How Organic Content Lowers Your Acquisition Costs

What is acquisition cost?

Acquisition costs are the expenses you incur to acquire new customers for your business. They can include advertising, marketing, sales, and other costs that are directly related to attracting and converting leads into customers. The lower your acquisition costs are, the more profitable your business will be, it's as simple as that.

How to lower acquisition cost

One of the ways to lower your acquisition costs is to create and share organic content. Organic content is the content that you create and share on your website, blog, social media, or other platforms without paying for it. It can help you attract and engage your target audience by providing them with valuable information, insights, or entertainment.

In this article, we will explore how organic content can help you lower your acquisition costs by:

• Boosting your SEO ranking and increasing your organic traffic

• Building trust and credibility with your potential customers

• Generating word-of-mouth referrals and attracting more leads

• Retaining and upselling your existing customers

Boosting your SEO ranking and increasing your organic traffic

SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of improving your website or blog’s visibility and relevance on the search engines like Google or Bing. By optimizing your site for the keywords that your audience is searching for, you can increase your chances of appearing higher on the search results pages. This can increase your organic traffic, which is the number of visitors who come to your site without clicking on any paid ads.

One critical point to note is that organic traffic is usually more qualified and interested in your products or services, which means they are more likely to convert into customers. According to a study by G2, the average organic CAC (customer acquisition cost) for a B2B SaaS (software as a service) is around $200, whereas the average inorganic CAC is around $340.

To illustrate this with a simple example, let’s say you have a monthly budget of $10,000 for acquiring new customers. If you spend it all on paid ads, you can expect to acquire around 29 customers ($10,000 / $340 = 29). However, if you invest some of it in creating and sharing organic content that boosts your SEO ranking, you can expect to acquire more customers with the same budget. For instance, if you spend $5,000 on paid ads and $5,000 on organic content, you can expect to acquire around 54 customers ($5,000 / $340 + $5,000 / $200 = 54). That’s almost twice as many customers as before!

In order to achieve this, you would need to create an entire organic content strategy that speaks both to humans as well as machines (SEO). Both in breadth - as it covers fundamental content (such as ever green) as well as in depth - as it needs to cover entire funnel stages.

Side note on paid - and this is always key even if your strategy is just to run paid campaigns. Ads is one of many ways to spend your budget but there may be other alternative ways that can get you more users (depending on your business, user segment), for example: running a lucky draw on social media based on UGC.

Building trust and credibility with your potential customers

Trust and credibility are essential factors that influence your potential customers’ decision to buy from you or not. By sharing useful and relevant content that showcases your expertise, knowledge, or experience, you can establish yourself as an authority or a thought leader in your field. This can make your customers more confident in choosing your business over your competitors.

One of my past jobs was to build trust and credibility on a personal finance ecommerce website. For certain business segments such as finance, trust is exponentially more important and for users it is the difference between buying from you or buying from a competitor (who has managed to generate more trust). Building trust from content alone is tough (and not necessarily enough) and there is a lot of work to do - not just in what is being written but more specifically in how it is written. Tone of voice, impartiality and bias (and therefore personal opinions) and how all this is leveraged to create your content goes a long way toward building trustworthy content.

A PWC study shows that there is a 57% gap between how leaders estimate versus how much consumers really trust them. Therefore, creating organic content that demonstrates your value proposition and customer satisfaction can help you bridge this trust gap and reduce your acquisition costs.

Generating word-of-mouth referrals and attracting more leads

Word-of-mouth referrals are one of the most effective and low-cost ways of acquiring new customers. By creating and sharing content that is engaging, informative, or entertaining, you can encourage your existing customers to share it with their friends, family, colleagues, or social networks. This can expose your business to a wider audience and attract more leads who are already interested in what you offer.

According to a study by HubSpot, word-of-mouth referrals have a 70% higher conversion rate than other sources of leads.

Note that in order for word-of-mouth to be effective, trust is definitely a pre-requisite. If no one trusts your brand, not only will they not spread a positive message about your business, they are more inclined to spread negative messages which will damage your brand.

Word-of-mouth is not so much a topic covered in this article, specifically under organic content. But leave me a comment if you're interested and I'll write more about this in my next article.

Retaining and upselling your existing customers

Retaining and upselling your existing customers can also help you lower your overall acquisition costs. By creating and sharing content that is relevant, timely, or personalized to your customers’ needs, preferences, or feedback, you can increase their loyalty and satisfaction with your business. This can reduce your churn rate, which is the percentage of customers who stop using your products or services within a given period. It can also increase your customer lifetime value (CLTV), which is the total revenue you expect to generate from a customer over their entire relationship with your business. By retaining and upselling your existing customers, you can reduce the need to spend more on acquiring new ones.

Again, upselling is less to do with organic content but I can cover this in a future article. Just comment and let me know.

Conclusion

Organic content is a powerful way to lower your acquisition costs and grow your business. By creating and sharing content that boosts your SEO ranking, builds trust and credibility, generates word-of-mouth referrals, and retains and upsells your existing customers, you can attract and convert more customers with less money.

If you need help with creating or optimizing your organic content strategy, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you and assist you in any way I can. Or comment if you have any opinions of your own.