2. Customer Acquisition Channels

Welcome back! We laid basic introduction to the Why you should take Customer Acquisition seriously. Today we'll dive into Customer acquisition channels.

These are the platforms companies use to promote their products and services to new audiences — including organic search, organic social media, and email. The best acquisition channels for your business will depend on your audience, resources, and overall strategy.

Customer acquisition methods can be broken up into a variety of different types: paid and free, inbound and outbound, etc.

1. Organic Search

Organic search refers to the search engine results pages (SERPs), such as Google’s or Bing’s search results. Organic search marketing, by extension, refers to any efforts you make to rank highly in these results.

Thankfully, you don’t have to guess how exactly to use organic search for your customer acquisition plans. You can use tools such as SEMRush, Open Site Explorer, and Ahrefs to find the best keywords for your business and create powerful content that attracts potential new customers.

2. Paid Search

Paid search marketing (pay-per-click, or PPC) is advertising on search engines themselves. for example platforms, such as Google Ads, allow you to place display advertisements on partner websites and publishers.

Instead of organically optimizing your content, PPC allows you to create a search result and pay for it to show up alongside organic results, that means you increase your chances of being found by your customers.

To equip your content and ads to perform best in search engines, you can use tools such as Google Keyword Planner and Microsoft Advertising.

3. Organic Social Media

Social media marketing consists two approaches: Organic and Paid. Organic social media is very useful for boosting brand awareness, developing a company personality, and sharing content you’ve published from your blog or videos, etc. Consider it the gasoline for a fire where you’ve already started using other acquisition methods.

4. Paid Social Media

Leveraging paid social media may be a better tactic for your business especially if you are selling products or services, depending on your budget and audience type. Paying for social media advertisements and exposure is a surefire way to get content in front of your audience, without having to build up a network of loyal followers. (But don’t get me wrong — that’s important, too!)

Facebook Lead Ads are a great way to get your content in front of your target audience and gather customer information such as email addresses and names. This information can make the difference between a follower and a lead, so if your business is looking to build its list, this might be the acquisition method for you.

5. Email

What do marketers do with all those customer acquisition leads they've gathered through other channels? They use them to build an email list, and then they use that list to connect with and convert customers.

Email marketing is a highly effective way to stay in front of your customers and promote quality content, product information, and discounts and events. It is also a great way to simply connect with your audience.

Email marketing provides a direct line into your consumer’s inbox, unlike social media, search, or content marketing. Outside of direct sales, there’s no better acquisition tactic than email marketing that gets to the heart of the individual customer.

6. Referrals

One of the best ways to acquire new customers is by earning customer referrals. While you can’t force your current clients to refer others to you, you can encourage this behavior in a few ways.

When you create a referral program, you are likely to attract new business through your customers. Offering incentives — whether credit, physical gifts, or monetary rewards — is usually the best way to motivate a customer to share about your company (and compensate them in return).

7. Events

Events — like conferences, webinars, and trade shows — are a fantastic way to connect with interested prospects and acquire new customers.

Today, most events are online, which can make customer acquisition easier, as attendees have to register with their email addresses to attend (whether they pay or not). This information isn't always easy or natural to capture when meeting prospects in person.

8. Traditional Advertising

Traditional advertising channels — such as TV, radio, and print media — are a great fit for local businesses, as well as large businesses that have the budget for launching multi-city campaigns. Traditional advertising can be a powerful customer acquisition method if you properly target your ads and carefully consider the audiences that each publisher caters to.

Now that we’ve covered several channels that you can use for your customer acquisition plan, let’s look at strategies specific to each channel.

See you tomorrow for Part 3 of The Customer Acquisition Guide.

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