It’s no secret that traditional advertising and older digital marketing methods are growing more expensive and contributing to bloated Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC).
For those of you who aren’t actively tracking your CAC (you should be), here is a quick rundown of what it is and how to calculate it.
Customer Acquisition Cost is a valuable marketing and customer success metric that measures the cost of marketing, sales, and service efforts required to close a deal and onboard a customer. It is calculated by summing a company’s total sales and marketing spends (plus implementation costs) and dividing it by the number of new customers.
In the last five years, the cost of acquiring new customers has increased by over 50%, as marketing becomes more expensive and consumer distrust of brands grows.
Consumer habits are changing, and marketing teams everywhere are seeing growing CAC. With all-time high competition and other pressures, such as the changing regulation and tech battles around third-party cookies, marketers struggle to find efficient ways to bring in customers.
Fortunately, there are marketing strategies that align with and capitalize on modern consumer behavior to generate leads and acquire customers efficiently.
What’s more, these methods work alongside your current marketing efforts and, unlike traditional advertising, provide long-term value.
I’m talking about inbound marketing.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing revolves around the idea that as people need help solving challenges, they search the internet for insights. By providing valuable educational content and sharing it with the world, organizations attract leads, nurture prospects, and delight customers.
As a bonus, when prospects seek out knowledge to help them solve problems, they are more perceptive and engaging with brands that provide value upfront.
In other words, leads generated from inbound marketing are more valuable and have higher intent than leads generated from traditional broadcast marketing methods.
How does Inbound Marketing Work?
Inbound marketing is a methodology or system that combines several digital marketing tactics and strategies to draw in leads organically. Inbound marketing combines content, SEO, SEM, social, and digital marketing tactics to create a modern and prospect-centric marketing experience.
We go in-depth into the methodology of inbound marketing and how it works in our comprehensive guide.
However, a high-level breakdown of inbound marketing is as follows.
- Know Your Customers: Understand your customer’s challenges they face and how they identify them.
- Educate: Create valuable content that helps prospects identify their problems, weigh solutions, and make decisions.
- Share: Leverage your website, SEO, and social channels so prospects can find your content.
- Convert Visitors: Visitors to your site need solutions to challenges you have demonstrated expertise in solving. Offer them premium content in exchange for their contact information and generate leads.
- Nurture Prospects: Leads are seldom ready to buy right away. Once a lead converts, nurturing efforts continue to offer value and insights until prospects are ready to purchase. When they are, you have cultivated rapport by sharing value throughout their buyer’s journey.
- Help Throughout The Journey: Marketing’s job doesn’t stop when the sale completes. Continue to offer resources to help clients achieve value and create advocates. Nothing beats word-of-mouth!
- Profit: Educational content that spans the entire customer journey generates leads, converts prospects, and delights customers passively.
The Value of Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing strategies do come at a price, however. These strategies take time to develop a body of knowledge that draws in prospective customers. Results occur within 6 to 9 months of concerted effort and then grow and compound from there.
Despite the ramp-up time, the payoffs of inbound marketing are tangible and directly impact customer acquisition costs.
Once the system is up and running, inbound marketing generates leads and converts customers at a higher rate and for less cost than traditional marketing methods. What’s more, these efforts continue to return passive benefits as your social networks grow, happy customers spread word-of-mouth, and content ranks on search engines.
Inbound marketing is human-centric digital marketing that spans the entire customer journey.
As such, it has compounding value that spreads across all of your customer-facing teams.
The internet has changed the way people make purchases and find business partners forever. As such, inbound marketing will only become more valuable as the internet’s presence in our lives grows.
It’s time to stop investing in transactional marketing and start drawing customers to you with genuine and long-term engagements.
How To Lower Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
So, how can you leverage all of this to lower customer acquisition costs?
Well…
HubSpot’s State of Inbound Marketing report revealed that Inbound-dominated organizations average 60% lower cost per lead than outbound-dominated organizations.
Inbound marketing counters rising acquisition costs and consumer mistrust by turning your marketing team into a customer education team. Through demonstrated expertise and authority, marketing teams can align their efforts with modern consumer behaviors and draw in highly engaged prospects.
When marketing generates and shares knowledge, instead of interrupting and broadcasting messages, they nurture and support the entire customer journey.
What better way to build trust?
When deployed holistically across the customer journey, inbound marketing can:
- Draw in high intent visitors and convert them to valuable leads throughout the buyer’s journey.
- Shorten sales cycles by nurturing prospects and supporting sales with valuable collateral.
- Lower costs by onboarding customers efficiently.
- Delight customers by sharing knowledge and resources to help them achieve ROI.
- Lower the cost of servicing your customers by enabling customer self-help and empowering service teams.
Strategically leveraging knowledge empowers marketing, sales, and service efforts—thus driving down the cost of customer acquisition and growth.
Start Lowering Your Customer Acquisition costs With Inbound Marketing
The most significant value of inbound is that it aligns with modern consumer behaviors and fosters more trust, engagement, and conversions than other marketing methods. When inbound marketing is executed comprehensively across the customer journey, marketing teams create a competitive advantage that compounds in value.
Inbound marketing leverages marketing teams in non-traditional ways to manage the entire brand experience. While the results are extremely valuable, it can be challenging to know where to start.
Many valuable resources are linked throughout the article to share insights and details on inbound marketing to help you get started. Or, if you would like to speak with an expert on how inbound marketing can lower your customer acquisition costs, we are happy to share our insights.
We are here to help!
Let’s Get Growing!
