Chap 2 Three Main Customer Acquision Channel

Lets take a moment to step back and look at the big picture
How online customers discover products to buy:
a) Word of mouth + blog
b) Search+blog
c) Advertising + blog
First of all nothing beats recommendation of a friend or someone you respect. Great products generate
all the buzz on the social network and this drives sales like a charm. That’s called word of mouth.
Then there is search
Whenever you are facing a problem or have any kind of question the first place you go to is google. If
there is a product or service that can solve your problem it is very likely that it will popup in all your
search results.
And finally adverstsing is a very old and proven way to get a product in front of prospective customers.
We see hundreds if not thousands of ads every daywhich actually dilutes their ROI quite a bit but this
channel is still quite effective never the less

Do you even need a blog in order to tap into these three main customer acquision channels
Well not really
Let me explain it with a real example
Let’s say you own an e-commerce store that sells shoe laces like lacesout.net
When someone buys new laces from them, chances are this person is going to brag about these to this
friends and recommend laces on this website.

That is if that customer has a positive experience with that online shop.
Pleasing your customers is all that you need inorder to generate that word of mouth
Now lets talk about search. If we plug lacesout.net website in hrefs search result tool. I will see that
they rank in organic search results of quite a few keywords related to their products. They rank at
position number three for the keyword sneaker laces, at position no seven for the keyword laces and at
position number five for sneaker shoe laces and a ton of other relevant keywords of course. In other
words people who search on google for shoe laces will inevitably disover lacesout.net because it ranks
quite well and these people are the best customers you may hope for because they express their direct
intent when searching on google for these things. So search as a customer acquisition channel has
worked really well for lacesout.net
And finally advertising, looks like hrefs doesn’t see any ads for lacesoutnet in google search results.
PPC=0
There is another great tool called similarweb where you can check for other forms of advertising besides
google pay per click. But it looks like lacesout.net is not doing any advertising even according to similar
web. So they must be quite happy with how the two other customer acquision channels work. But still
they can pour some money into advertising anytime they want.
So lets check these customer acquisition channels for them anyways
Now given that this online customer store can successfully leverage all three major customer acquisition
channels why are they running a blog then.
Well lets take a look at this article from the blog that teaches different lacing styles.

According to hrefs this single article ranks in google for over six hundred related search queries. Here are
some of them.
How to lace nikes
How to lace nike shoes
How to lace airmarks ninety

So people do the following

They search for different article on google
They find this article “laces blog”
They read and enjoy this blog
Dig deeper into this website
Eventually they buy laces from it
This is a near perfect example of how content marketing can drive customers from business from google
So let’s put blog next to customer acquision channel
What about the word of mouth
Well this article teaches you some cool and unique ways to tie your sneakers
Guess what people will do when they learn new way to tie their laces, post it on social media ofcourse

There is even a #shoe lace art on instagram. Once friends and followers ask for a tutorial they learn to
tie laces like that they will given them a link to this article
See where I am going with this?

It’s not just the positive experience with the company and your product that can generate the word of
mouth. You can generate a lot of buzz with your content.
So lets put blog beside word of mouth too.

And finally you can spend money to promote the content that talks about your product instead of
promoting the actual product directly. It may sound counter intuitive but quite often the content that
promotes your product have a much higher conversion rate than the sales page for that product.
But we’ll talk more about it later in this course. For now let put blog next to advertising.
SO all in all as you can see creating a blog can massively expand your reach in all three major customer
acquisition channels. This is why the interesting content marketing only keeps growing. Just look at the
google trends for the keyword content marketing. It goes up