IF YOU MARKET ONLINE FOR NEW CUSTOMERS, YOUR CUSTOMER ACQUISITION COSTS WILL SKYROCKET THIS YEAR! BUSINESS HOW-TO
Instagram, and Google’s platforms. This massive influx in money, one that has no need to generate revenue or prove an ROI, will drive up ad costs across these platforms and cause some companies to no longer be able to afford their customer acquisition costs once summer hits. This will only get worse over time, with larger and larger budgets moving into play the closer we get to Nov. 2. Long term, this could have an interesting impact on advertisers, as some companies just won’t be able to survive weeks or months without new customers and won’t be able to get new customers due to the cost of customer acquisition. How do you avoid this issue for your business? To some extent, we will all be affected. High customer acquisition costs hurt us all, but now would be a really good time to review your entire marketing and sales process. Look
For the last few years, there has been a push to only use online marketing. There are whole companies created only because they’re able to sell their products via Facebook or Instagram. I sell a ton on these platforms as well, but there is one big difference, and I have one major word of warning for anyone selling on Facebook or Instagram: Start to prep now. Far too many small-business owners get the vast majority of their traffic from one of these two paid media sites. This is similar to the early 2000s Adword days. If you’re a student of history, you’ll remember that you used to be able to get penny clicks on AdWords. Some folks made a killing using AdWords ads to sell products or by utilizing the service’s arbitrage feature (arbitrage is where you pay for a click on a certain website — these clicks are sent to a website full of ads that in turn pay you). And while AdWords is still a great marketing tool for many, the days of super cheap clicks are long gone. Facebook and Instagram have been raising their price per click, engagement, view, etc. for years now, and you’ll notice that the demographic of advertisers has changed since many can’t afford the cost. Having all your eggs in these baskets is a huge mistake. If you’re making good money on these sites but they’re one of the only places you’re getting any volume of traffic, you better start solving that problem now. It is going to get ugly here soon. That leads me to my warning. We have an upcoming presidential election, and while we have seen some political money already making its way onto Facebook and Instagram, we haven’t seen anything yet. Politico.com is estimating that at least $1.6 billion will be spent on Facebook,
for areas that are weak because they rely on cheap customer acquisition and fix those areas first. For example, what is your lead follow-up process? Do you need to add in more nurture campaigns or sell other products and services to
unconverted leads? Do you need to get some sales training in place or add a new media that is going to be less affected by the political ad spend? Whatever your plan, the good news is that you have time to make sure you can easily weather any storm coming your way. As an added benefit, by doing this exercise, you’ll also ultimately have a better, more profitable business once the ad spend normalizes. If you choose to do nothing, you may find it to be a very lean summer and fall season for new customers, business growth, and profits.
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