B2B and B2C Marketing: A Deeper Dive

Part 2 of Marketing Paradigm Exploration

In our last post, we met Lucy, an entrepreneurial product creator who transformed a simple bicycle helmet into a global fashion icon.

Check out the previous post for the story of how she managed content as she rode the explosive growth.

We’ve also previously discussed the high-level differences between B2B and B2C marketing paradigms.

In Lucy’s case, she transformed from a primary B2C business to a primarily B2B business over the course of the business growth.

In this article, we’re going to walk through how the B2C and B2B marketing paradigms would differ as Lucy’s company grew.

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Challenges and Opportunities

Before we dive into some of the differences in approaches between B2B and B2C marketing, I wanted to point out that the challenges and opportunities for each of these areas are different.

Just because you’ve built or run a solid B2C marketing team doesn’t mean that the same processes can be converted over to B2B for enterprise sales.

Photo by LinkedIn Sales Solutions on Unsplash

• B2C: Customer Market Size vs Keeping Pace with Consumer Trends

  • Challenges:

    • Fostering customer loyalty in an era of abundant choices

    • Much easier for a customer to switch products

    • Staying updated with rapidly evolving consumer trends

  • Opportunities:

    • Creating memorable brand experiences and delivering exceptional customer service for organic growth

    • Much larger customer base

    • High fidelity data for insights and marketing strategies allow fast strategy adaptation

• B2B: Limited Market vs Stickiness

  • Challenges:

    • Finding high-quality leads in an industry landscape

    • Buying process is much slower

    • Calculating specialty pricing competitively is hard

  • Opportunities:

    • Lasting relationships that result in repeat business

    • Harder for customers to switch products

    • Much larger average order size

A summary of the common challenges and opportunities is shown below:

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Now that we’ve covered some of the challenges and opportunities regarding B2B vs B2C marketing, you may know which paradigm you’re more interested in pursuing—some people do great with the relationship-driven sales cycle of B2B while others prefer to highly metric-driven B2C marketing world.

Before you decide which is more up you or your business’ alley, let's go more in depth on two more key areas in marketing:

• Segmentation and Targeting

• Content Strategy

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Segmentation and Targeting

• B2B: Niche Markets and Personalization

  In B2B marketing, the core goal is identifying and targeting niche markets. For example, a strong, trusting relationship between a steel buyer and foundry is worth far more than 3 weak relationships when a salesman tries to sell a new steel product.

  Businesses must understand the specific needs of their clients and personalize their marketing efforts accordingly. It's all about crafting tailored messages that resonate with decision-makers in other organizations.

  Rote batch and blast campaigns¹ are not going to build trust from your intended audience.

  The goal should be demonstrating expertise, trustworthiness, and the ability to drive outcomes that the buyer struggles to do on their own.

• B2C: Mass Appeal and Demographic Targeting

  Conversely, B2C marketing often employs a broader demographic-based approach. (read: it’s a numbers game)

  Brands aim to appeal to a wide range of consumers by targeting demographics (such as age, gender, and interests) and psychographics (such as dog-lover, loves vacations, indecisive).

  The goal is to create products and campaigns with mass appeal within the goal market, tapping into common emotions and desires.²

Now that we understand how marketers break down the potential markets into useful segments content strategy, lets see where the tone and style of communication differ significantly between B2B and B2C marketing.

Content Strategy

• B2B: Educational and Thought Leadership

  B2B content marketing revolves around educating and showcasing competence. B2B sales don’t happen without trust, so content is aimed towards developing it.

  Businesses create whitepapers, webinars, and in-depth articles to showcase their expertise. They aim to position themselves as industry authorities, fostering trust among potential clients.³

  Content often provides useful frameworks for thinking about and solving complex business problems. B2B businesses hope that their free samples will bring interested buyers for further implementation work.

• B2C: Entertainment and Emotional Connection

  In the world of B2C, content takes on a different form.

  Brands strive to entertain and forge emotional connections with consumers. The core difference here is that the marketing team wants to tie positive emotional connection to a product rather than just focusing on trustworthiness or competence.

  For example, dinosaur eggs oatmeal (where sugar eggs ‘hatch’ baby dinosaurs) is not designed to drive feelings of trustworthiness to parents or children.

  It’s designed to drive feelings of curiosity, wonderment, and excitement. It worked on me as a kid and I still feel fondness when I think of the product.

  

  Additionally, storytelling is key in B2C marketing, and content often leans towards being visual, engaging, and shareable.

  It's about creating experiences that resonate with consumers on a personal level.

  The goal is to drive consumers to take action, whether it's making a purchase or sharing content with friends to further improve brand equity.

Conclusion

As we close this section of B2B and B2C marketing exploration, it's evident that while the two paradigms differ significantly, they share common threads of customer-centricity. Without a satisfied customer, both B2B and B2C marketing teams are up a creek without a paddle.

Filling out the digram from above with our new discussion, we can see that there are many easy ways to slip up if the wrong paradigm is chosen.

“When you stop growing you start dying”—William S. Burroughs

Any sufficiently competent company that starts selling B2C will eventually develop a B2B arm as well. Assuming that the new market is “low hanging fruit” is a dangerous assumption.

I hope our walkthrough of the differences between B2C and B2B marketing shows that a well-considered plan is a requirement for breaking from one paradigm into the other.

1. They don’t really work at enterprise scale for B2C either

2. This has been the traditional approach. However, with the rise of better analytics, the goal for mature B2C marketing teams should be B2B-like personalization at scale

3. For example, I am doing this through the newsletter. By explaining MarTech concepts to a general audience, I’m proving that I’m capable of providing value for a potential client’s marketing problem