Acquiring customers means acquiring customers. In fact, acquiring customers equals growth. It is the core goal of an enterprise and the task of the entire enterprise organization.
Acquiring customers in a narrow sense means completing a purchase behavior and truly achieving sales; while acquiring customers in a broad sense means acquiring users without requiring transactions. To distinguish, we call acquiring customers in a broad sense new customers or obtaining sales opportunities, while acquiring customers in a narrow sense is called acquiring customers. Social media platforms first focus on the number of users, while for B2B businesses, there are many factors that affect customer conversion. In order to more accurately evaluate the effectiveness of social media marketing, we mainly examine acquiring customers in a narrow sense.
Among the three main functions of social media marketing, social media acquiring customers is the one that merchants pay the least attention to compared to brand marketing and remarketing. Merchants believe that the effect of social media acquiring customers is not as good as that of e-commerce platforms and search engine marketing. Through social media marketing, merchants hope to obtain the value of brand marketing and remarketing.
However, acquiring customers through social media is the lowest-cost way to acquire customers. As the cost of online customer acquisition continues to rise, the low-cost value of social media in acquiring customers has gradually been valued. According to statistics, the period from lead conversion to order conversion through social media is the shortest, which is only 40% of the average conversion period. However, the conversion rate is relatively high, about 1.5%, second only to customer/employee recommendations and official website recommendations, and is one of the active channels with the highest conversion rate. Therefore, customer acquisition has become one of the four major functions of social media marketing.
1. The value of social media customer acquisition
The value of social media marketing in customer acquisition is mainly reflected in the following aspects. (1) Since the user stickiness of social media mainly comes from “interest”, social media can make a very detailed portrait of the marketing audience.
(2) Social media often allows businesses to create company homepages for publishing dynamics, organizing activities, etc., which gives businesses the opportunity to continuously influence potential customers. This is particularly valuable in a period of high customer acquisition costs.
(3) Some social media platforms, such as LinkedIn, are particularly suitable for cross-border B2B sellers to “actively” acquire customers.
(4) The average conversion period of social media customer acquisition is relatively short compared to other marketing forms, which benefits from the more efficient interactive function of social media.
(5) In the long run, the outstanding advantages of social media in brand marketing will make the diluted cost of social media customer acquisition lower.
2. Social Media Customer Acquisition Cost
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the total cost of acquiring new customers. Because the term “customer acquisition” itself is not rigorous, customer acquisition cost also has the following multiple definitions:
(1) The cost of acquiring a follower CPF (Cost Per Follower).
(2) The cost of acquiring a lead CPL (Cost Per Leads).
(3) The cost of acquiring a sales-qualified lead CPSOL (Sales Qualified Leads).
(4) The cost of acquiring a closed customer CPD (Cost Per Deals). Obviously, the above definitions are related to different milestones in the sales funnel. In cross-border B2B, CPSOL is often used as the customer acquisition cost. In cross-border B2C, CPD is more commonly used as the customer acquisition cost. Excellent platforms will provide advertisers with the average PPC (cost per click) and CVR (conversion rate) of their industry. Before placing an advertisement, companies can calculate the customer acquisition cost of the industry on the platform. The calculation formula is:
CPD= PPC/ CVR
For cross-border B2B, the customer acquisition cost calculation formula is:
CPSQL= PPC/Number of sales approval inquiries
The above formula is used to calculate the customer acquisition cost of paid advertising. In social media marketing, more and more attention is paid to the natural traffic brought by social media operations, and its cost calculation is not so simple.