Blog»The Correlation Business Model of B2B That Can Incorporate From B2C
Last updated on: January 16, 2021
B2B and B2C are worlds apart. And so are their marketing approaches. One of the key challenges that B2B marketers face is to create a buzz, or virality around their technical enterprise solutions.
But as the world of B2B marketing is evolving rapidly, it is necessary to think out-of-the-box and use unconventional approaches to get noticed.
In fact, B2B marketing can take a leaf out of B2C marketing to try a trick or two that can break the monotony and improve their outcomes. Here are a few things where B2B marketing can take inspiration from B2C:
Personalization
While B2B marketing uses personalization to a fair degree, B2C has truly mastered the art and science. With greater personalization comes the ability to serve the right type of content and make the customer journey more pleasant, less intrusive, and highly outcome-oriented.
But how does content personalization work in B2B? There are many ways of implementing this:
- Personalized by segment: By industry vertical or segment criteria
- Persona specific: personalized for specific buyer types
- Stage-specific: customized for a stage of the buying process
- Account specific: personalized for a prospect organization
- Lead specific – personalized for an individual lead
An organization can use the above approaches in tandem or use a single approach that works best for them. By personalizing your marketing, your efforts will be made in the right direction. Creating content specifically also means your marketing spend goes a long way.
Omnichannel marketing
Another benefit of personalization is that it opens up all available channels to meet the customer on a device or channel he/she prefers.
An omnichannel marketing strategy is more comprehensive where the important thing is to be present everywhere in the consumer experience.
A recent DMA Response Rate Report shows that 65% of marketers use two or more media channels in their campaigns, where 44% of marketers use three or more.
Like B2C, B2B marketers can make omnichannel an inherent part of their design. So when you are planning a campaign, bake that idea right at the beginning.
Using an omnichannel approach means the ROI and strategy are calculated from the beginning so that you can measure the impact. For instance, most B2B companies have mastered the art of using social media for engagement and traffic generation.
Audience centricity
The evolution of demand generation, right from lead gen to named accounts to combining the two(demand units) is a recognition of the fact that you need to understand your audience at a personal level.
What are B2B audiences made up of? Primarily of leads and accounts. In an audience-centric approach, companies zoom in and get really personal to gain insights and leverage this information to tailor their marketing.
Just as effective B2C campaigns don’t spam you with every possible product or item, customer-centric B2B marketing uses the right data to identify what products or services are most relevant for their customers. This data could be age/social demographic related or even personal beliefs and interests.
The advantage of the audience-centric model is that it narrows the field significantly and makes B2B more targeted results.
For instance, if you use automation or data to target more specific, relevant audiences on Linkedin, you will certainly see a rise in your click-through rates and ultimately conversion.
Influencer marketing
One area where B2C does significantly better than B2B is influencer marketing. It is something that should be a part of every B2B brand’s earned media strategy in combination with other link building and PR tasks. Influencer marketing also has a great impact on SEO. This is because links continue to reign as an important ranking factor in search engines.
A crucial tip here is to look beyond social media. Of course, social media is a gold mine when it comes to finding influencers, particularly on Linkedin and Twitter. Yet, remember to look beyond social media to find authorities in various domains ranging from authors, speakers, presenters, podcasters and researchers. You will be surprised to find the number of experts who are not on social channels.
With influencer marketing, don’t expect results instantly. Build relationships that last. Observe trends and predictions and work on creating a bond incrementally.
Humanise your content
One key learning from B2C is also how clever, personal, witty and human the overall copy is. Start creating content for humans instead of an imaginary potential buyer.
By this, it means to cut out unnecessary verbiage and jargon and make your content as appealing and easy-to-understand as possible.
In technical industries particularly, it is easy to write inaccessible copy and assume that all your audience is jargon-savvy. Your landing pages, emailers and gated content should not be littered with jargon phrases and acronyms.
An easy way of resolving this challenge is to write your content for search intent and not just keywords. And this means understanding why someone is searching for a particular term and making sure your content addresses the issues.
Next, make an emotional appeal and not just a logical one. What might your prospects want to learn from a page? What are their pain points and goals and how can you empathise with these?
Build credibility by including the human element on your website. Be it your leadership pages or personalized blogs that don’t just talk about your products and services, but offer personal insights and experiences.
Conclusion
B2B marketing doesn’t have to be boring, impersonal or serious. You can inject elements of fun, get inspired by some great B2C campaigns and see where the rules of B2C marketing can be applied creatively to pump new blood in your campaigns. Ultimately, whether it is B2B or B2C you are selling to people and individuals who respond to brands that strike a chord and that speak to them.
Blue Shark Solution effortlessly brings these new-age strategies to practice, benefiting clients to scale up their bottom line.
