Hey there 👋
How are you doing this week?
I turned 40 on Saturday. I couldn’t party that much (thank you dear Covid 19) but I have to admit that I didn’t spend enough time working on my side project this week… 😱
Bad boy.
That said, I wrote about the AARRR! Framework last week and I got questions about how to find the appropriate or adequate channels to acquire customers:
What is the best channel for Acquisition?
What is the best way to attract new customers?
The truth is there is no truth.
Every business is different.
Every business targets different customer segments.
Every customer segment has different behaviors and habits, and consumes different media.
So, the right question is: how to find the best customer acquisition channel(s) for MY business?
In this newsletter, I’ll present 20 acquisition channels.
👉 In the next one, I’ll present a framework to test them and find the most appropriate one.
I got largely inspired by Traction - How any startup can achieve explosive customer growth, a book written by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares, to write these two issues. And, if you are interested to learn more on the subject, I advise you to read their book.
20 Customer Acquisition Channels 👇
Social & Display Advertising
This is about display visual ads on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Youtube, the Google Display network, press sites via a programmatic reseller…
They can be used to build brand awareness or to drive trafic to your website or mobile app.
These ads should be designed to get attention.
If you want to drive trafic, they need a clear call to action and a link to a related landing page on your website.
In my experience, they are very effective to drive a lot of trafic, but do not expect that trafic to be super qualified.
On the other hand, social media offer extremely relevant segmentation possibilities to target your niche customers.
Social Media 📲
You can use Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, Pinterest… or any other social media to build your brand, position yourself and find an audience that shows interest in your value proposition.
Public Relations
This is mainly a way to get exposure in the press using classic tactics.
You can send press releases, organize press conferences, offer exclusive interviews to journalists…
Be very specific and reach out only to the press that will be interested in what you have to say because it will be interesting for their audience.
Unconventional PR 🦄
The idea here is to get noticed by journalists by doing something remarkable.
Create a public event, a happening. Flash mobs were popular at some point, weren’t they?
Do what some call Guerilla or Street Marketing.
Organize an exceptional contest.
Make it so original that the press will want to talk about it.
Influencer Marketing
Reach out to Instagramers, Youtubers, Bloggers, Celebrities… and ask them to promote your brand, your product or your service.
Of course someone like CR7 promotes Nike for… more than 162 million € per year and this is not affordable for every brand.
But there are thousands of micro and nano influencers online that talk to very specific audiences.
Wondering how to find them and how to find the time to reach out?
Just type “Influencer Marketing Agency” on Google. 🤓
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) 🕸
SEO is all you can do to make your website more findable by search engines.
There are certainly more than 200 criteria that influence your website ranking, and the literature is more than abondant on this subject so I’ll keep it extremely short.
There are technical optimizations and page content optimizations that you can implement.
But you should also invest time in a quality link-building strategy.
Search Engine Advertising (SEA)
This is often very effective to drive trafic with intent to buy on your website (= qualified trafic).
This is quite simple.
You buy/bid on search terms people type on Google or Bing search and you get ranked on top of organic search results.
Most of the time, you pay per click (PPC).
Content Marketing
Content marketing consists in creating online content that your audience will find useful.
You can create a Blog, a Vlog (video blog), White papers, Webinars, eBooks, Newsletters…
The great news is that creating online content positively influences other efforts like SEO, Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing…
In B2B Marketing, white papers or webinars are very interesting to generate leads for your sales.
Email Marketing 📩
I guess the title is clear enough. Email marketing consists in using emails to communicate with your customers and prospects.
You can send Newsletters, Nurturing campaigns, Onboarding campaigns…
In a certain way, email is more an activation, a retention or an up/cross-selling channel.
Engineering as marketing
There can be little online tools that you can develop easily and that your audience is looking for and would find useful.
It can be a micro-site, a widget, a Chrome extension…
Example?
Buffer, a social media management tool, created a free Chrome extension that allows you to share the link to the web page you are currently visiting to your social media profiles in seconds.
Offline advertising 🗞
You can advertise on TV, Radio, Newspaper, Outside Display Ads…
This works fine to build brand awareness which is, I hardly learned, critical to your commercial success.
Affiliate Marketing
Many B2B SaaS businesses set affiliate programs up to generate new customers and many bloggers monetize their audience and earn their money by simply referring products in their content.
Amazon also has its own affiliate program.
I am a member. I am an affiliate.
And I refer books.
So, if you click on a link in this newsletter that brings you to a book for sale on Amazon and that you buy it, I should get a small referral fee. 🤑
Business Development 🤝
Doing business development consists in setting up partnerships with other companies that target the same market segment with a different value proposition.
The idea of such partnerships is to promote each other in order to grow our customer base.
Of course, most of the time, you don’t partner with competitors.
App Store Optimisation
As well as you can optimize your findability on web search engines, you can optimize it on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
Community Building
You can create web portals, Slack Channels, Facebook or Whatsapp groups… that gather your customers together.
It’s a great way to get feedback, and build loyalty (= retention) and ambassadorship (= referral).
Sometimes you can even leverage those channels to get User Generated Content that can be used elsewhere to promote your business.
Trade Shows
You can participate to industry specific fairs where your niche is hanging out.
Offline events
You can organize your own events: meetups, conferences, User groups…
You can also try to be invited as a speaker in public events.
Sponsoring
That’s expensive but you can associate your brand to events or sports teams and get press exposure when they get exposure.
This tactic is mainly used to gain awareness or stay “top-of-mind”.
Sales 📞
If you are in B2B, you can hire a team of sales guys that go and meet your prospects or qualified leads. Ok, it’s not that simple but you get the idea. 😜
If you are in FMCG, you’ll be more likely to hire POS representatives or send sandwich (wo)men in the streets to promote your products.
Growth Hacking 🧑💻
Last but not least, growth hacking marketing is the new normal in D2C tech products.
It’s pure referral.
The concept is to leverage your existing audience or customer base by incentivizing them to invite their friends to use your product too.
You know, the Dropbox story I shared in this post.
We call this organic growth.
If you want to learn more, Ryan Holiday wrote “Growth Hacker Marketing” which is a must-read on the topic.
Please share this newsletter if you found it useful, or at least pleasant. 😜 👇
Are you new here ?
That’s it for today.
See you next week.
I will present a framework to prioritize and test all those channels in order to find the most appropriate ones for your business.
Fabee