MIA #06: How to Choose Customer Acquisition Channels (+ Template)
A step-by-step guide to selecting and prioritizing marketing channels that fit with your market, product, and business model.
Thanks for reading MIA—everything you need to put marketing into action—templates, frameworks, data, insights, case studies, ideas, and martech/GTM tools. Share it with your network! ~James
This edition is brought to you by Testimonial — collect and display customer love in minutes with video testimonials.
🔗 ICYMI: In our last issue, we took a lesson in history—when and where growth marketing evolved, and who was involved. Read it here:
If you build it, they will not come. You need to find the most effective ways to get it to them.
Hundreds of founders are launching new products every day on ProductHunt, Betalist, Indie Hackers, Hacker News, Reddit, TechCrunch etc.
It truly is easier to build software products with the tools, technology, and information available today.
What is much harder now is how to find, acquire, monetize, and retain customers.
This is why choosing the right customer acquisition channels is crucial for business growth, and even more so when you’re under a venture-backed timeframe.
But with a seemingly endless list of channels out there, from SEO to Content Marketing to PR (and even carrier pigeons), how do you choose the right ones?
There's no one-size-fits-all answer. The best customer acquisition channels are the ones that fit with your market, your product, and your business model.
It can be hard to weigh the pros and cons of each channel, so it’s best to build a channel matrix.
Building a channel matrix helps give you three things:
A methodical process to evaluate each channel.
A way to compare each channel on the same attributes.
A visual organization of the information for each channel
Without this framework, you may fall into the whims of Random Acts of Marketing (RAM)—marketing efforts that are unplanned and lack strategy.
They can include spending a lot of money on advertising without data or research to support the decision or trying one marketing tactic after another without a strategic plan.
Here’s a channel matrix template to help you weigh the pros and cons of each customer acquisition channel, and prioritize your growth and marketing efforts on what you want to be great or good at, rather than random acts of marketing with no direction.
How I implemented a Customer Acquisition Plan for a B2B SaaS Company with a Hybrid GTM
1—We prioritize what (the channels) we care about
Break our work down by:
Things we want to be great at (8/10 and above)
Things we want to be good at (7/10 is enough)
Things we might want to be good at (experiments)
Things we don't want to spend time on (because they don’t work / don’t care about)
We should be great at (8/10 and above):
Paid Social Ads: Offers low cost, high targeting, control, and scalability. Immediate results can be achieved, making it a good channel for quick wins.
SEO: Provides long-term benefits with organic traffic. While results take time, the investment in SEO can yield sustainable, high-quality traffic over time.
Blogging: Builds organic traffic, establishes authority, and engages the audience. Moderate cost and control make it a valuable content marketing strategy.
Owned Community: High control and targeting. Building a community fosters brand loyalty, engagement, and a direct line of communication with the audience.
Email Newsletters: Direct communication with a highly engaged audience. Cost-effective, high control, and scalability for maintaining and nurturing customer relationships.
Gated Content (Ebooks, Whitepapers): Medium cost with high targeting. Valuable for lead generation and establishing expertise through in-depth content.
👉🏽 Join the Marketing In Action WhatsApp Community.
We should be good at (7/10 is enough)
Forums and External Communities: Low cost and targeting. Effectiveness depends on the relevance of the community to our audience.
Webinars: Effective for engagement and lead generation. Moderately cost-effective with a potential for high returns.
Video Marketing: Visual content enhances audience engagement. Medium cost, targeting, and scalability make it a good medium for storytelling.
Podcasts: Builds a dedicated audience and provides an additional platform for content delivery. Medium cost and targeting.
Might want to be good at (Experiments):
Social Media: Low cost and low targeting. Consistent effort is required for significant results.
Guest Blogging: Medium cost, targeting, and control. Effective for reaching new audiences through established platforms.
Influencers: Medium cost and targeting. Effectiveness depends on industry relevance and the influencer's audience.
PR: High cost with limited control. Effective for brand awareness but needs careful monitoring and may require significant input time.
Don't want to spend time on (they mostly don’t work):
Here we relegate some channels after experimenting and finding that they do not work.
2—We compete on depth, not breadth
We cannot beat larger competitors on content output (yet), so we focus on quality and have strong opinions on subject matters (our voice, and thought leadership).
Content split: ⅓ SEO articles, ⅓ tutorials, ⅓ other.
3—Build channels we own
We cut off the middle man (as much as possible) because:
Social algorithms are always changing and hard to win (especially without paid efforts).
It is also hard (and mostly impossible) to control external channels that we do not own.
Therefore we prioritize and build channels that we can control in the long term, most of which are what we should be great at, and what we should be good at.
4—Set up some basic attribution
Attribution is mostly a 7/10 problem. Most B2B buyers make decisions inside channels and places that we can’t track. Because complex attribution is also beyond my expertise, we can:
Set up some basic tracking with help from engineering.
Add a free “where did you hear about us” text box to our onboarding.
Track UTMs on paid ads (even if they don’t tell the whole picture).
Run experiments to see what happens when we switch off certain channels.
How we execute
Strategy e.g. Acquisition channel (SEO)
Project e.g. Project (On-page optimization)
Task e.g. Keyword Research and Analysis
This article focuses on distribution via acquisition channels. I discussed how to create content for your customer acquisition channels to drive growth in another article, which you can read here: https://www.marketinginaction.xyz/p/mia-08-content-led-growth-strategy
📣 Share this with a founder or marketer on Twitter | LinkedIn | WhatsApp. It takes me 20 hours to write this. Sharing will only take 20 seconds.
TL: DR
Get a PDF summary of this article here.
If you build it, they will not come. You need to find the most effective ways to get it to them.
There's no one-size-fits-all answer to selecting customer acquisition channels.
The best customer acquisition channels are the ones that fit with your market, your product, and your business model.
Without a structured framework, you may fall into the whims of Random Acts of Marketing (RAM)—unplanned and without a strategy.
Evaluate each channel based on Targeting, Cost, Input Time, Output Time, Control, and Scale.
Prioritize your channels based on things you want to be great at (8/10 and above), things you want to be good at (7/10 is enough), things you might want to be good at (experiments), and things you want to spend time on (because they don’t work).
You may not be able to beat larger competitors on content output (yet), so focus on quality.
Build channels you own and cut off the middleman (as much as possible).
Most B2B buyers make decisions inside channels and places that you can’t track.
Set up some basic attribution with help from engineering, and add a “Where did you hear about us” text box to your onboarding.
Was this helpful? Hit that ❤️ and let me know your thoughts in the comments! Want to see more of this content? Restack this post (if you're on Substack) and share it with your friends!
You might find these interesting:
How to choose the right marketing channels for your startup — How to go from zero growth marketing strategy to picking channels and running campaigns that are the perfect fit for your audience, market, stage, creative, and marketing advantages.
5 steps to choose your customer acquisition channel — Brian Balfour’s five steps to comparing, contrasting, and choosing the right marketing channel for a company.
Posthog Growth Marketing Handbook — Posthog’s B2B startup marketing strategy.
Hiring within our network:
Head of Marketing at Doist
Founding Growth Hacker at GitStart
Chief Marketing Officer at Monkey Tilt
Partner Marketing Manager at Automatic
CRO Growth Marketer & Project Manager at Donorbox
Product & Partner Recommendations:
James Praise — I partner with founders and marketing teams of Product-Led startups to drive long-term growth using Performance Marketing, SEO, Product Marketing, and Lifecycle Marketing, from acquisition to retention to revenue.
Rytr — Rytr is a CHATGPT alternative that helps you create high-quality content that sounds like you, not a robot.
Memberstack — Memberstack empowers Webflow developers to add secure user accounts and payments in a fraction of the time.
Reform — Reform is the fastest way to create shareable and embeddable forms that look great, are awesome to fill out, and integrate with the rest of your work.
Writesonic — Writesonic is an AI-powered content automation platform with 100+ features like Facebook ads, landing pages, Quora answers, Twitter tweets, and Instagram captions.
Pictory — Pictory is an AI-powered video creation and editing software that makes it easy to turn scripts, blog posts, and long videos into short, shareable branded video content.
Frase — Frase.io is an AI tool that streamlines content creation and optimization by automating SERP research, content outlining, and writing, ultimately improving SEO performance.
If you want to collaborate or feature your product in this newsletter, shoot me an email.
We’re building a village of 1,000+ marketers and founders who want to increase their odds of succeeding at marketing. Share this newsletter with them.