Customer acquisition channels are constantly improving. There are many ways to reach your prospects and communicate with them effectively. Being an advertiser can be a difficult task when you don’t know what to use.
But today, all that is about to change. In this article, you’ll discover the best acquisition channels, how much they cost, some examples and much more…. 💡
What is marketing acquisition ?
The word may sound barbaric ⚔️, but it’s not, we promise.
You’ll need to set up strategies to attract new prospects to your landing page, your social networks or your services page. Moreover, this approach goes hand in hand with your prospecting (maybe it seemed obvious?).
There are several marketing channels you can use to acquire new customers. new prospects the most common are e-mailing or cold e-mailing, social media such as LinkedIn, paid advertisements, etc….
In fact, the more channels are diversified, the better your chances of acquiring new customers or retaining old ones over the long term. 🔐
It is important to maintain marketing communication with your prospects and customers, so that they don’t forget your products and can be kept informed of new promotions or upcoming features.
As a result, you need to review your channels according to the marketing strategy you would like to adopt for your your company’s growth. Here is an article listing all the acquisition techniques that you can use to improve your prospecting.
Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? 😉
What are the online acquisition channels?
To give you a more complete list of the online acquisition channels you can use :
- Social networks (organically).
- SEO 🔥 .
- Advertising (Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Google Ads…).
- E-mail marketing.
- Partnerships with influencers.
- Content marketing is part of inbound marketing.
- Video on YouTube (or other, if you have a choice).
- The digital press (in concrete terms, you set up partnerships so that your brand appears on the web through these players).
Offline acquisition channels
Of course, you can couple them with offline acquisition channels such as :
- Traditional billboard advertising.
- Radio.
- Television.
- Word-of-mouth👄.
- Telephone prospecting.
Don’t worry, we’re going to break it down for you, here we go! 😇
What are the main online customer acquisition channels ?
There are a multitude of acquisition channels that you can use in your webmarketing strategy. We’re going to talk about a few of them so that you can get to know how they work.
1) Social networks as an acquisition channel
This acquisition leverage customer should be treated with caution. 🦞
Why? 🤔
Well, the day you stop using this means of communication, you won’t get your usual traffic. That’s obvious. But that’s not all, your target audience 🎯 also needs to be well chosen according to their usage preferences (to put it simply, don’t go targeting Mamie Josette on TikTok).
The SMO
Also known as Social Media Optimization, is an approach to optimizing a company’s or brand’s presence on social media. It involves the strategic use of social media platforms to achieve various objectives, such as increasing visibility, engagement and brand awareness.
We’ll take 3 giants as examples, namely Youtube, Facebook and LinkedIn. 👀
Acquisition via Youtube
This channel may be a little more complicated than the others, but the results are very good. On the other hand, it takes time to create a video content on YouTube. However, if you succeed, you’ll find that it’s a great way tobooster your publications on Facebook or LinkedIn.
Why, you ask? 🤔
Because users of these platforms will spend more time looking at them, therefore more time viewing your profile, your company page and the algorithm of these platforms will reward you with more views thanks to this!
Acquisition via Facebook
Acquisition via social networks is very effective, as you know, when you create quality “content marketing”, it helps attract new customers and reinforce your brand image. They have their own paid ads that can be synchronized with Instagram, if your prospects also use this communication channel. 🔈
Acquisition via LinkedIn
Finally, it’s our favorite, because it gives you a network of qualified prospects. This channel is well known for the quality of its content, so make sure you use it correctly. 💛
As a result, the acquisition strategy we’ve decided to adopt on LinkedIn is to publish messages almost daily from every accounts of our company to capture a larger audience. 🤗
The ADM
Known as Social Media advertising is a marketing strategy that involves using paid advertising on social media platforms to promote a company, product or service.
They include :
- 🔵 Targeted advertising.
- 🟣 Advertising formats.
- 🔵 Budget management.
- 🟣 Performance measurements.
- 🔵 Integration with SMO.
Influence marketing
It’s a marketing strategy based on collaboration between a company or brand and influential individuals on social media.
They are often called “influencers”. I’m thinking in particular of Lena Situations and her collaboration with Adidas.
2) Search
Online search is an essential customer acquisition channels in digital marketing, as it mainly refers to two important components: natural search (SEO) and search engine advertising (SEA).
Just the thing, we’re going to cover the following points right away. 😇
A reliable acquisition channel : SEO
This one is rather important because it generates traffic and when you’ve got a site, getting qualified traffic is exactly what you want. It’s in your best interest to implement an SEO strategy. Why, you ask?
Firstly, because SEO is a long-term strategy that brings you sustainability, which will help you get constant, long-term traffic.
Of course, you’ll need to be up to speed on the technical aspects, content and netlinking of your site. We tell you more here. for this, you can call on the services of an SEO freelancer or a SEO agency.
The results won’t be immediate at all, but if you stick to it and do it well, these results will enable you to attract new customers, appear on the sacrosanct search engine, and so on. Google. It’s one of the most effective and powerful acquisition levers you can use.
Google Ads
One of the best-known online advertising platforms. Provided by Google it enables advertisers to create and display paid ads on Google search results, partner websites and Youtube.
Integrate e-mail into your acquisition campaigns
A common misconception is that email marketing 📧 is out of fashion. Well, we can assure you right now that it isn’t. On the contrary, you need to exploit ✈️ the power of this tool, which is still far from retirement. In fact, some companies base their campaigns solely on this means of customer acquisition.
In fact, good, old-fashioned email is a safe source. It’s inexpensive, customizable and very easy to set up.
3) Outbound
Also known as outbound marketing, this is a traditional marketing approach focused on the company’s initiative with the aim of reaching potential customers. Here are some key points 🔑 :
- 1️⃣ Push strategy.
- 2️⃣ Interruption.
- 3️⃣ Mass ads.
- 4️⃣ High costs.
- 5️⃣ Traditional measurements.
If you want to know more about this practice, we talk about it in our article “Outbound Marketing“. 👀
4) Advertising
In addition to SEA and SMA, there are other kinds of advertising, and that’s what we’re going to look at right now. 😇
Youtube videos
Like Google advertising, it’s all about displaying content to your target audience. 🎯
To determine the content, you have a choice of different targeting options. Here are a few examples:
- 🔵 Age.
- 🟣 Genre.
- 🔵 Geographic area.
- 🟣 Interests.
- 🔵 Search terms.
Google shopping
When you go to Google to search for a product, you’ll see ads that are usually composed of an image, a title, a price and sometimes notes.
What are the offline acquisition channels?
We’ve given you several channels that can be used Online 🍀, but you can also rely on Offline customer acquisition channels. And you can (actually, do both 😇) also combine Online and Offline channels.
Professional events
As mentioned above, the offline channels are complementary to online ones. You can easily attract customers to your exhibitions you’ll be able to explain what you do directly to consumers at exhibitions and conferences.
And who else but you can explain to a potential lead what you do? 🤔 Well, yes, yourself. 🫵🏼
At this kind of event, you’re an industry professional, and the atmosphere is designed to facilitate interaction between you and potentially interested customers. 👀
Traditional advertising
It’s a technique for acquiring new customers. The only problem here is that you won’t be able to measure the profitability of the operation. You won’t know who has been brought into your business by a street marketing campaign, so you won’t be able to calculate its profitability.
The main advantage of traditional advertising is that you can reach everyone: from the child 🧒 to the parent to the grandmother. Yes, everyone.
The main drawback? It’s also an advantage: your targeting is imprecise. They teach you to make personas to sell better, not for nothing.
Offline acquisition channel: the telephone
Visit prospecting yes, we’re all thinking the same thing: incessant calls from an energy supplier. Yes, it’s unbearable. And yet telephone prospecting still has a bright future ahead of it. But you’ll need to be armed.
The first thing to do is to prepare yourself. What are you going to say to the person on the other end of the phone? You need to grab your potential customer’s attention as soon as you start talking, and above all have confidence in yourself and in the product or service you’re going to sell.
Of course, we’re not giving you an exhaustive list, but you should know that there are many other acquisition channels you can use to get your business.
Street marketing
It’s an unconventional marketing method that can be found in many different forms. 🔄
Here are the different types:
- Guerrilla marketing.
- Classic street marketing.
- Event marketing.
I won’t tell you more, we have a whole article dedicated to the street marketing so make the most of it! 😇
The strategy for attracting new customers through a medium that is still not widely used
In the end, you need to keep and boost the channels that have given you the most business. KING with the most notoriety for your brand.
For example, let’s say your company sells energy drinks, right? ⚡ I don’t think setting up a coldmailing campaign for people who like sports is the best solution….
In this case, you should take part in sponsoring sports competitions, sponsor top athletes who could have an influence on their followers, organize free tastings in supermarkets and so on.
For example, you can send e-mails containing tips and tricks on how to use the tool, special promotional codes… 📩
You can also use social media such as LinkedIn where you can find many professionals in your field of expertise, engage with your customers through messages and articles, create a sponsorship etc.
These are just a few of the channels we use, which have proved highly successful in growing our business, creating a presence to differentiate ourselves from the competition. 🚀
How do you calculate the cost per acquisition channel?
It’s a question often asked by project managers, because all ideas are beautiful, but sometimes you have to opt for the most practical solution, depending on the customer acquisition costs. 💸
The CAC, or customer acquisition cost, is calculated as follows:
You can even go a step further and do this quick calculation for each channel, but be aware that the results may not reflect the benefits immediately. If, for example, you’re spending money on an upcoming event, you won’t see conversion results until the event is over.
This will help you determine your marketing budget necessary for each channel, and those you should abandon if they don’t give you a sufficient return on investment.
The best customer acquisition tool
Now that you know the basics, let’s get down to business, shall we?
Let me explain what Waalaxy and what it can do to help you explore your acquisition channels. 🤯
First of all, you need to know that this is a Chrome browser extension that creates a CRM to enable you to manage your leads on LinkedIn. It’s completely safe, because we don’t touch the HTML code of the page and we’ve put safeguards in place to protect your LinkedIn account. Most importantly, daily quotas and human-like actions.
You can create sequences for interacting with your prospects, called Campaigns. These are completely automated, so all you have to do is choose your target audience, export it from the results of LinkedIn search to set up the Campaign and voilà! 👀
Secondly, it is a tool for multichannel! This means you can manage other acquisition channels such as e-mail from the same platform.
Isn’t it great? 🤩
This will save you time and effort in setting up your campaigns, and you’ll be able to monitor the results in one place. All you have to do is synchronize your e-mail account and choose an advanced sequence, then launch the multi-channel campaign directly from your CRM.
Article conclusion
Now that you know a little more about the subject, we’re going to give you some tips on how to do it. It’s ti-par 🚀!
The first thing you need to keep in mind, especially if your product or service is on the digital is to have a SEO optimized site. 👀
In fact, it makes perfect sense: if you appear at the top of the search results, people are more likely to buy your products. In fact, you should know that the first page Google alone generates 91% of clicks. When you consider that there are billions of searches per day on this search engine we pay a little more attention to our position.
In the red box ❤️, this is what belongs to the ATS. If you do Ads if you’re in the market for a keyword, you’re likely to be placed here, depending on the budget you allocate to the keyword.
In the blue insert, it’s natural referencing. If you’ve worked hard on your SEO, you’ll end up on the first page, or even better, in the top spots. This is what comes from organic 🔗 links and by optimizing your various contents on a request in particular.
You can also have a Google My business insert. This is specially designed for local referencing. It gives your visitors your contact details, so they can come and find you or give you a call.
Then make personalized content. For this, no secret, you need to establish a … Yes 👏! You guessed it right, a persona. A clearly identified target will enable you to create content specifically for it.
Also, show off your best side on the social networks. Make organic and paid content and be regular.
And finally, don’t forget to keep track of your KPI. That way, you’ll know if what you’re doing is working for you. 😇
Frequently asked questions about B2b acquisition channels
It should be noted that in recent years, the acquisition cost customer sales increased by 60%. Yes, we know, that’s a lot, but at the same time, competition is tough, and you’ve got to make the most of it.
How do customer acquisition channels work?
Customer acquisition channels are the different ways in which you can reach your customers. potential customers some are online, such as inbound marketing, blogs, social media… and others are offline, such as meetings, conferences… events etc. 🗓️
How do I choose my acquisition channels?
To choose your customer acquisition channels, you need to target your prospect, compare channels by cost, time x channel matrix, and test!
In order to calculate customer acquisition cost you can use the following formula:
And then apply it to each channel. 😇
What is the purchasing channel?
The purchasing channel, also known as the distribution means the route or method by which a product or service is made available to consumers for purchase.
Buying channels are an essential part of a company’s distribution strategy, as they determine how products or services reach their target audience. 🎯
What are the marketing channels?
In marketing, channels refer to the different means or methods by which a company distributes its products or services to its target customers or consumers.
Here are some of the most common marketing channels:
- 🟣 Affiliate marketing.
- 🔵 Social networks.
- 🟣 Website.
- 🔵 Online advertising.
- 🟣 Print advertising.
- 🔵 Direct marketing.
- 🟣 Trade shows.
Now you know all about customer acquisition channels! 🚀