Enterprise Marketing: The Problem of High Opportunity and Customer Acquisition Costs

The Costs of Enterprise Marketing

How much does it cost for your company to bring in a new customer?

The cost of acquiring a new customer can add up rapidly when you total the costs of advertising, marketing, and sales. When that cost is too high or growing too fast, it can cripple or even bring down the largest enterprise marketing budget.

Inbound marketing can lower opportunity and customer acquisition costs. It will bring more potential leads to your company and make it easier to convince them to become paying customers. The bonus is that inbound marketing provides both short and long-term returns.

The Power of Inbound Enterprise Marketing

Today’s consumers are less and less impressed by flashy advertising and hard sales pitches. They are more educated and more discerning about the businesses they patronize and the value they expect. Inbound marketing is the perfect fit for this new consumer.

Inbound marketing relies on high-quality content, delivered to a targeted audience, at the right time. This content is not sent out in one single blast. Instead, the content snags their attention and draws them towards your company. The content positions your company as a trusted expert and as the right place to buy when the consumer is ready.

The Short and Long Term Returns of Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing costs, on average, less than traditional marketing (TV, radio, billboards, etc.). This brings down the opportunity and customer acquisition costs significantly. This helps improve a company’s profitability in a short time.

Investing in the high quality content of inbound marketing helps with long-term costs as well. A good deal of the content that you create will be as pertinent in years to come as it is today. That means that you will see returns on that content long after you create it. This helps keep opportunity and customer acquisition costs down long-term.

How to Create Successful Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing requires knowledge of your target audience and the stages of your sales life cycle.

How can you sell your product or service unless you know who your customer is? Building a comprehensive buyer persona helps identify a company’s target audience. That helps focus your marketing and sales efforts. A buyer persona profiles several things:

• who your customer is (age, gender, income bracket, etc.),
• what that person does (plumber, cashier, manager),
• and what pain points that person has that your product/service can alleviate.

You also need to know what your customer expects at each stage of the sales cycle. A casual visitor to your website is at a different stage than someone who is about to order a product or schedule a service.

Along with this knowledge, you will need a talented content creator. That person creates blog posts, ebooks, whitepapers, and other content for your inbound marketing efforts. Each piece of content focuses on providing value to a particular customer persona at a particular time in the sales cycle. By targeting your content, you can guide your prospects closer to the conversion point.

The last piece of the puzzle is aligning your sales team with your inbound marketing efforts. Inbound marketing sifts out casual visitors from those ready to buy your products or services. The key to this is using an integrated sales/marketing system that tracks every interaction the customer has had with the company. This lets the sales person know everything he or she needs to know about the lead. This focuses the sales pitch and leads to higher conversion rates.

Take the first steps to lower your opportunity and customer acquisition costs in you enterprise marketing plan with the Inbound Marketing Assessment. The assessment is free and will identify gaps in performance in your digital marketing.

Marketing Matters Inbound?is an inbound marketing firm specializing in online conversions, content?strategy, PPC campaigns and traditional media placement. Our experience in?B2B digital?marketing?and?traditional media?allows us to deliver results through a strategic media mix. We believe in?aligning and merging marketing and sales/operations for optimal return on your marketing investment.