5 Steps To Choose Your Customer Acquisition Channel

Step 1: What Are You Optimizing For?

here are the most common possibilities you might be choosing between:

  • Learning - You might be trying to learn something specific about engagement, interest among a certain target audience, monetization ,etc.
  • Cost - Optimizing your CPA to get more out of your budget.

Step 2: What are your constraints?

  • Time - Do you have a specific optimal window to reach your audience? Do you only have 3 months of cash left?
  • Money - Are you well funded, or bootstrapping? Do you need to extend your runway?
  • Target Audience - Do you need to reach someone really specific?
  • Legal - Are you taking on an old industry with litigious stalwarts? (i.e. Uber, Music Industry, etc)

Step 3: Setup Your Channel Matrix

Building a channel matrix helps give you three things:

  1. A methodical process to evaluate each channel
  2. A way to compare each channel on the same attributes
  3. A visual organization of the information for each channel

Step 3.1 - Open your favorite spreadsheet tool (google docs, excel, numbers)

Step 3.2 - List Out All Potential Channels In The Header Column

3.3 List Out Channel Defining Attributes In The Header Row

Step 4: Fill In Values Of Channel Matrix With Low, Med, High

Step 5: Choose 1 - 2 Channels As Hypotheses