Open markets don’t stay open forever. Competition for customers starts to eat into acquisition costs as you get more and more competitors. The channels you relied upon to be so fruitful begin to show diminishing returns. Costs go up, conversion goes down. In order to sustain their growth, the scaling businesses need to find new sources of customers because their previous channels have been tapped.
The companies that continue to grow don’t just double down and spend more on channels that are losing their efficacy. They find new channels to attract customers before their competitors do. This isn’t always easy. It means looking outside of obvious channels and places that other companies have discovered.
Why Channels Stop Being Viable
When a business first starts advertising, the success they see can often be effortless. Clicks are inexpensive through social media, search results convert with abandon, email lists grow organically over time. Then competition sets in. Other businesses discover the same channel, bids go up in an auction, saturation occurs with audiences.
This causes a double-edged issue for businesses. Customer acquisition costs go up as advertisers compete for the same screen time and audience attention. Audiences also become less susceptible to those kinds of ads and acquisition efforts because once they see one ad that targets their needs, they don’t need any more.
Acquisition costs become inflated as more bidders seek a coveted position in front of an audience’s attention. Audiences also become less responsive to ad formats because when they learn to appreciate and acquire products that suit their needs from one business, that saturation keeps them from being receptive to the format as a whole.
Many businesses that find their previous streams drying up respond by just putting more money into those channels. This isn’t sustainable, nor the best approach because it means damaging costs will go up on top of each other rather than proactively trying to find something else to fill in that gap.
Where to Find New Acquisition Channels
The businesses that continue to find audiences and grow spend effort to find channels that are still available for acquisition before they get too expensive. They look for ways to reach out to potential customers in places their competitors have yet to discover.
Push notification ads are one such channel. The format for push notification ads targets audiences outside of other formats that have received serious saturation already by other businesses. When researching options, looking at the best push ads network options proves the format still works outside of costly ad spaces.
These companies share the commonality of being able to scale and succeed during challenging times by acquiring customers through early adoption before channels become too saturated. The window remains open for a period before other businesses discover the format and use it as well.
Various channels keep their windows open for a long time until other businesses pick them up. Testing the waters before beginning an ad campaign with push notification ads shows this channel still provides low costs per acquisition due to being an underutilized channel.
Sourcing customers on platforms for specific demographics also proves fruitful if a business can find niche markets that their competitors have not yet conquered. Where most of your competition looks at Facebook or Google for customers, others have also ignored platforms with low audiences, which may provide more bang for your buck per customer.
A Channel May Not Be a Channel Anymore
Using one channel for customer acquisition puts all your eggs in one basket. If the basket falls, your customers will, too. Scaling requires distributing your sources of customer acquisition over many different avenues, so if one avenue is no longer viable, you still have others.
The importance of spreading out the sources of income over multiple channels protects business from problems that befall one specific channel after others discover that source of potential customers. Then, it also allows businesses to utilize each source rather than being bound by that which gave them the most success in the past, which may no longer work.
When someone loses their job for a perceived mistake or mishap, they lose all their resources and income dedicated to that one effort. A better approach is to locate multiple streams of income and utilize those positive efforts individually as best as you can.
This builds resilience against channels saturating or expiring due to mistakes like changing algorithms or prices rises. Spreading source materials doesn’t take much time—the modern business owner has a limited amount of time on their hands and should not overwhelm themselves by focusing on too many at once.
Asking the Hard Questions
Moving to new customer acquisition channels feels risky because it means abandoning what’s familiar for the unknown. But staying in oversaturated channels where everyone competes is riskier. The businesses that keep growing when competition intensifies are the ones willing to test unfamiliar channels and adopt what works before competitors catch on.
This requires accepting that some tests will fail. Not every new channel will deliver results. The goal isn’t perfection but finding enough new customer sources to support continued growth despite increasing competition in traditional channels. That exploration, uncomfortable as it feels, often makes the difference between businesses that scale and those that stall.