As a marketing consultant, I work on customer accounts and make sure that your marketing works (ie earn money for business). In order to measure the marketing success, I particularly like two benchmarks: the costs per lead benchmark (CPL) and the customer acquisition costs benchmark (CAC).
These benchmarks are helpful for all Knowing in business, but particularly important for sales and marketing teams.
I mainly work in the B2B room, and the B2B costs per lead benchmark are one of the most valuable metrics. B2B sales cycles can take a long time and it can be difficult to determine the exact customer acquisition costs, but you have to accept these numbers as close as possible.
In order to refine your marketing strategy in order to reduce the costs for the acquisition of leads and customers, you will find some helpful CPL and CAC -Benchmarks as well as findings from a recently carried out hubspot survey among hundreds of marketers. I wanted to see what the numbers about CPL and CAC tell us together with the behaviors of marketers in 2025.
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The most effective strategies for reducing the CAC
HubSpot State of Marketing surveys have previously proven that CAC varies between companies and industries.
What reduces customer acquisition costs depends heavily on your industry, product or service, your customers and your preferred buyer trip. The good news is that you can find data with the costs per lead benchmarks according to the industry. This should help you see how your website works.
I wanted to find some data to see what CAC could reduce. I used Drift Kings Media’s State of Marketing Survey To understand what marketers do in 2025 and beyond. Surely to say that every marketing that attracts the attention of the masses moves the needle for the business.
Here is what I found:
- User-generated content (UGC) is chosen as a top marketing strategy for 2025.
- If you use UGC in marketing, consider the form of the media your audience is the most busy. For example, report marketer short form videos As a high ROI.
- Think of your audience. Both B2B and B2C companies are mainly aimed at millennials.
- Authenticity seems to lead the charges for the majority of the marketers. 92%of the surveyed marketers plan to maintain more in the brand awareness or to invest in them. I would argue that branding and authenticity go hand in hand with video.
Marketing channels with the highest and lowest CAC
It is another way to reduce the costs for the acquisition of customers to consider the channels they use and how much these channels cost.
Marketing channels with the lowest CAC
Accordingly First side of the saltOrganic marketing channels with the lowest CAC include e -mail marketing and public speaking for B2B as well as social media marketing and webinars for B2C.
For paid channels, the lowest CAC channels are:
- Direct advertising and PPC/SEM for B2B.
- Facebook ads and PPC/SEM for B2C.
When measuring your CAC, look at your sales cycle and your time to close leads.
I used to work in a B2B marketing agency, and every year we would carry out a cheap direct post campaign. However, the campaign results have often not been reported for years. However, the customers we got were excellent! Taking it is that you have to compensate for this with efficiency.
Marketing channels with the highest CAC
The above tables also show us the highest CAC of channels for B2B and B2C.
I wanted to examine the marketing people who carry out in 2025. It can be assumed that these channels should lower the CAC.
Let’s take a look at social media in 2024. With the exception of LinkedIn, both B2B and B2C companies prioritize the same social media platforms. The favorite is Facebook, followed by Instagram (only for B2B), YouTube and Tiktok. B2C brands favored LinkedIn last what makes sense.
Pro tip: It may be that channels with the highest CAC support channels with a lower CAC. If you do a lot of marketing, you should consider the media mix modeling to determine how channels such as a higher CAC channel support others.
An example from the article by Media Mix modeling that I wrote shows perfectly what I mean: As shown above, radio ads have a high CAC for B2B. However, a marketer found that radio ads increased the clicks and the commitment on social media by 25%. Marketing channels have to play all different roles and should be measured individually and together.
The most effective strategies for reducing the CPL
A effective way to lower the CPL is marketing automation. Use of AI tools like Drift Kings Medias AI, breezeincreased Inbound leads by 99%. If you can increase the quality ads with minimal effort – with AI -, CPL decreases.
Kyle DenhoffSenior Director of Marketing from HubSpot successfully lowered the costs per lead with creator partners. Denhoff says: “Creator has become one of our top growth drivers in less than three years. Some long-term creative partnerships reduce our costs per lead by 30-40% compared to advertisements for META and Google. We now have over 100 creator partners and you drive around 50% of our media network range and demand. “
When it comes to CPL, you want to spend less money per lead. But what does a good CPL look like? Well, that depends on industries and channels, but here is a look at CPL for different channels Visitor queue.
If you ask yourself what a good CPL is, you can refer to the mean values ​​shown in the following table.
Marketing channels with the highest and lowest quality of leads
Not every tour is a good lead – you do not all have the need or the desire to buy a product or service from your company. To ensure that you reach your target group, the marketers of the marketers are used here to attract the highest quality leads.
Marketing channels that lead to the highest quality of leads
Accordingly First page sageThe marketing channels that lead to the highest ROI (and therefore have accepted the highest quality of the leads) include:
- Public speaking.
- Guide and SEO.
- Webinars.
- E -mail marketing.
- Podcasts.
The first page Sage presents this information in a table with the time up to results.
Against this background, I would like to fall back on what I used to say about the direct employment campaign. The highest ROI -LEAD generation channels are:
- Mostly to carry out medium to very difficult.
- Expensive.
- Take your time.
Our direct post campaign took years to have it paid out, but we received quality processes. However, it was at least low and cheap.
The truth is that it is not easy to generate high -quality leads for your company and it will take time.
Pro tip: Make these channels as efficient as possible so that you can get the best out of you. For example, AI can help to generate blogs from video transcripts and vice versa when writing content. Use the right software (Marketing hubfor example) with integrated AI to optimize processes. The more optimal you work, the greater the chances that you will reconcile your CPL with the costs per lead benchmark.
Josh Ames Is a lifting spot and GTM manager at Phocas softwareAnd he uses Drift Kings Medias AI to carry out more tests.
AMES says: “Drift Kings Media’s data enrichment function quickly improved our data quality, which led to more effective campaigns and better orientation. 92% of companies in our CRM had at least one new enrichment property that was populated by the new function. With AI you can pass from A/B tests to A to A test and quickly find out which ads or contributions are most likely to be best suited with your audience. “
Marketing channels that lead to the lowest quality of leads
Marketing is bad marketing, marketing is bad. You will probably not reach your audience in a way that is well received or use marketing channels that your audience does not use.
For example, Drift Kings Medias Consumer Trends Report It was found that Millennial’s number one for the product discovery of social media is. In view of the fact that marketers aim in B2B and B2C companies on millennials, a social media presence is a must!
Do you remember what I said earlier? The three most important social media channels of marketers are:
- B2B: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn.
- B2C: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube.
Marketing channels with the lowest and highest CPL
What is a good CPL? Similar to CAC, there is another way to reduce the costs of generating leads to search for channels with the lowest costs.
Marketing channels with the lowest CPL
Visitor queue recorded Data CPL to channel. Using the cost average, the lowest CPL channels were included:
- SEO ($ 31).
- E -mail marketing ($ 53).
- Webinars ($ 72).
It is important that you explore your industry to determine what a low CPL is returning for you. The data found by Visitor Wartenchlangen, conflict with the first page, in which SEO is listed as the third mostly channel with medium to high time for results.
There is no uniform unit in metrics, and even companies in the same category (B2B or B2C) have to dig into their niche data accordingly. For example, the B2B -Saas costs per lead benchmark can generally differentiate between B2B.
Marketing channels with the highest costs per lead
Stay on the visitor queue Data about CPL to ChannelThey found the channels with the highest costs per lead, including:
- Trade shows ($ 811).
- PPC ($ 181).
- Content creation (92 US dollars).
CPL and CAC are essential parts of the puzzle
Now that you know which strategies and channels are most effective to lower CAC and CPL, you can confidently refine your marketing strategy to put on new customers and leads and save money at the same time.
While I was happy to pursue CPL and CAC, I think about the overall picture of how the marketing channels influence each other (modeling media mix) and the time to complete a deal is essential. As I learned by putting together this article: the channels with the lowest CPL that bring the highest quality leads are also the channels that last the longest results to see results.
Note from the publisher: This post was originally published in July 2022 and updated for completeness.