There is a considerable gap between the customer acquisition approaches of B2B and B2C marketers with B2B seemingly lagging behind, according to research from the DMA and The Media Octopus.
According to the report, B2B marketers only employ, on average, six channels for customer acquisition, the most popular being email (79 per cent), website (73 per cent) and face-to-face (65 per cent).
Less popular forms of acquisition included social media (55 per cent), direct mail (46 per cent) and telemarketing (41 per cent).
In contrast, B2C marketers use up to 15 different channels for customer acquisition and are much more likely to use paid social media (63 per cent compared to 34 per cent of B2B marketers).
Other notable differences included acquisition versus retention costs, with 61 per cent of B2B budgets spent on customer acquisition compared to 51 per cent of B2C.
However, consumer marketers spend 19 per cent of their budget on customer retention, compared to only nine per cent of B2B marketers.
B2B respondents cited a limited budget as their main challenge in regards to customer acquisition, 43 per cent mentioning it as a stumbling block compared to 35 per cent of B2C marketers.
