how hard they think it will be and what they’ll have to give up, you'll get more leads. 

10. Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is simply something valuable enough that a stranger will trade their details for it.

It moves people from “I don’t know you” to “I trust you,” which makes every ad and follow-up cheaper — and lowers your CAC.

A good lead magnet does three things:

1. Solves one specific problem quickly — a fast win.

2. Attracts the right customers — people who actually need what you sell.

3. Sets up your core offer — it gives them a taste of the outcome you provide.

Used well, a lead magnet warms your audience, improves conversion, and makes acquiring customers significantly cheaper.

If you do the following, I guarantee you will see a reduction in customer acquisition costs. In the next article, we will go over how to ENGAGE your leads.