HubSpot：收购成本报告(英文版).pdf

The Hard Truth About Acquisition Costs (and How Your Customers Can Save You)by Michael RedbordConsumers Don’t Trust Businesses Anymore Acquisition Is Getting Harder Your Customers Are Your Best Growth Opportunity Putting It All Together: The Inbound Service Framework391830Table of Contents3The Hard Truth About Acquisition Costs 1The way people interact with businesses has changed -- again. The internet’s rise three decades ago did more to change the landscape of business than anyone could have imagined in the 1990s. And now it’s happening again.Rapid spread of misinformation, concerns over how online businesses collect and use personal data, and a deluge of branded content all contribute to a fundamental shift -- we just don’t trust businesses anymore.Trust in businesses is eroding, and so is patience. Marketing and sales are getting harder, and the math behind most companies’ acquisition strategy is simply unworkable.The best point of leverage you have to combat these changes? An investment in customer service.Consumers don’t trust businesses anymore1Consumers don’t trust businesses anymore4The Hard Truth About Acquisition Costs 1• 81% trust their friends and family’s advice over advice from a business• 55% no longer trust the companies they buy from as much as they used to• 65% do not trust company press releases• 69% do not trust advertisements, and 71% do not trust sponsored ads on social networksWe used to trust salespeople, seek out company case studies, and ask companies to send us their customer references. But not anymore. Today, we trust friends, family, colleagues, and look to third-party review sites like Yelp, G2Crowd, and Glassdoor to help us choose the businesses we patronize, the software we buy, and even the places we work.Consumers are also becoming more impatient, more demanding, and more indepen-dent.Consumers don’t trust businesses anymore5The Hard Truth About Acquisition Costs 1In a survey of 1,000 consumers in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Singapore, we found that 82% rated an immediate response as “important” or “very important” when they were looking to buy from a company, speak with a salesperson, or ask a question about a product or service. That number rises to 90% when looking for customer service support.But what does “immediate” mean? Over half (59%) of buyers expect a response within 30 minutes when they want to learn more about a business’ product or service. That number rises to 72% when they’re looking for customer support and 75% when they want to speak with a salesperson.Modern consumers are also unafraid to tell the world what they think. Nearly half (49%) reported sharing an experience they had with a company on social media, good or bad. While buyers are fairly even split between being more likely to share a good experience (49%) vs. a bad one (51%), every customer interaction you have is an opportunity to generate buzz -- or risk public shaming.The hard truth is that your customers need you a lot less than they used to. They learn from friends, not salespeople. They trust other customers, not marketers. They’d rather help themselves than call you.Consumers don’t trust businesses anymore6The Hard Truth About Acquisition Costs 2The erosion of consumer trust is a difficult issue for companies to grapple with on its own. But as if that wasn’t enough, the internet, which has always fundamentally trans-formed the traditional go-to-market strategy, is moving the goalposts again.Let’s break this down into two functions: Marketing and sales.We’ve taught inbound marketing to tens of thousands of companies and built soft-ware to help them execute it. Inbound marketing accelerated business growth through a repeatable formula: Create a website, create search-optimized content that points to gated content, then use prospects’ contact information to nurture them to a point of purchase.This still works — but the market is experiencing four trends that, combined, have made it harder for growing businesses to compete with long-established, better-re-sourced companies.Trend 1: Google is taking back its own real estateMuch of modern marketing is dependent on getting found online. Without the mul-timillion-dollar brand awareness and advertising budgets of consumer goods titans, the best way a growing business can compete is creating content specific to their niche and optimizing it for search.Google, the arbiter of online content discoverability, has made significant changes in the last few years that make it harder for marketers to run this model at scale without a financial investment.First, through featured snippets and “People Also Ask” boxes, Google is reclaiming its own traffic.A featured snippet is a snippet of text that Google serves on the search engine results page (SERP). You’ve likely been served a featured snippet when you were searching for a definition, or something that involved a step-by-step explanation.Marketing is getting more expensiveAcquisiti。