One of the top challenges of B2B tech companies is how to keep customer acquisition as cost effective as possible. If you spend too much on b2b customer acquisition, not only will your profit margins be lower, but you may also discover that you’re draining resources from other parts of your company. Outsourcing customer acquisition is a popular strategy for B2B tech companies, but there are plenty of other customer acquisition strategy examples to help you control your average customer acquisition costs.
While some consideration needs to be given to the stage your business is currently in, since the customer acquisition funnel is different for startups than for established businesses, there are some strategies that work regardless of the size of your company.
Account-Based Marketing
Account-based marketing is a strategy for b2b customer acquisition that is critical as you scale your business. Essentially, the marketing and sales teams collaborate to actively target the company’s ideal prospects and turn them into customers. This strategy doesn’t waste time with accounts that don’t fit the company’s customer profile because they’re focused on a high ROI rather than finding as many prospects as possible. Instead of taking a shotgun approach toward acquiring customers, account-based marketing directs a laser directly onto the high-value prospects that will provide the best ROI.
To implement account-based marketing, B2B companies first need to create a buyer persona to understand who they’re targeting. Some questions companies will want to ask themselves as they develop a buyer persona are the following:
- What size of company do we want to target?
- Who uses our product in those companies and how do we get them to influence decision-makers?
- Where are the companies we want to target located?
- What are these companies’ pain points?
- Where do these companies go for information?
- What do these companies value in a vendor?
- What are the most common objections from these companies for our product or service?
Answering these questions will help you narrow down the type of customer you want to target and allow you to personalize your marketing strategy to ensure you are getting the most out of your customer acquisition resources. Additionally, revisiting your buyer personal at different stages of your company’s growth will help you pivot your marketing strategies to ensure they stay relevant and focused.
Blog Marketing
This type of marketing is extremely cost-effective because you can usually find someone on your staff to write for your blog or you can have people in your company rotate in that role. If you’re considering outsourcing customer acquisition, having an experienced writer produce content for your blog provides an extremely high ROI. Creating SEO-optimized content that provides value to potential buyers impacts b2b customer acquisition costs in a couple of ways.
First, writing a blog about the pain points you’re solving establishes your company as an expert in your field. This can open up all kinds of marketing opportunities, especially if other websites link to your content. Second, a blog attracts your ideal buyer because typically, readers get to your blog by searching keywords that pertain to the pain points you’re solving. Blog readers are often high-value targets in account-based marketing.
Social Media Marketing
B2C companies have been at the forefront of social media marketing, but these days, B2B companies simply can’t afford to ignore social media if they want to lower their average customer acquisition costs. Specifically, B2B companies can leverage the more professional social media platforms like LinkedIn to identify companies that need their product or service. Not only can you search for the specific employee role you’re targeting, but you can also filter out the decision-makers as well.
Once you’ve curated a list of contacts at companies that match your buyer persona, you can create a targeted marketing campaign through the social media platform that includes private messages, emails, and posts. All social media platforms have tools that allow you to use keywords to tag your posts and messages to expand your reach to other potential customers who search for a solution to the pain points your company addresses.
The best part is that marketing on social media can be entirely free. Certainly, you can always pay for more leads or services that fine-tune your marketing campaigns, but if you’re looking for a way to increase your customer base without increasing your customer acquisition costs. Even if your customer acquisition costs are already low, there is minimal risk to social media marketing and should always be one of your top growth strategies.
Conclusion
B2B customer acquisition has the reputation of being much harder than B2C customer acquisition, but that’s not always the case. Tech companies that use a combination of the strategies mentioned here will see solid results in no time at all. Their customer count will rise while their acquisition costs fall, and that is the ideal scenario for any company, regardless of industry.