7 Customer Acquisition Channels for Achieving Higher Success

Customer acquisition is an important component of any business today.

Since you need customers in order to be successful, you’ll have to spend money to find them and entice them to interact with your brand.

The expenses involved, however, can run high and wreck your budget if not streamlined for the highest effect.

One way to help boost your chances of success, and lower those overall costs, is to become highly efficient in your acquisition marketing and also choose the right customer acquisition channels.

Customer acquisition channels are those platforms, methods, and strategies a business can use to connect with a target audience and showcase its brand.

With consumers being choosier today when it comes to who they trust and buy from, you’ll have to remain smart about how and where to reach them in the most effective way.

To help with this, consider the following seven best and most effective customer acquisition channels.

1. Blog

Blogging continues to be a highly effective acquisition method for businesses of various sizes today.

As part of your content marketing strategy, you can use your blog posts to introduce your brand, solve customer problems, and answer consumer questions. 

You will also want to create content that supports the entire buyer’s journey of your target audience.

The benefits of having your own blog include:

• Ability to explore and share various topics.
• Potential for building authority in your industry.
• Building trust among your prospects and readers.
• Increasing chances for engaging with your target audiences, such as through CTAs, graphics, and comments.

A blog can also boost your SEO efforts.

By posting frequently, you’ll be continuously updating your website. Search engines will take notice and push you up in organic search results.

Over time, you will find the right posting frequency, which can be one to four posts per week, all the way up to one or more posts a day.

Make the most of your blog by incorporating different types of content, including videos, infographics, links to podcasts, and even helpful and entertaining interactive content.

Accomplish all this by assigning team members the task of writing blog posts and monitoring comments, or hire freelancers to do the writing and your employees to respond to comments.

2. Email

Email marketing is still remarkably alive and well and can be a valuable customer acquisition channel for your business. 

It remains one of the more effective ways for increasing brand awareness and staying connected.

It is also one of the most cost-effective channels for nurturing prospects and turning them into customers.

You can build up your email list in several ways, including through your blog, social media, and website. 

Concentrate on creating opportunities for first-time visitors to subscribe to an interactive newsletter or to receive regular updates from you. 

Offer discounts or gated content (e.g., white papers) in exchange for email addresses.

Those that opt-in are more likely to be consumers interested in learning more about your brand, products, or services. That is, they are higher-quality leads.

You’ll also benefit from monitoring the behavior of your email recipients. 

Watch how they interact with your email marketing campaigns. What do they click on? Use all you learn to create better content to meet their interests and needs going forward.

Essentially, you can use your emails to:

• Promote exclusive content.
• Provide product or service information.
• Alert them to upcoming events.
• Inform about discounts, promotions, and special sales.
• Share customer stories and testimonials.

You can also use emails as part of your relationship marketing efforts, which leads to long-term customer loyalty and retention.

3. Events and Industry Trade Fairs

Offline customer acquisition channels to consider this year are events and trade fairs. 

These channels are the tried-and-true choices for businesses across various industries and are particularly beneficial to brands that cater to a specific niche.

The genius of these channels is that they involve direct contact with prospective customers, giving them a close-up view of who you are and what you offer.

In other words, attending or hosting one of these can greatly set you apart from those who only show up online.

Use events and trade fairs to demonstrate your product or service or something relating to your brand message.

Look for industry-related trade fairs and events close to you or, if your budget allows, further away.

Trade fairs, or trade shows, create a dynamic opportunity for you to get your message out to your ideal audience. You can also meet like-minded professionals and obtain new leads and customers.

The atmosphere at these shows is specifically designed to create interactions with interested customers, so it can be a boon for your business.

You can also host your own event. Maybe you know of a business interested in doing a cross-promotion, allowing you both to benefit from an in-person gathering.

The hosting of such an event initially involves a lot of planning, yet it can prove beneficial for generating high-quality leads and acquiring new customers.

Also, keep in mind that events and trade fairs can be online these days, so stay on the lookout for virtual opportunities as well.

4. Paid Ads on Social Media

With almost everyone spending so much time on social media these days, it’s all too apparent that this is where you need to be to reach new customers.

You’ll need to determine which platform or platforms will be beneficial to your customer acquisition efforts. 

One way to start is to find out where your target audience is hanging out the most. Is it Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, or one of the others?

Next, use paid ads on these social media platforms to reach a wider audience, increase brand awareness and recall, and attract potential customers. 

The most popular of these platforms include Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Facebook makes it easy to create a paid ad on the platform. These ads can help you locate new fans, connect with existing followers, and retarget those consumers who visited your website but didn’t make a purchase.

Instagram is ideal for visually promoting your products or services and boosting brand awareness.

If you are a B2B, you may choose to consider LinkedIn paid ads as well.

However, don’t forget other platforms which can benefit your brand. TikTok, Snapchat, and Pinterest ads can also provide you with a wealth of customers to reach for and acquire.

To help avoid negative repercussions from any disgruntled customers or negative comments by consumers in general, create a social media crisis management plan ahead of time.

5. Affiliate Marketing

Creating a partnership through affiliate marketing can help you expand your reach, generate unique content, positively influence your target audience, and gain new customers.

Essentially, affiliates become a part of your sales team, sharing your brand, products, and services with leads that are likely to transition into customers.

Also, since these affiliates earn commissions based on each sale made, they have incentive to promote you in the best possible ways.

Take time in seeking out the right affiliates for your business. Then, create and provide the content you want them to promote.

6. Search and Display Advertising

Two of the most popular and effective customer acquisition channels are paid search and display advertising. 

Both attract customers throughout the buyer’s journey and result in high-quality leads and higher sales.

You can easily create and purchase such ads through advertising platforms, such as Google Ads.

For increasing effect, combine your search advertising, or Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, with your SEO strategy. Also, consider making your ads interactive to reach more of your audience and entice them to engage with your brand.

Display ads do well in strategies geared to where you want to remarket to those prospects who already interact with you in some capacity and need another prompting or reminder to give your product or service a try.

Both search and display ads can aid your customer acquisition strategy this year.

7. Loyalty Programs

For a slightly different approach, consider adding a loyalty program to entice potential customers to take the leap over to your side. 

While these programs are usually promoted as a way to increase customer loyalty and retention, consider the effect they can have upon those not yet included.

You can include referral incentives in the program for your current customers, encouraging them to share information on your brand with non-customers and referring them over to learn more. 

From there, you can nurture these new leads until they become customers and join the loyalty program also.

Customer acquisition is essential to your business, and today you have more choices than ever for how to go about it successfully. 

Experiment with the channels on this list and determine what works best for your brand and reaches your target audiences the most effectively. 

Combine multiple channels in your marketing strategy and watch how much faster you reach your customer acquisition goals.

Find out how to calculate your customer acquisition cost along with more ways to reduce it this year.