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3 Powerful Online Customer Acquisition Channels To Use In 2023

customer acquisition channels
Table of Contents

The paradox of choice.

Contrary to popular belief, empirical evidence shows that the more choices we have, the more difficult it is for us to make a decision. We often postpone it or give up on it entirely.

Not only as customers, but also as people living in the modern society, we are bombarded with information, news, products, services, career choices, lifestyles, and brands that it’s actually made us more on the mad side rather than free and happy.

So how can you as a brand break through all of that information overload and not be just another postponed choice your customers may question if they should even make at all?

Customer acquisition, when done right, can be just the tool you need to break through the sea of brands and help you attract more customers. But unfortunately, it’s not simple.

We want to help you in this difficult task and decided to craft an in-depth analysis of 3 powerful customer acquisition channels you can use in 2023.

A Few Disclaimers

Before we dive into the article, we want to highlight that your customer acquisition plan may differ depending on a number of factors and that you should always take into account a few things.

Such as, the fact that the new customers you want to acquire may be at different awareness stages, and you have to adjust your strategy to the different awareness levels.

Your strategy will also differ depending on the industry you’re in, whether you’re selling services, products, or even productized services.

You also may have more than one buyer persona to craft a customer acquisition strategy for.

Also, take into account that all the methods we go through in this article require some major time investment, consistency, and patience.

And last, but not least. Don’t forget to always use your own logic and compare the solutions with your own situation. Think critically, don’t go for popular templates, because it may turn out that they don’t fit your business or your buyer personas at all.

Now, let’s get to it.

Best Online Customer Acquisition Channels with Statistics and Examples

Better fasten your seatbelts because we’re on for a ride. And no, we won’t hit you with the vague content is king or add value to your content marketing! slogans everyone’s using.

Frankly, we are all sick of seeing everyone juggling 10 random customer acquisition channels with little to no explanation on how and why they work.

Instead, let’s take a deeper look at the 3 most powerful (in our opinion) customer acquisition channels to invest your time in, in the freshly-started 2023.

#1 Search Engine Optimization: SEO

Starting off with SEO.

More than 50% of all website traffic comes from organic search.

Search Engine Optimization is more on the complicated side and definitely is not a quick win or a right here and now kind of solution.

But if you’re patient enough and consistent with your efforts, SEO may be the most rewarding customer acquisition channel of them all.

Because as much as 60% of marketers say that inbound marketing gives them the highest quality leads.

Now, Search Engine Optimization is composed of a few main elements. And no, it’s not only ‘good content’. So let’s give you the hardest pill to swallow first: valuable content won’t bring links, views, and clients to your website on its own.

As much as we wish for it to only take a good content writer, it’s not the SEO reality.

So what else is it about if it’s not only about good content?

SEO is build with a few main, extensive in itself departments:

Technical SEO: which is all about making sure that your website meets the standards of today’s search engines. You have to take care of attaining proper speed of loading, mobile responsiveness (because almost 60% of users are mobile ones), deal with sitemaps, structural data, ensure proper crawling, and more. It’s definitely too much to explain in one article, so we’d recommend treating this as a separate topic. This guide divided into six chapters from Backlinko may help clear the clouds for you. But definitely don’t neglect technical SEO.

Links: authoritative pages linking back to your website, preferably with a do-follow attribute and in a natural way is the best case scenario in terms of link building. Good links are important for SEO because they help build your website’s authority in the eyes of Google. Since others are recommending visiting your website, it must mean it’s worth visiting. Now, it’s best to treat linking as tiers and first obtain links from sites of similar DR/DA as yours and gradually build your way up. Remember that links that are unnatural may be penalized by Google.

Topical authority: the next thing you need to keep in mind when working on the SEO of your website, is building your topical authority. What does that mean? It basically means that Google recognizes your website as trustworthy to speak on a certain topic. There are several ways to strengthen your topical authority, including creating valuable content in the area you want to rank in, adding an author page with an actual author person (best if that person has proven experience writing on the topic you want to build authority on), and more.

Website architecture: use information architecture to establish structure and logically organize the information on your website. This does not only ensure better user experience for your potential customers, but it also helps with SEO. Google must clearly understand what your website is about and must be able to make connections and find essential information easily. Add to that a good internal linking structure, and you’ll be on your way to Google’s favorite cards. This article made by Terakeet explains why website architecture is important in SEO using the analogy of clothes, tags, and messy store departments.

Now, we know this may sound like a lot. Because it is a lot. But SEO is complicated and is time-consuming. There are no shortcuts, no quick solutions.

If it seems too overwhelming, we’d highly recommend hiring an expert while slowly expanding your own knowledge on the topic, best by comparing it with your website’s results and stats.

But if you still want to do the SEO yourself, we’ll now suggest a few best solutions when it comes to content creation and keyword research, for starters.

The Avalanche Technique

As SEO statistics show, average pages don’t rank within the first year of their existence in Google, and the average age of pages ranking in the top 10 is 2 years.

So if you’re starting from scratch, your best bet is to go for the avalanche technique.

Let’s imagine a perfect winter aura, with freshly laid, puffy snow. Suddenly, we hear Anna singing do you wanna build a snowman? And we say yes!

So we start by making a small snowball.

All we have to do then is roll our small snowball further in the snow to make it bigger, until eventually we have the first part of our snowman.

The avalanche technique works on the exact same principle.

The snowball is our website, and we start small and slowly build our authority and trust with Google by going for small search keywords. Essentially, building tiers to our content.

Because you’re much more likely to rank for smaller search keywords if your website is still in its infancy. Google is less likely to rank fresh websites for big keywords, just because it doesn’t trust them just yet.

Plus, you’ll have plenty of keywords to choose from, since over 90% of searches in Google get 10 or fewer searches per month.

If you’re not sure which volume of search to go for, many people suggest going for the search volume that matches the number of clicks your website is currently receiving. For example, clicks from 1-10 should go for 1-10 search volume keywords.

In short: start slowly, build your topical authority, go for smaller search keywords, and be patient. In the meantime, try to find the power to invest in different customer acquisition channels, not to leave empty-handed.

The Keyword Golden Ratio

Add to that the use of Keyword Golden Ratio, and you’ll be on your slow way to success with SEO!

But what even is the Keyword Golden Ratio?

Put simply, KGR is the number you get after dividing the number of the :allintitle: results by the search volume of the keyword you choose.

The smaller the number, the bigger are your chances to rank high in Google for that keyword. Of course, as long as you provide some valuable content and optimize your post for the phrase in question, but that’s another story.

All you have to do to apply the KGR method is look for keywords as per usual and then compare their search volume with the number of their :allintitle: results.

To get the :allintitle: results, type in Google :allintitle: followed by the keyword you want to compare the results with. For example, :allintitle:”best shoes for runners”. Remember to avoid putting any space between the :allintitle: command and your selected keyword.

Ideally, your KGR should sit between 0.25 to 1.0 to actually help you rank higher.

Because the fewer the results, the bigger your chances to beat the competition. Especially, if the keyword is smaller, and you won’t be competing with giants, such as Forbes or the New York Times, which is often the case with big volume keywords.

Search Intent

While we may get fixated on the different metrics, Keyword Golden Ratio, keyword difficulty, or getting high-quality backlinks to our website to increase the Domain Rating, there’s one crucial thing we need to keep in mind at all times, and that is the user’s search intent.

If we don’t create our content with the user in mind, no metrics or golden rules can help us rank.

Generally speaking, a user’s search intent can be divided into a few main categories:

  • informational, e.g., how are gummy bears made
  • commercial, e.g., best sour gummy bears
  • navigational, e.g., Haribo’s headquarters
  • transactional, e.g., Haribo gummy bears big bag

Because we have a different intent when typing in how to build Lego than when searching for best Lego sets for adults. The first intent is clearly informational, while the second one is rather commercial.

All that Google ultimately wants is to meet the user’s intent best so that they come back and use this search engine more.

You can get the main idea as to what the users want to see after typing in their query and looking at the first results page. Compare the content in the top 10, look for similarities, and then compare it with your idea for this search intent. Really sit and think about what you would want to see if you were to type that query into Google.

Providing Answers

And last, but not least. Give your potential customers what they want.

The truth is that we’ve come to treat Google as an oracle.

Whenever we have a question or a problem, what do we do?

We type it in Google in hopes to find an actual helpful answer and not see another completely unrelated blog post positioned by someone who cracked the algorithm or, even worse, an AI-generated text regurgitating widely available information with no additional value.

The most annoying side-effect of SEO is people who are wrongfully using it just to get their websites to rank for keywords, even if their content is irrelevant.

And Google definitely takes notice of that and constantly rolls out new updates to its search engine to improve the SERPs and make sure that the users are getting relevant results for their queries. For example, the latest (December, 2022) update adds an extra E to the commonly-known E-A-T concept for Google search results. The additional E stands for experience, prompting creators to provide content based on their actual, first-hand experience in the topic.

But don’t let that stop your marketing efforts, use it to your advantage instead. If you want to attract leads and customers that are high-quality, you need to give people what they want. And most of the time, they want answers or solutions.

So, provide a solution.

Be the first one to show up whenever your potential customers type in their problems or queries into Google. Of course, you must only tend to the problems you can solve with your experience, not to annoy the living soul out of your customers.

Now, how to do that?

Research the queries your potential customers may have, check the search volume, use the avalanche technique, check the :allintitle: results, and if you’ve got a match, craft an article with the exact answers or solutions your clients need.

And if you keep the most important information in your articles upfront and are actually helpful and straightforward with the answers, you have bigger chances to rank high and even to get selected for Google’s snippets.

When SEO May Not Be a Good Fit Anymore?

Sponsored Content Taking Over

Let’s pity for a second those of us who need to find the best product among MANY options. Let’s say we’re currently looking for the best hair dryer for that perfect blow out.

We type in best hair dryer into Google, thinking this will solve all our problems, but all we get in return is even more confusion and a whole lot of sponsored content.

customer acquisition channels: SEO and SERPs results

The first result: 23 best hair dryers for all hair types by the Cut gives us a list of the best hair dryers, all with their affiliate links to each product. Unsurprisingly, the rest of the search results for that keyword looks exactly the same.

To know if a certain link you’re looking at is an affiliate one, try to find some additional tags within the URL. Often the name of the website you’ve come from is also visible in the affiliate link URL.

You can also look for disclaimers in the post that state whether purchasing the items listed in the article earns the website’s owner a commission.

customer acquisition channels: affiliation example

Why is that happening?

Well, because this keyword has some serious traction, having gained around 7k of searches each month, the SEO people have caught onto it and do their best to rank for that keyword while also earning commission thanks to affiliation.

In a case like this, when all we see is sponsored, branded content, with no actual value, no actual comparison, or if we’re unsure whether the comparison is biased, it’s best for us as customers to dig elsewhere.

So, we may switch the beginning of our buying journey from Google to social media. And that’s not to say that there’s no sponsored content on social media. But, you have bigger chances of getting someone to actually use and show you video results of using the product you’re looking for.

You also have the chance to see videos from creators who are genuinely into fashion or into whatever you’re searching for and see their reviews of said products. Reviews that are honest and unpaid for.

As a seller, it would be difficult to break through all that sponsored content and comparisons of dozens of tools in one article, especially when the search is high and the keyword is competitive.

So instead of pointlessly trying to go one better than the competition, use a different channel, such as social media, at first.

Competition Too High

Another case scenario when you may postpone your SEO efforts is simply when the competition is too high and there are no low-hanging fruits to grab.

So let’s say you’ve been analyzing your competitor’s keywords, looking for branded keywords, looking for keywords with little to no search, and you find nothing you could go for. There’s just not enough room to swing a cat in these searches.

In that case, it’s best to focus first on different customer acquisition channels.

For example, build brand awareness on TikTok, invest in Google Ads, or work with influencers to sell your solution and bring more traction to your brand.

Final SEO Checklist

✔️ Make sure that the Core Web Vitals are met

✔️ Make sure that the information architecture of your website is logical

✔️ Build topical authority and trustworthiness

✔️ Build your linking structure

✔️ Go for the avalanche technique

✔️ Check the search volume and :allintitle: results to find KGRs

✔️ Remember about the search intent

✔️ Provide relevant answers

✔️ Add your insights and experience

✔️ Check the latest Google’s updates and guidelines

✔️ Learn how to recognize when SEO is not the area you should focus on first

#2 Social Media

Okay, enough about SEO.

We get it. It’s time-consuming.

Let’s now break down the second very popular and pretty powerful customer acquisition channel to take advantage of in 2023 – social media.

This time, the most important part is choosing the right social media channel depending on your buyer persona or personas, aka who you’re trying to reach.

Step One: Choose the Right Social Media Outlet

To choose the right social media outlet, you have to analyze each social media channel’s users.

The easiest way to do that is to look at the user base statistics of each platform.

So here are a few pieces of data from the most popular platforms that may help you make your decision. You can also dig deeper and look for further information to help you choose the right social media platform for your buyer personas.

Facebook

Even though Facebook hit a stagnation period when it comes to their monthly active users when nearing the end of 2021 and the company’s net income has been on the decline since the beginning of 2022, the platform’s statistics are still quite impressive.

In fact, it was Facebook winning the most popular platform for the year of 2022.

Age

According to early 2022 data, the most predominant (18.4%) user group on Facebook consisted of males aged 25-34. The second place (13.3%) goes to males aged 18-24, while third on the podium (12.6%) being females 25-34 years of age.

Groups exceeding 5% of users all are between the ages of 18 to 54.

The least visible user group consists of females aged 13-17.

What’s interesting is that even though the highest number of users sits between the ages of 25-34, the fastest growing users between 2018 and 2019 have been users aged 65 and older.

Hence, the belief that Facebook is slowly becoming a platform for older generations to enjoy. Still, they haven’t overtaken Facebook just yet.

Country

The top 5 countries with the highest number of Facebook users in 2022 were:

  1. India
  2. United States
  3. Indonesia
  4. Brazil
  5. Mexico

Other

More than 80% of Facebook users access the platform via their mobile devices.

In 2021, there were more than 10 million Facebook groups with over 1.8 billion users in them.

Facebook turned 18 in 2022.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is not only a platform for recruiters and jobseekers. It’s also a great platform to reach industry professionals, other businesses, leaders, CEOs, and investors.

The company’s revenue has been steadily growing for the last 5 years along with the number of users that in 2022 reached 850 million.

Age

The biggest user group on LinkedIn is those aged 25-34 amounting to 59.1% of the whole user base, followed by users aged 18-24 that take up 20.4%.

The smallest user group (2.9%) consists of those aged 55+.

LinkedIn is also predominantly male (57.2%).

Country

5 countries with the most LinkedIn users are:

  1. United States
  2. India
  3. Brazil
  4. China
  5. United Kingdom

Other

According to official LinkedIn statistics, 4 out of 5 LinkedIn users are the ones that drive business decisions.

Moreover, as much as 40% of the surveyed LinkedIn b2b marketers chose LinkedIn as their best source for high-quality leads.

Nearly 60 million companies have their page set up on LinkedIn.

Instagram

Although the number of Instagram users keeps on growing, the pace is slowing down with each year. Despite this fact, Instagram is still one of the biggest players, being the fourth most popular social media platform globally when it comes to the number of monthly active users.

Age

The most predominant Instagram group when it comes to age are users aged between 25-34 (31.7%), followed right by the second-biggest age group of 18-24 (30.2%).

The least visible age group on Instagram consists of users aged 65+ sitting at 2.1%.

This time around, Instagram is a platform where women take the lead with 55.6% female users and 44.4% male users.

Country

5 leading countries on Instagram are:

  1. India
  2. United States
  3. Brazil
  4. Indonesia
  5. Russia

Other

Instagram is the second-most used platform by marketers worldwide (79%), following Facebook, that’s used by a round 90% of marketers.

Right up to December 2022, the most popular post on Instagram was a picture of an egg on a white background: @world_record_egg, having received 56.1 million likes. However, that post was recently knocked off the first spot by Leo Messi’s carousel post of pictures from Argentina’s World Cup victory. The post was liked more than 70 million times and received almost 2 million comments up to this day.

Instagram’s influencer marketing market size is expected to grow to over $22 billion by 2025.

Twitter

The number of Twitter users keeps on growing and is expected to reach almost half a billion by 2025.

This platform is mainly used for entertainment and as a news source for its US-based users.

Age

The biggest age group among Twitter users is those aged 25-34, constituting 38.5% of the whole user base. Following with 20.7% is the group aged between 35-49.

The next spot is taken ex aequo at exactly 17.1% by the 18-24 group and the 50+ group.

The smallest Twitter user group consists of those aged 13-17 (6.6%).

Twitter is also predominantly male (56.4%).

Country

Countries with the highest number of Twitter users are:

  1. United States
  2. Japan
  3. India
  4. Brazil
  5. Indonesia

Other

33% of adult US-based Twitter users have a college education.

US-based Twitter users that have an income of 75k+ a year constitute 34% of American users, while only 12% are those US users who make under 30k per year.

Twitter Ads have the potential to reach nearly 30% of all Americans past the age of 13.

Pinterest

The number of monthly active users on Pinterest has been on the decline. However, the net income of this social media platform has increased in 2021, which helped the company to come out in profit for the first time in a few years.

US users constitute of the most predominant (86.3 million) user group of Pinterest.

Age

The age groups on Pinterest are laid out quite evenly, with the three biggest groups of US users being:

  • 38%: ages of 50-64
  • 34%: ages of 30-49
  • 32%: ages of 18-29

The least visible age group is those of 65+.

Additionally, the platform is ruled by women (76.7%), while men constitute 15.3%, and 8% come as unspecified.

Country

Top 5 countries with most Pinterest users are:

  1. United States
  2. Brazil
  3. Mexico
  4. Germany
  5. France

Other

Pinterest users have saved over 240 billion pins over time.

Pinterest proves to be quite effective, since almost all (98%) users have tried something that they have seen on Pinterest themselves.

Half of the US users shop on Pinterest.

YouTube

YouTube was the second most popular social media platform in 2022 with over 2 billion users. Moreover, YouTube’s user base is still growing.

Age

The most predominant group among YouTube’s users are male aged 25-34 (11.6%), followed by male aged 35-44 (9%), and females aged between 25 and 34 (8.6%).

The least visible group among YouTube users are male aged 55-64, constituting 4.4% of the whole user base.

Country

Top 5 countries with the highest number of YouTube users are:

  1. India
  2. United States
  3. Indonesia
  4. Brazil
  5. Russia

Other

The most popular video on YouTube in 2022 was the “Baby Shark Dance” that received more than 11 billion views.

In Q2 of 2022, over 300 thousand videos have been removed from YouTube. What’s more, that number excludes automatically flagged videos. Country with the biggest number of removed videos was India, followed by the United States and Indonesia.

Around 250 million hours of video content is being consumed daily on YouTube, which translates to around 5 billion videos watched every single day.

TikTok

From 2019 to 2021, TikTok had the highest (38%) growth of monthly active users among worldwide social media platforms.

Age

The biggest group of users on TikTok consists of women aged 18-24 (23.8%), followed by men aged 18-24 (17.9%) and females aged 25-34 (17.1%).

The smallest TikTok user group are males aged 55+ adding to 1.7% of the whole user base.

Country

5 countries with the biggest number of users on TikTok are:

  1. USA
  2. Indonesia
  3. Brazil
  4. Russia
  5. Mexico

Other

TikTok was the 6th most used social network in 2022 in terms of its monthly active users.

In the second quarter of 2022, the average daily time spent using TikTok equaled 95 minutes (around 1,5 hour), which is more than Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

83% of TikTok users have posted a video on the platform.


Whew, that was a lot of data.

But hopefully, these statistics will help give you a bit more insight on each of the most popular social media platforms you can use in your 2023 customer acquisition strategy.

Don’t forget that you can also find your audience on the less-mainstream social media platforms, such as Mastodon, Reddit, Quora, Discord, or Telegram to name a few.

Step Two: Apply the Right Strategy

Let’s say that you’ve now compared the available data and statistics with your buyer persona and have chosen the best-fitted social media platform to use for your customer acquisition efforts.

The next step is to craft the right strategy.

But before making 100 posts and automatically scheduling them to publish on Facebook, think about a few things first:

  • Your goals and objectives: to properly match your content with the objectives you have, you have to first list what you want to achieve.
  • Your target audience: e.g., when do they use social media, where are they from, are they in a different time zone than you, what do they like to see on social media?
  • The platform’s algorithms: each social media platform works differently. Plus, the changes are ever-present and fast. Observe the situation and act accordingly.

That being said, let’s look at the two most important aspects of crafting the right social media strategy for customer acquisition in 2023.

Mind you, we won’t go through each social media platform in-depth because this article would have become a book.

Let’s get to it.

Type of Content

With Instagram forcing its users to create and watch reels, Facebook’s never-ending stream of videos, YouTube’s shorts, all inspired by the success of TikTok, you may be thinking that video content is taking over.

But the truth is that it depends.

It depends on the platform you’ll choose, it depends on your target audience, and your capabilities.

Sure, it may have a big impact on the future of social media and will probably be a significant ranking factor on some of the platforms. But you have to think independently and choose video content only when it’s truly the case for it to be beneficial.

Let’s say you conclude that your target audience spends their time on YouTube. Then, you’d simply have to create video content, for example, by learning how to make YouTube shorts.

77% of marketers say that their company uses YouTube as the platform to up their marketing strategy.

For YouTube, it’s best if you mix long-form videos with the YouTube shorts. Because almost 40% of marketers report that it’s short-form content that brings them the most ROI.

But let’s say that your target audience uses primarily LinkedIn. In that case, you can even go as far to post plain text content, with no visuals, no infographics, and no videos, as long as you give something valuable and unique along with it, preferably sharing a personal experience.

Of course, besides just the general distinction between content type, such as visual or text based, there are a few more subliminal factors to take into account.

You also have to think about the tone of voice to use (maybe you have a certain brand voice?), whether the content should be informational, educational, light-hearted, or relating to current events and news.

The best possible advice here is to do your research as to what currently works on different social media platforms, compare that data with your buyer persona and their possible preferences, and then test these solutions yourself while making sure to speak directly to your audience and fit their needs and tone of voice.

Algorithms

The times when social media organized posts in reverse chronological order are long gone. Meaning that you won’t see all posts from every account you follow organized from the newest to the oldest ones, but you’ll be presented with posts that the specific social media platform thinks you’ll like best instead.

The mysterious algorithms stand behind your content not reaching your target audience organically.

But of course, again, each social media platform boasts a different and unique kind of algorithm for us, poor marketers, to catch on.

One of the platforms stands out in particular thanks to an exceptional algorithm they’ve developed. We’re talking about TikTok and its infamous ForYouPage.

TikTok’s algorithm is said to be so good that it’s hard for users to believe its powers. The FYP on TikTok is the main space of the app that shows the user videos that the algorithm selected based on their behavior, preferences, location, and other data it collects.

Once really synced with the user, the videos that show up on the FYP are extremely well-picked. Users even often joke about it, saying that the platform’s FYP really said for you this time.

But TikTok’s algorithm is not only beneficial for the viewer, it is also highly beneficial for the creators on the app, especially new ones. And that’s because each video posted on the platform is shown to at least one person’s FYP.

Meaning that every creator gets an equal chance to go viral. How that first person interacts with your video sets its future. If they react positively, your video will be shown to a larger batch of users, and then a larger one, and larger, until eventually going viral.

Other platforms now try to mimic TikTok’s recommendation algorithm, however, none have been successful. Some even had to apologize for their not-the-best TikTok copying attempt.

The moral of the story is to remember that algorithms are the king now when it comes to social media, and that we have to approach each platform and its rules differently. Using viral sounds on TikTok won’t do much on Twitter.

#3 Gated Content

The third way to acquire customers we want to discuss is gated content.

Gated content is basically any content you create, but won’t share with your audience unless they fill out a more or less demanding form. Therefore, the form stands as a gate between your audience and the content you’ve created.

As much as 50% of marketers admit that they use gated content to qualify leads and have stated that it plays a key role in encouraging conversions in their business.

Now, if you decide to take advantage of gating some of your content, make sure to do your research first to apply the best practices and achieve the best results. And 

trust us, there are a lot of nuance factors to keep in mind.

Here are some of them.

Added Value

The content you decide to gate must be of exceptional value. It must be unique, must be beneficial to the potential recipient, simply must give more than the content you usually put out for free. Make it feel exclusive.

Because you don’t want your audience to feel scammed. Feel like they’ve shared their information in exchange for something they could easily get for free elsewhere.

So, first you have to establish two things:

The Awareness Stage

Think which part of the funnel you want to reach with your gated content. Maybe you want to target people who are already in the problem awareness stage and push them to the solution awareness stage.

In that case, you’d be presenting the available solution options to their exact problems, essentially helping them with their struggles. Of course, meanwhile squeezing in your product as the perfect option to choose.

So remember that the content you create must match the awareness stage perfectly, because otherwise it simply won’t work.

The Type of Content

Now, seeing that you have the awareness stage picked out, and you know what your main goal with the gated content is, you can now establish the type of content that will best suit those areas.

Really try to think about what will be the most beneficial for your specific audience. Maybe they won’t appreciate a lengthy ebook, but would rather get an actionable checklist to follow or a template to use.

Targeting the Right People

You have your high-value content prepared, you know exactly who you’re trying to reach, at which awareness point, and you know which problem or need you’re tending to.

Now, it’s time to reach your target audience.

If the right people won’t have the chance to see your gated content, all your efforts will go to waste.

But how do you do that?

Well, you have a few options to choose from.

First, let’s go through the on-website options you can use. You can add a CTA button on your homepage, create a promotional banner, set a popup, create a landing page, include mentions in your articles and cite the lead magnet as a source, create a resources page, or write a separate article about it.

The options are endless, but do make sure that the gated content can be found on your website.

You can also reach your target audience outside your website, especially when you’re targeting people in the early stages of awareness that don’t even know a solution like yours exists.

So you can go ahead and set an ads campaign, whether that’s Google Ads, social media ads, or a retargeting campaign, the choice is yours. You can also add sneak peeks of the gated content into your newsletter, or simply link it up while sending out your regular messages.

And lastly, don’t underestimate the power of sharing your lead magnet on social media.

Always keep in mind that you have to reach people that you know will be excited to download your lead magnet. Hit the areas where your buyer personas are, whether that’s through organic search by targeting the keywords they type into Google or through a specific social media platform they’re known to spend time on, reach them where they are.

Endless Options to Catch Attention

At this point, you’ve prepared your content and know how to reach your audience. Now, you may be wondering how to actually convince your target audience to download the gated content and share their information.

There are quite a few ways to grab your potential customer’s attention with your gated content. But whether you choose to do it via a popup on your website, a landing page, an ad, or adding a shortcode with your lead magnet to a high-traffic article, the right copy will be the key to get conversions.

You have to convince your audience that they’ll find something of high-value that’s exclusive and beneficial to them.

So use the language of benefits and highlight what your potential customers get in return for submitting their information to download the gated content you’ve created.

Not Overdoing It

Another essential aspect of crafting a good piece of gated content and successfully sharing it with the right audience is to not overdo it.

What we mean by that is to:

  • not be too demanding in the lead capture forms you’ll attach to the gated content,
  • not to be vague when explaining what the gated content is about,
  • and not to sugar coat the benefits your potential customers may get after downloading the content you’ve crafted.

One thing we need to highlight here is that not being too demanding in the lead capture forms, doesn’t necessarily mean to go too easy with it. Too simple of a form may give you a lot of leads, but they may not be as high quality as those that take their time to complete a bit more complicated form. Strike the right balance.

Bonus Advice: Think Outside the Box and Build Hype

Example #1: ChatGPT

ChatGPT is the new talk in town.

This AI solution gained its first million users in just under a week! To put that into perspective, successful companies known worldwide, like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram needed much more to achieve that kind of success. For example, in the case of Netflix, it was 3.5 years.

OpenAI claims that the main thing that distinguishes it from the rest is that ChatGPT can speak in a conversational tone.

What we believe is more important is the fact that it tries to solve mathematical problems, write code, and solve code bugs.

So there are a few different qualities to this AI chatbot that distinguish it from the rest of similar solutions, like Jasper. But it still is a solution with limitations, mainly because it sources its knowledge from what’s already available on the internet.

Now, there are a couple of things to unfold here when it comes to its lightning-fast success.

How did ChatGPT actually gain their first million users in 5 days?

Well, it starts with an influential person.

OpenAI, the Artificial Intelligence laboratory consisting of both for-profit and nonprofit organizations, was co-founded in 2015 by among others Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

Even though the newly-appointed CEO of Twitter had resigned from the OpenAI board back in 2018, he remained donating to the organization. OpenAI had also received a significant donation from Microsoft in 2019.

Now when OpenAI shared its new chatbot – ChatGPT at the beginning of December 2022, Elon Musk was one of the first to give it a pat on the back and promote it via Twitter.

customer acquisition channels: Twitter example

What’s more, ChatGPT is now available to its many users for free, because it’s still in the testing phase. That gives the AI chatbot a significant premise before they move to a paid version of their product.

Even though a highly-influential person has been involved with the success of ChatGPT, its story is definitely one to get inspired off of.  And one thing is clear, OpenAI knows how to bring traction to their product, even when it hasn’t been fully developed yet.

Example #2: Supreme Clothes

If you’re in a bit less privileged position and don’t necessarily have influential friends or haven’t received big donations from worldwide known companies, you may be thinking that building the hype all by yourself is impossible.

Well, the Supreme brand begs to differ.

Product scarcity, a reselling market, street clothes, and zero paid marketing – those are the words connected with the Supreme brand.

It was first established in April 1994, starting from scratch. Fast-forward to 2019 when Supreme was the most worn streetwear brand in the world, even passing Nike.

The story of Supreme brings us to James Jebbia, the founder of the brand, who saw a great opportunity in the youth. The youth that loves to skateboard and make graffiti. What he noticed was that the street kids were not really targeted back when James decided to start his business.

Now, the first biggest key to Supreme success was to give their target audience exactly what they needed at the time.

The first, experimental store that James opened included a space to hang out, a space to ride skateboards, the freedom to talk and drink and spend time with friends while purchasing or not purchasing their streetwear items.

Moreover, the store was operated by the same people that James wanted to target, meaning that the sales people were street kids as well. This gave this, at the time, misfit group, a sense of belonging, a sense of importance, and a sense of power since they made a lot of decisions as to what and who could get into the store.

So what the Supreme founder did differently is that he gave the power to his target audience, which worked really well in terms of shaping the brand into exactly what they wanted and not what the founder or the marketing team thinks the target audience wanted.

And that alone is one of the best examples that shows knowing your target audience and buyer persona helps you reach the all-time-highs.

But the brand became even more popular overtime, until eventually the Supreme fandom became so big it blew everyone’s heads off.

The future efforts to promote the Supreme included many other non-conventional practices. For example, they supplied their products with scarcity in mind to keep them as exclusive as possible. The brand even had to come up with a system to stop people from fighting their way into the store for every new launch.

Streetwear fans are now collecting Supreme clothes and items as if they’re worshiping it. Many of the fanbase do their best to be the ones to buy the Supreme clothes and items on the launch day and then either resell them immediately with twice the value or keep them to increase it even further.

To really sum things up, we’ll just say that there’s even a Supreme red clay brick that their fans can purchase as a collectible.

Conclusion: It’s Not Easy

It may not be the conclusion of your dreams, but the truth is that customer acquisition and choosing the right channel for it, is not easy. Especially now with all the information and choice overload.

Add to that all other elements of customer acquisition, including the different metrics you have to track, such as the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), the fact that we have to calculate Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), and more. It gets to be a lot.

But when it comes to the customer acquisition channels only, whichever one you decide to go for in 2023, our best advice is to try to be as real and authentic as possible, do your research, use your head, put yourself in the shoes of your customers, and be thorough. Customers now very much care about authenticity.

And if you don’t want to or don’t have the time to invest in all the research, planning, and executing customer acquisition strategies through different channels, don’t be afraid to hire an expert. Let’s be real, a gen Z person probably knows TikTok’s algorithms more than we all do. They’d be happy to use their knowledge to build your brand there and engage with your existing customers as well.

Last, but not least. Remember that sometimes taking a completely different approach than others may be the key to success.

May the algorithms be ever in your favor!

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Aleksandra Dworak
Aleksandra Dworak
Content Writer

Lifts weights at the gym and of off reader's shoulders to help them skip the daunting research part and get valuable information instead.
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