Acquisition channels (also known as marketing channels or traction channels) are the means by which you acquire new prospects and customers. For a deeper dive into B2B-specific acquisition strategies, check out The complete guide to B2B Marketing channels.
A core focus of your growth marketing strategy should therefore be identifying the most successful marketing channel(s) for customer acquisition. You need to identify which channels allow you to profitably attract new clients in a way that has a measurable and significant impact on your business. Understanding and optimizing your customer acquisition cost (CAC) is a crucial part of that process.
Being strategic with acquisition channels
Whilst your marketing activity may involve many different marketing channels, your customer acquisition is likely heavily skewed to one core channel.
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How to evaluate marketing channels
Clearly, if 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort, choosing the best acquisition channel for your business is high-leverage activity.
Whilst there is no “right acquisition channel” for your business we have included a number of questions below in order to help you narrow down the selection.
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Where is your ideal customer? Do they spend time in this channel?
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Input & output time - the upfront time required to start running experiments versus the time it takes to start getting data
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What is the cost of acquisition in the channel, and how does this compare to customer lifetime value? (known as your LTV:CAC ratio)
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Does the channel provide fast payback (like ads) or slow payback (like SEO)?
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How scalable is the channel, and does this matter at your current stage?
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Are you looking for a pull (capturing demand) or push (generating demand) approach? Are people actively searching for your solution(s)?
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Is this an online or offline channel?
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How mature is the channel? Can you compete, and win, in the channel?
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Control - the ability to turn the channel on or off at will
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Product/channel fit - is your product or service built to take advantage of a particular channel?
Acquisition channel testing
In the popular growth hacking book Traction, Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares describe 19 customer acquisition channels (they call them traction channels) that businesses can use to acquire new customers.
Rather than copying what competitors do, or acquiring customers in the same way you have in the past, the book goes on to describe an approach known as The Bullseye Framework to test these different channels and uncover what works for your specific business. Clearly, this is an excellent use-case for experimentation.
The 20 customer acquisition channels
According to the book, there are a total of 19 marketing channels that every business should consider and test. These are as follows, we delve into each one in-depth below.
Acquisition channels in Growth Method
Marketing channels are a core part of Growth Method app functionality and are available in Ideas, Experiments, Playbooks and Reporting sections of the product.
Whilst there is no enforced framework or approach within the app, this does allow you to sort and filter by channel, as well as utilise marketing channels in your reports - for example, to see which channels deliver the most successful experiments for your business.
Resources
Recommended additional reading.
Final thoughts
Think of distribution channels as pokemon characters. They each have a set of rules and a list of superpowers. You can’t change how that distribution channel behaves, the rules, or its superpowers.
Instead, find the distribution channels you can enslave with your product’s attributes, your team’s execution, or finding a blue ocean to grow within.
Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing, HubSpot
Got questions? Ping me on LinkedIn or on Twitter.