No, you’re not imagining it: You’re seeing more and more ads everywhere you look, and they’re making it hard to keep customer acquisition costs in check. In fact, some professionals estimate that the average person is bombarded by up to 10,000 ads daily. While some of those ads may be relevant, most are what The New York Times recently dubbed “crummy”.
Fortunately, your brain has developed the ability to filter out an unwanted ad from a good one. Call it an instinct born out of self-preservation. And the instinct works very well: According to one report, 41% of people remember fewer than 10% of the ads they encounter. Eighteen percent can’t recall any ads they’ve seen lately at all.
These are positive outcomes if you’re a consumer who feels a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of ads vying for your attention. But what if you’re an advertiser who’s desperately trying to get your brand noticed? That’s a different story.
When you’re an entrepreneur or marketer who wants to bring leads into your sales funnel, having customers “tune out” your ads isn’t ideal. Your goal is for your messaging to evoke a response, not become lost in cyberspace. Otherwise, you’ll continue to see an undesirable metric trend: exorbitant and steadily rising customer acquisition costs (CAC).
Fighting Against Ballooning CAC rates
What is CAC and how is it determined? A CAC is the dollar figure it takes to bring a single customer into the fold, as shown by this equation:
Your Marketing/Sales Costs / Number of Paying Customers = CAC
To accurately determine your CAC, you have to factor in all the costs associated with customer acquisition. These can run the gamut from a portion of your marketing team’s salaries to the price you paid for stock imagery or footage. In other words, your total marketing-related expenses might be higher than you realize, which will affect your final CAC.
What’s a good CAC? It differs for each company and sector because industry averages fluctuate quite a bit. For instance, in the hospitality realm, a $907 CAC may be acceptable, whereas in ecommerce, a much lower CAC of $274 is more common. It just depends. However, rest assured that your company has a baseline CAC number whether you’re paying attention to it or not.
Here’s the issue, though: Regardless of where the baseline of your customer acquisition costs sits today, you can probably expect it to keep going up if you stay the course, market as usual, and never change your strategies.
Why? All those ads.
As people continue to see increasing amounts of ads in general, they’re apt to become more resistant to your brand’s impressions. Even consumers who are part of your target audience (and therefore should be interested in what you’re selling) won’t necessarily be motivated to find out more about your brand or offerings because they’re so tired of being hammered by ads.
As a result, your customer acquisition costs will inch up every quarter. You’ll be forced to work harder (and spend more) to get the same number of customers you did a year or two ago.
Lowering Your Average Customer Acquisition Costs With Performance Publishing
This doesn’t mean that you can’t move the CAC needle in your favor. You can. You just have to make changes in the way that you approach your marketing and customer experience practices, starting by embracing more modern and frictionless digital marketing approaches such as performance publishing.
Developed by leading performance marketing agency Quality Media powered by the publication, The Quality Edit, performance publishing is a future-forward synergy of several marketing tactics that allows you to rise above the ad clutter and gain control over your CAC levels.
What makes performance publishing so unique among other evolving digital marketing solutions is its human-centric design. At its core, performance publishing is aimed at growing a tight bond between brands and consumers.
Performance publishing puts customers in the driver’s seat by engaging them in intuitive, natural ways that don’t promote the friction that traditional advertising can. The performance publishing process feels comfortable — and produces results. To date, Quality Media has seen an impressive 20% decrease in CAC (and a 30% return on ad spending) across its brand partners, beating internal paid social performance 90% of the time, with clients that have incorporated performance publishing into their marketing and sales workflows.
What differentiates performance publishing the most from other marketing strategies is that it works with (not against) the modern consumer’s buying journey and experience expectations. And you can use performance publishing to move marketing levers in your favor by resetting your marketing and branding in several key ways.
1. Look for avenues to build trust with consumers from their first introduction to your brand.
Trust between brands and buyers is more critical than it’s ever been. And it’s something that you can’t purchase. You have to nurture it by planting the seeds of trust in every consumer encounter, starting with people’s introduction to your brand, which is probably going to happen on their terms — not yours.
Consumers frequently take many steps to educate themselves before making a purchase. In fact, 95% of buyers sift through brand reviews before they start to shop for an item. In other words, they’re not making impulsive choices based on static ads that cross their paths. On the contrary, they’re looking for facts and information from reputable sources to determine which brands to trust. However, they won’t necessarily go to your website to find out about your company or products. More likely, they’ll hunt around the Internet and believe what experts say.
How Performance Publishing Affects Your Brand’s Impact on Consumers
Performance publishing acknowledges and leans into this modern customer journey flow by leveraging the power of third-party validation, storytelling, and data-driven paid amplification on trusted sites such as The Quality Edit.
Why The Quality Edit? The answer is simple: The site’s journalistic integrity is second to none. The Quality Edit boasts a 90% trust rating among readers, which is exceptionally high within the digital media space. When Quality Media’s partner brands are talked about on The Quality Edit through sponsored content, roundup or gift guide inclusions, dedicated articles, or other messaging, they automatically get a trust-building brand equity and validation nudge.
If you’re waiting for consumers to become aware of your brand through paid static ads alone, you’re not actively nurturing their trust. (People know that you wrote your ads, after all.) But if you’re making sure your brand is being validated through reviews and recommendations on trusted media sites like The Quality Edit, you have a better chance at wooing them later with other advertisements and marketing.
2. Use social media partnerships and mentions to continue your trust-boosting brand buzz.
Once you’ve started sowing trust with consumers through third-party validation vehicles such as The Quality Edit, you can begin to expand your efforts with other digital marketing strategies. For instance, you might want to collaborate with social media influencers and then push out well-timed (and irresistible) social posts to your target audience.
Quality Media’s performance publishing principles follow this practice of driving brand exposure through “sticky” social media storytelling. Their team hand-selects social influencers and creators to continue brand conversations beyond The Quality Edit’s pages. After all, despite consumers being weary of ads, they’re certainly not weary of listening to their favorite social celebrities gush about products and brands.
Just how big is the social media user crowd? Right now, more than half the people on the earth are using social media, and many are spending more than two hours daily on sites like YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. Accordingly, when they encounter a product through their favorite macro or nano influencer via performance publishing, they’re likely to take notice and interact. They’re also less skeptical about trying the new products that trusted influencers are raving about.
Later, if they see a thumb-stopping creative ad for the same product, they’re apt to stop scrolling and start clicking. Once they click, they’re led to a landing page that keeps the narrative rolling along — and the feel-good trust running high. That’s a nice perk if you’re trying to snag sales and trim your CAC rates.
3. Phase out marketing techniques that don’t engender consumer trust or perform well anymore.
When it comes to improving your CAC, you have to break free from old-style marketing tactics that aren’t working as successfully as they did before. Which tactics should you shelve? Do some math on the ones you’re using now to see which ones are getting stale and should be phased out. At that point, you can replace them with high-performing alternatives like performance publishing.
Just be sure that you conduct due diligence before investing in any new strategy. For instance, you’ll want to check out how well a strategy has worked for other businesses like yours. To date, Quality Media’s brand partners have collectively acquired more than 300,000 customers and enjoyed $50+ million in incremental revenue in just a few years. Those numbers suggest performance publishing is a low-risk tactic to get more out of your marketing budget.
Performance publishing doesn’t just deliver short-term or one-time outcomes, either. It offers a lasting return on your investment. As you bring in customers who have confidence in your brand, you have the opportunity to turn them into repeat buyers. The more products they purchase, the higher each one’s customer lifetime value (CLV) will go. A higher CLV average can offset the rates for your customer acquisition costs. Plus, you may be able to entice some of your newly loyal fans to produce user-generated content (UGC).
The Role of UGC in Consumer Trust
It’s no secret that UGC can be a boon to your bottom line. Not only does it add more fuel to your trust-building machine, but it gives you additional content to disperse. For example, you can share UGC videos on social media, not to mention glowing reviews on your website. Since you’re not paying anything to develop UGC, it becomes a free source of authentic brand messaging, adding credibility to your products and story. Plus it invites consumers to collaborate in the buying process instead of just being seen as a cog in the wheel. That’s yet another way to show you trust them and help them see your brand in a positive light.
You can’t do anything about the jam-packed, ad-heavy digital marketing space. It’s always going to be elbow-to-elbow, and it’s likely to get even more noisy and crowded. But you can jockey for position — and trim your CAC — by getting creative with the way you attract new buyers to your brand with emerging strategies like performance publishing.
