Per martketingcharts.com It’s getting pricier to acquire customers, B2C marketers say. Perhaps as a result, almost 8 in 10 B2C marketers surveyed [download page] by Stirista report that they expect an increase in budgets dedicated to customer acquisition efforts in the next 2 years.
The senior-level B2C marketers participating in the research use a variety of channels for customer acquisition, with half using at least 4 and close to one-third (31%) leveraging at least 5. Those with a mature and successful customer acquisition strategy rely on more channels than others, according to the analysis.
When asked which channel/tactic contributes most to the success of their customer acquisition efforts, B2C marketers cited social media first, at 26% share of respondents. Not too far behind was digital advertising (22%), with email (20%) also getting a significant share of the vote. These three channels alone combined for two-thirds of responses, with no other channel getting a double-digit response share.
Recent research indicates that the focus on social media and email is well-placed, as consumers are highly likely to make purchases as a result of marketing on these channels. Separate research reveals that for US consumers, digital advertising has well and truly passed TV as their main attention-grabbing advertising medium.
The Stirista study finds that successful marketers are much more enthusiastic about social media than others. Fully 88% of marketers with extremely successful customer acquisition strategies say that social media is extremely effective at helping them to achieve their goals, a rate that’s twice as high as reported by all other marketers surveyed (44%).
Meanwhile, respondents with highly mature customer acquisition strategies are more likely than those with low or moderate maturity to say that email is the biggest contributor to their success, and this group is also more apt to say that video is effective.
Separately, seven in 10 respondents overall expect to make changes to their budget distributions across channels in the coming 2 years. For those who are keeping their budget allocations the same, the leading factors for doing so are having tested many channels and finding the ones that work, budget constraints limiting the ability to make changes, and innovation and industry changes reinforcing confidence in the current mix.
Finally, the report reveals that B2C marketers’ biggest contributors to success are also their greatest challenges. The top 2, closely grouped at the top, are data quality/availability, and workflow efficiency, while in the second tier of contributors and challenges are segmentation and targeting and measuring performance and attribution.
About the Data: The results are based on a July 2023 survey of 186 marketing decision-makers at B2C companies with 500 or more employees operating in the US.