Businesses often straddle two distinct landscapes: Business-to-Business (B2B) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C). 

While both realms share common goals of attracting, engaging, and retaining customers, the nuances of each environment require unique strategies to reach and resonate with their respective audiences effectively. There are intricacies of marketing in both B2B and B2C environments and distinct strategies for achieving success in each.

The Differences Between B2B and B2C Marketing

Before diving into specific strategies, it's essential to understand the fundamental differences between B2B and B2C marketing. While both involve selling products or services, the target audience and purchase decision-making process vary significantly between the two.

B2B marketing targets businesses, organizations, or institutions that have people making purchase decisions on behalf of their company.
These procurements often involve larger budgets, longer sales cycles, and a swath of opinions about spending and needs from a committee of people. The bigger the organization, the bigger the committee, and the slower things move. Focus on building relationships at all levels of the decision-making tree, often working your way up from the bottom gatekeeper by providing value-added solutions or bust through barriers with unexpected tactics that slip past the sentries.

B2C marketing targets end users and focus on eliminating an inconvenience or elevating the person’s status. B2C ranges from simple transactional sales to impulse buys to more complex sales for larger purchases. 

Identity branding is leveraged most in B2C sales to capture a premium price. In the absence of delivering status as the primary driver, businesses need to offer exceptional convenience to capture a premium price. The use of authentic brand storytelling to evoke emotions helps elicit a relational-oriented buying experience. If you don’t want to be commoditized as a brand, don’t talk about transactional stuff. Talk relationally instead.  

Strategies for B2B Marketing Success

Understand Your Buyer

In B2B marketing, understanding your buyer matters far more than understanding personas or archetypes. Real, actionable intel about your buyer gives you a valuable competitive edge. Conduct research, observing and interpreting their behavior. Create a detailed dossier to map out their underlying needs, preferences, and pain points to formulate a plan for optimal persuasion. 

Develop Relevant Content

In B2B marketing, return on investment (ROI) is king. This is known as dollarization. Create valuable, informative content that addresses the specific pain points, challenges, and objectives. When you can draw a direct line to the cost to the bottom line through money, diminished productivity and efficiency, and wasted time, you get their attention.

Format it in a way that expresses the return on their investment in money, energy, and time, and the cost and risk of not choosing your option. 

Leverage Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

ABM is a targeted approach to B2B marketing that focuses on consistently engaging key accounts or high-value prospects with personalized messaging and content. 

You have to have the mental and financial durability to endure the length of their purchase cycle for your goods. Not only does there need to be a need, but often their current supplier also has to mess up. Be patient and distinct.  

Identify your ideal customers, do your research on them, and custom-tailor your marketing efforts to their specific needs and preferences. Nurture relationships through unexpected, personalized communication that gets past the gatekeeper.

Be a Thoughtful Leader

Establishing yourself as a divergent, thoughtful leader in your industry.  If you don’t have anything to differentiate your product, look to how you can differentiate your service in a way that your competitors would think you insane. You want to be seen as the trusted authority for their industry by providing actual value, not just table stakes. 

Philosophize on industry challenges, take a stand against injustices causing your prospects pain, and make enlightened, unique interpretations of trends and best practices. You are looking for common misunderstandings and smarter strategies, tactics, and plans that outperform the generic platitudes everyone believes to be true. 

Contribute to articles, speaking engagements, podcasts, and industry publications to share your delicious perspective and build credibility with your ideal prospects.

Utilize Social Media Strategically

LinkedIn, YouTube, X, Meta, and even TikTok are powerful platforms for various B2B marketing. Certainly show up where your audience is looking for news, trends, and information about their industry, but don’t forget that your audience are simply people looking for the pulse of the market, entertainment, and distraction, too.  

Don’t just showcase your products or services, either. Create compelling content that has them considering all aspects of their solution and how you may be able to improve it in some manner. 

Contribute to the conversation, give encouragement and praise, but don’t be afraid to entertain. Instead of telling a story about your thing, become the story to draw people in to bond with them. 

Deliver a Quick Win 

People are looking for fast, easy, and safe ways to test the choice to work with you. What better way to give them a glimpse of your superior solution than to help them realize a quick win? 

In B2B, you’re dealing with smart, motivated people who are looking to tick all the boxes while demonstrating their worth as an independent thinker for the organization. 

If the problem you solve is complex, show them how you tick all the boxes and then get even more value than what fell inside the boxes. When you show them how to overdeliver for their business and look good doing it, you help them elevate their status within the organization.  

For less complex and easy-to-understand solutions, give them the opportunity to experience your product or service firsthand. Offer free trials, demos, and consultations to help them discover you are the right decision. This is an empathetic way to demonstrate your competence and allow them to reconcile the decision to engage with you. When you pass this test, it’s your sale to win or lose. 

Strategies for B2C Marketing Success

Understand Your Buyer

In B2C marketing, understanding buying mindsets matters more than understanding buyer personas or archetypes. While economies and cultures change around the world, psychology and biology do not. 

Your prospective buyer will only look at your product or service transactionally or relationally. You may feel relational about the vehicle you buy, but my dad doesn’t. So, people see clothes as a necessary evil while others feel that they represent their identity. 

The best brands have done an impeccable job of making people feel relationally predisposed to what they are selling. The more you tap into elevating the buyer's identity or relieving their immediate pain, the more money you can charge. How much you get is directly proportionate to how trusted you are in your market. 

In general, people operating with a transactional mindset are often living in survival mode. This has nothing to do with how much money they have. It has to do with whether or not they feel free and safe to spend their three great resources (money, energy, and time). 

If you want to sell a transactional-minded person at a relational premium price, you need to start by meeting them where they are currently, in survival mode. Gently take them by the hand and change their beliefs about how to define value. 

Until you help a person make a new choice about what they believe, they will not change their transactional behavior about what you sell. And like zombies, not all of them can be cured. 

Focus on Storytelling

Terrible ads are about you and your company. Spouting off predictable platitudes is a surefire way to remain invisible. Great ads are about your buyer and their life. 

Stories of struggle, sacrifice, and transformation. Stories that make you laugh, cry, or get angry. Stories that tug relentlessly at the unpredictable. Stories of mystery and partial reveals. Stories that make them grapple with the unknown. Stories that satisfactorily reconcile by the end. 

People love great stories. If your brand is the one telling great stories, you’re going to get remembered. When your brand triggers at the moment they need what you sell, they call you. 

Great ads are stories – little tiny sitcoms when done right. With story arcs, character arcs, and even a theme song. While most advertising is written to sound like an ad, careful not to offend anyone, you need to run ads written to persuade. Persuasive ads are certain to offend someone. Not to worry though, because you can’t go on an adventure without facing a bit of trouble. 

Be brave. Be adventurous. The alternative is to be boring. 

And for those brands that have been playing the game well before the trigger point but the prospect is still undecided, your brand will aid in their recall that you are now their brand of choice.  However, if you’re just meeting your prospective buyer for the first time at the zero moment of truth, you’re just another number on the roulette table at Casino Google. 

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Align Visual Content to Your Words

I find visual content is usually pretty weird in B2C marketing. It’s usually done before a strategy has been conceived or a story has been crafted. This leaves a lot of brands with inauthentic logos, icons, colors, and even shapes, phonemes, and mascots. 

In truth, until you have clarity on where you hope to take your business and how you will get there, think of your name, logo, and colors as placeholders. 

Think of it this way. Would you rather draw a bunch of pictures and tell a fictional story about them, or would you prefer to tell your story about your values, beliefs, and intentions and then draw the pictures and name the brand that you actually stand for and stand against? 

Both ways work. One just works infinitely better than the other and deepens the bond between your brand and your culture. 

“The biggest brands create a movement.” 

Whether you do pictures, videos, colors, logos, or fonts, you’re always better off figuring out your strategy first. Your strategy will inform your story (editorially and visually). Your strategy and story will inform your communication channels. Never the other way around.

The Rise of User-Generated Content

When you say you’re awesome, it comes across contrived. When a third, unbiased party says you’re awesome, it just feels true, doesn’t it? 

User-generated content (UGC) is earned media. Brand building that holds the highest value to others because it didn’t come directly from you. It’s word-of-mouth advertising at its best.  

Assume every single person who interfaces with your brand – buyer or not – is an influencer. When you create the natural opportunity for them to share positive, authentic experiences, feelings, stories, and visuals of your products and services, you get woven into their fabric of influence. The more interesting the story, the more likely you become legendary. 

“Everyone is an influencer.”

Don’t be afraid of the haters. Showcase UGC in your marketing campaign for authentic appeal. 

Commit to One Big Thing 

If you try to get known for many things, you’ll be remembered for nothing. Being famous for a single, big idea is far more effective than trying to be all things to all people. 

This is super counterintuitive to companies that have multiple business lines, but in the world of communication, no one cares who you are or what you do. Sorry 🇨🇦. They care about what pain you relieve or value you have proven to bring to people like them. 

Finding your one big thing is the most essential aspect of retention and recall, regardless of what you sell.

“When you try to speak to everyone, you resonate with no one.”

Cross-Promote Your Products and Services

What opportunities do you have to cross-promote your B2B and B2C products and services? Who can you promote that would be thrilled to promote you back? What unrelated services could put a company in a position to identify consistent opportunity for your products and services?

For example, a pest control company could find opportunities for door companies to repair weatherstripping. Could a weatherstripping sale lead to a larger opportunity down the road?

Align All Channels With Your Brand Story

Align your brand message across all channels, whether you’re B2B or B2C. While the content may vary, maintaining a cohesive brand identity helps reinforce your brand message. 

This makes it easier for people to figure out that it’s your brand across multiple touchpoints. 

Remember Pavlov’s Dog

Whether you sell B2C or B2B, your objective is to make the sale. That means talking to the dog about what interests the dog in the language of the dog. 

In short, start with your strategy. 

• Who are you talking to? 
• What motivates them?
• How do they wish to be treated?
• Where will you find them lurking? 

When you know why they should care, you can create an emotionally charged message that reaches them consistently for as long as their purchase cycle lasts. 

Make them feel good about your meat paste (your brand) and then ring a bell (your brandable chunks™). Do this over and over until they’re ready to buy. 

Like Soylent Green Crackers, all buyers are made of people, B2B or B2C. You just need to figure out what delicious spread goes best with them. 

No, go ring that bell.  

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Ready to elevate your B2B or B2C strategy? Connect with me, Wizard Ryan Chute, and discover how innovative leadership, disruptive marketing, and a culture-centered approach can drive exponential growth. Let’s turn your challenges into opportunities and your vision into results. Schedule your consultation today.