Online acquisition channels
Defined by your personas, you will know which communication online channels you have to activate. So to say, there is no secret, if your audience is on a huge and famous e-commerce platform, you have to be there too.
Getting customers online do not come from heaven, there are different techniques that you can use:
- Physical marketing.
- Word to mouth.
- Search Engine Optimization.
- Online Advertising.
- Social Media Optimization.
- Affiliate marketing.
- Emailing/Newsletters.
- Couponing/Grouping websites.
- Video marketing.
- Podcasting.
- E-Commerce marketplaces.
- Price comparison websites.
Physical marketing
Nope, it is not a mistake, physical marketing can be linked to digital marketing. In fact there are possibilities offered by physical components to go digital. Let's take QR code, have a QR code on a subway poster and scanning it will send the data online. You will then be able to identify the return on investment of this marketing campaign. Same thing if you start to print t-shirts by adding vanity urls to them, each visit brought by people entering this url within the address bar would probably mean that people came thanks to those t-shirts.
Word to mouth
If you have a strong brand, you can really bring a lot of visitors to your website with just word to mouth. The key thing here is really to have a domain name that everybody will be able to remember. Think of it like websites such as Twitter and Facebook. Few people are typing those names within a search engine, the reason is that those companies are so famous, so big and have a domain name easy to remember which stick within their head. As a result they just type them within their address bar to connect to them.
Here are a couple of pieces of advice when choosing it:
- Take your time.
- Choose the appropriate TLD (it is all about your audience habits)
- Think about your brand before thinking about keywords.
- Make it short.
- Make it easy to remember and to pronounce.
- Avoid playing on words or numbers.
Keep into consideration the following scenario, if your website get out of search engines index, how people could still access to your website?
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization, also named SEO is about making your website visible within search engines without to pay for it. This is probably the acquisition channel which will bring you the most traffic. Though, the main issue here is that you are not controlling the quality of the traffic coming from this channel, you have to trust search engines and you have to help search engines understand what your website is about. If you are doing a great job, you will probably get qualified traffic.
Online Advertising
As its name stands for it this is about contractual agreement that you are passing with organization in order to promote your website. Being good at online advertising is all about the quality of the traffic you are going to buy.
Social Media Optimization
It all depends about what you will publish here, how much time and effort you are going to invest so as the level of freedom you are giving to your community managers. If you are putting a lot of effort into it, high chances that SMO will bring you a significant amount of traffic. In case of a buzz, you can even get it from people from the outside and not your community managers directly.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing look like a little bit online advertising, let's say that it is the same thing or a cousin of online advertising. The thing is that most of the time affiliate marketing refer to CPA, (Cost Per Acquisition), you will pay back the advertiser,
if a sales or a lead is brought. Though you will pay a bigger amount than if it was in a Pay Per Click system.
Emailing/Newsletters
Emailing is about sending commercial offers through emails to your leads/customers. Newsletters as its name stand for it is an indirect way to get your leads/customers buying from you by sending them updates about your organization.
Couponing/Grouping websites
Some years ago, I used to work for web agencies. There was this ecommerce website which was making just a sale or two per month, that we decided to put on Groupon, a massive website offering huge discounts based on the number of products you are selling.
I was really impress to see the number of sales which have been made on Groupon, about 80 in a month so a 4000% rate increase. You are not going to make any money with those sites, though by using it you will see straight away if there is an interest
for your product has a chance or not and give you an idea if your audience is price sensitive.
Video marketing
I see you coming here telling me that you are not a movie maker. So as myself. Do I want to punch me in the face when I seeing mine in a video... yes. Do I hate my voice? Yes. But the thing is that you are probably the worst person to judge your performance. Pass your video to someone else and you will see that she or he will see it from a different eye. So to say, video marketing is for you as everybody love watching them. The big thing is about what you will insert into it.
Games
Organizing games and/or challenges is a great way to get new leads. It requires a bit of work but can offer you a significant amount of leads in no time. The big thing is all about the quality of your audience at the end of the day.
Podcasting
E-commerce marketplaces
It is about listing your products there.
Important notice: it is not a question about which one are you going to choose. In general you need to do all of it because you never know which one is going to work better than another.