ACQUISITION CHANNELS: WHICH ONES TO USE TO SELL MORE?
What are acquisition channels
Acquisition channels are the paths used by your company to acquire new customers. Whether online or offline, they deliver your message to your customers in many different ways, and therefore need to be used effectively.
In other words, acquisition channels are the tools you will use to reach and communicate with your target audience, thereby generating new opportunities for relationship building, brand awareness, and, of course, sales.
To maintain your business's growth, you need to increase your sales constantly, and this is an ongoing challenge. That is why prospecting new customers is very important so that new leads enter your database and, from there, you can start building a relationship. Check out the article How to increase sales by improving your prospecting.
The importance of mapping and diversifying acquisition channels
Many companies make the mistake of directing all their investments into a single acquisition channel because it is bringing "satisfactory" results and because they consider testing new paths risky.
This type of thinking needs to end, because you may be missing out on many opportunities to diversify your customer acquisition and grow faster or even more easily.
Imagine that your company sells water in the middle of the desert. It has the perfect product for the location, right? But in addition to having the product, it needs customers. For customers to buy your water, they need to reach you. So, the more paths you have to make that happen, the better!
It is no use having an excellent product if your customers do not know you or do not know how to reach you.
In addition, you need to constantly expand your acquisition channels, because the market is becoming increasingly dynamic and consumer behavior is changing with the rules of the game. Therefore, you may be directing your investments toward a tool that no longer brings an attractive ROI or no longer attracts the right audience to buy from you, or even one that no longer fits the current times we live in.
Types of acquisition channels
There are several types of acquisition channels your company can use.
Direct Acquisition Channels
Direct acquisition channels are those over which you have complete control and do not need to invest much to get immediate results. Your sales team, for example, is a direct acquisition channel that goes to the customer and generates sales through negotiations. Other examples of direct acquisition channels are your website and physical stores, which should always be attractive so that customers enter and make purchases.
Indirect Acquisition Channels
Indirect channels, on the other hand, are channels in which you are not fully in control, but they are still necessary to gain market traction. The main types are franchises, partner e-commerce sites, marketplaces, outbound marketing, email marketing, and social media.
Which channels should you use to attract new customers?
Gather your team and brainstorm actions you can explore across different channels and the objectives you want to achieve. Set deadlines for these objectives and decide how much you want to spend. It will be very important to know how to calculate CAC (customer acquisition cost), so be sure to check out this article to learn more about the subject.
When you start planning which channels you should be on, always think about the group of people you want to reach:
Where are these people?
How can you communicate with them?
How can you get them to interact with your products/services?
What will make them become customers?
How will these strategies be executed?
Other questions you will need to ask about each channel you decide to invest in are:
- Which channel has the greatest capacity to appear to your persona (impression capacity)?
- What is the cost of reaching your persona through this channel? Is this an acceptable cost?
- What is the engagement capacity with your persona on this channel?
- What is the conversion capacity of your persona on the channel?
- What will be the cost of acquiring the lead?
- Will this channel bring enough volume for the sales team?
- How much effort/difficulty will your company face in implementing this channel?
These questions will help you expand your acquisition channels intelligently without having to shoot in every direction.
Now let's explore some of the main channel alternatives. Let's go!
19 acquisition channels you should consider in your strategy
1. Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is also known as attraction marketing because it uses various strategies to attract your target audience to you. This is its main difference from traditional marketing, which plays a much more active role in prospecting customers.
By creating content relevant to your target audience, inbound marketing works at different stages of the marketing funnel, attracting your audience, building relationships with them, and accelerating the sales process. This is very important because even before people decide to buy, they usually search for information about the product/service to help them make their decision. Therefore, your inbound strategy will need to account for 5 stages: attraction, conversion, relationship building, sales, and analysis. To learn more about this strategy, check out our article here.
2. Content Marketing
Content marketing is all content created to educate, inform, and entertain a potential customer. It is a pillar of inbound marketing, so it is important that it is done well to attract and retain qualified leads who will become customers.
The goal of content marketing is to make your brand a reference in the field in which it operates and, thus, always be top of mind for your customers. Therefore, content marketing does not only talk about your company or your products, but also about everything it can deliver or do for its customers.
Content marketing is also closely aligned with the SEO strategy we will discuss further down.
3. Social Media
Brazilians love social media and, therefore, spend many hours every day browsing and consuming the content available on them. Therefore, your company should identify which networks your audience is on and offer them relevant content about your brand and your products.
It is important to emphasize that the content published by your brand should align with the audience's interests, adapt to the different formats of each network, and seek to build relationships, interaction, and engagement.
In addition to publishing, your company should also make sure that interaction with your audience is constant and that customer service issues are also answered. This way, you will have much more credibility on these channels.
Social media are also powerful sales tools; learn how to boost them here.
4. SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is a set of techniques that seek to optimize your website so that it appears in the top options in Google searches. Through design, copywriting, and programming analysis, SEO makes your website more compatible with Google's requirements, and thus your brand will be found more easily by your prospects.
If you invest in other digital marketing tools but do not take care of your website's SEO, know that you may be losing money. After all, the other tools will need much more effort to bring traffic to your website instead of using SEO to generate organic (free) attraction.
5. Email marketing
Email marketing is a great tool to activate your customer base or to start building relationships with new leads. It is important to deliver the right message, at the right time, to the right person, so as to avoid being considered spam.
Contrary to what many people may think, email marketing is not only used to send out irresistible promotions. It is also used to periodically send relevant content to your database. Therefore, your company's CRM must be very well structured, as it will help bring insights about the types of content your audience will be interested in.
It is important to emphasize that for your email marketing strategy to be even more effective, you should create several lists (or customer groups) so that each one receives a type of communication aligned with their interests. One widely used example is the monthly birthday list, where brands usually offer a benefit to those who have a birthday in a given month.
6. Outbound Marketing
Outbound marketing is the process of active prospecting to approach potential customers. Many people think that active prospecting is limited to telemarketing actions, but they are completely wrong.
Billboards, website banners, radio and TV ads, YouTube, Facebook Ads, Google, AdWords, among others, are some of the outbound tools that impact us daily and, often without us realizing it, make us buy.
Obviously, to be more effective, you will need to be assertive in choosing the channels and, especially, get the target audience and the frequency right, or your brand will be considered intrusive and may get many "blocks" on the internet.
To help you structure an active prospecting process, we have put together this article.
7. Events
Events are always great opportunities to build relationships with interesting partners who may do business with you or even refer new customers.
The tip here is to participate in events with themes and approaches related to the customer segments you want to acquire. A very common mistake is for people to only participate in events relevant to their own business, when they should be focused on potential customers.
Another tip is: promote your own events. Classes, workshops, meetings, online chats, etc. There are countless possibilities to promote your brand and build credibility by offering quality content to your audience without having to spend a lot of money.
To learn how to boost your results even further, read the article Marketing Strategies for Events.
8. SEM
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a set of digital marketing strategies so that your brand appears prominently in Google search engines. It is usually divided into SEO (organic searches) and sponsored links (paid searches).
Sponsored links are paid ads that generally appear before organic results on Google, and also in the sidebar managed by platforms such as Google Ads and Bing Ads.
SEM is vital for those who want to scale their sales online, therefore, do not fail to invest in this tool even if you have other acquisition channels.
9. Trade Shows
Unlike traditional trade shows, which have a gigantic structure, Trade Shows are smaller events focused on a specific market segment. Generally, to participate in a trade show as a brand, you must be quite established and recognized in the market. It is a great place to network and close new deals, because the participants at the show are there focused on that.
10. Press relations
Press relations is a very important strategy so that your brand appears in different media (TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, etc.), reaching your target audience organically.
Investing in press relations does not always bring immediate results, but it helps with visibility and also with building trust with your audience.
11. Communities
On the internet, there are several discussion groups and forums where people share their questions or experiences with various brands and products. Therefore, these communities are fertile ground for opportunities for your company to interact with your target audience by clarifying relevant information for them. But you need to be careful, because each group has its own rules, and many of them do not allow the promotion of products.
12. Agreements and negotiations
Companies that offer products or services complementary to yours are great acquisition channels, because they can refer your brand to their customers. Therefore, map out a market segment that makes sense for your business and seek to make agreements and negotiations.
Having a network of partners is one of the paths you can take to constantly acquire new customers.
13. Publicity stunts
Publicity stunts are completely unexpected and daring actions aimed at generating buzz around a brand. It is a great strategy to get media attention in a spontaneous way, but it is important to be careful so that the story has an interesting ending, because it will generate great expectations from the audience, who may feel completely frustrated.
Claudia taking Leitte out of her name is a marketing action by Eurofarma.
14. Viral marketing
Viral marketing is a strategy that seeks to connect quickly with people so that they identify with it and spread your message in a completely spontaneous way. It is considered a technique with lower costs than traditional actions, because the media used is the target audience itself.
15. Presentations and Lectures
Giving presentations at companies about your brand or lecturing at colleges, events, and associations, for example, is also a way to promote your company or brand for free. Therefore, make your presentation great to impress the audience and generate interest!
16. Existing platforms
It may sound cliché, but you should not underestimate successful platforms like Facebook and YouTube, because it is very likely that your audience is there. But it is also very likely that your competitors and many other brands are already doing very well on these platforms, so try to make a different kind of presence on these channels so that your content does not become invisible. In addition, depending on your company's category, look for Marketplaces, exclusive Social Networks, or even associations that bring visibility to your segment.
17. Affiliate programs
Participating in affiliate programs can also be a strategy for you to acquire new customers. In an affiliate program, anyone who has a website, blog, or a strong social media profile can refer other companies, products, or services and earn a commission on the sales generated.
Hotmart and Monetizze, for example, pay a percentage of each sale made on their advertisers' websites, provided that the origin is the links on their affiliates' websites. Google AdSense, one of the largest affiliate programs in the world, pays its affiliates a percentage of the amount paid by its advertisers in the Google Ads program.
18. Conventional advertising
It is always good to remember the importance of conventional advertising in customer acquisition. Billboards, TV commercials, banners, etc., reinforce your brand's recall in the consumer's memory and improve purchase consideration.
19. Online advertising
Online advertising is one of the main tools to give traction to your digital strategy. Therefore, it is important that you make a presence in the consumer's journey on the internet and influence their final decision. Therefore, do not fail to invest in ads on social networks, websites, and anywhere else on the internet.
