Let’s get to an objective question first. Between B2B and B2C marketing, which do you think is the tougher? What do you think, which one is more difficult - convincing a customer or convincing the executive of a company to buy a product?Well, this question is best framed to manufacture an argument between B2B and B2C marketers. But nevertheless, it’s safe to say that both are, in their own leagues. We are B2B marketers and we sell a product that’s central to B2C marketing but we learnt quite a bit about the latter from problems our customers face.
Apart from the target audience profile (individual small spending consumers in B2C and big spending organizations in B2B), fundamentally, B2B marketing differs from B2C in the sense that it sales heavy, though sales and marketing are both important tracks. On the other end, B2C is marketing heavy owing to the simple fact that the audience volume is much higher. Eventually, B2C marketing is all about reaching each individual person in your target group, making them aware of your market presence, engaging them, convincing them of your product and finally hoping they make a purchase with you. You don’t make a lot of bucks on each purchase but the number of invoices is fairly large. This means B2C marketers are often tight on two things: time and coherence. B2B is a different ball game. It’s more like academics. Sales heavy accompanied by quite a bit of research and analysis docs as the main marketing weapon. The marketing channels are different which is why they don’t usually prefer channels for masses like ads on television. Basically, the target audience is thinner, but it’s all about reaching them and then having a dialogue with them. Convincing could be a little harder but obviously, big bucks on each closure.
B2C marketing involves dealing with a lot of end consumers and digitally which means Marketing technologies are indispensable and so are other allied tools. Cloud marketing itself is a package of several different software solutions, like Adobe Marketing Cloud with six, and and yet they are just only a part of your entire marketing stack. And then you have to have big data, loyalty programs and most importantly Customer Identity Management Platform without which all these are pointless. In his brilliant marketing technology landscape analysis at the beginning of 2015, Scott Brinker found there were 1876 marketing tech vendors across 43 categories and that the number of companies had doubled between 2014 and 2015. Brinker is still working on the 2016 edition.
Digital marketing has created a paradoxical situation for marketers. Because of the Web economy regime, businesses are expected to deliver more meaningful and more human experiences to customers but still do all this digitally using automation tech and databases filled with just attributes.
Why’s that? Because like the 1875 competitors each marketing tech vendor had in 2015 (yes they are not all directly competing but let’s assume they are), your business too would be grappling with a ton of other competitors who are probably using the same kind of tech to power their marketing as you are. Your marketing campaigns could be different but your end product or service could be similar which means that the customer experience is the most prominent differentiating factor. There are a lot of similar people in this world but we become friends with someone only when an emotional connect is formed. In today’s digital world, emotion and humanness is your trump card. Simultaneously, it’ll not just help you make a sale but also establish a relationship, make your customer loyal to you, probably propel them to do word of mouth marketing for you and many other things.
But tech heavy marketing can get really hazy, isn’t it? The biggest roadblock all businesses are now facing is that of data silos. You’ve got like a million tools you using already and then a new one comes out every quarter. It’s likely you’ll get one of those two but data just doesn’t flow so freely. Data is not a fluid. On the contrary, it’s all solid. To beat the blues, we’ve got a few tips B2C marketers can use that’s refined straight from the problems we have directly noticed B2C businesses facing.
Redraw your marketing stack
Say you’ve got a new loyalty tool. Don’t just start using it but redraw your entire marketing stack along with other legacy softwares that could play a part and define the goals you want each of them to achieve and chalk out how each of them can complement each other. Remember that your marketing stack must be perfect for your strategy to work out. Don’t assign similar goals to two different tools.
Begin with a Customer Identity Management platform
The first step in digital marketing is to setup a database of prospective customers you can target. But don’t make the mistake of scouring for email addresses off the internet and just creating a simple database on your local server. Establish your presence in the market and get customers to sign up on your website. Get yourself a Customer Identity Management platform simply because it’s not just a email address and password storing repository. It’s much more than that. It can potentially be the hub of your marketing strategy which holds the key to all your data problems. It can be potentially be the data supplier to all the other components in the stack.
Centralize your data
This tip is closer to the one above but still important. Like we said earlier, data silos is one of the biggest hurdles in automated marketing. Components of your stack, say your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, your loyalty program tool, your ad platform or whatever else, all need and hold data. They are small individual reservoirs which only store data and do a bit of work but to produce power, you need a larger reservoir. Not just that all of these tools need data to be fed into them. None of them can extract customer data. At the same time, you need a central hub holding your data and which can also integrate seamlessly with other components of the stack to transfer data and erase silos. Again, a Customer Identity Management platform can perform this function by being your data reservoir.
Establish an emotional connect and personalize
Automation lacks emotion. Precisely the point. People are increasingly looking for an emotional connect to invest their time and money in purchasing and using your product. Unlike earlier, the idea of a purchase is being obliterated. There are no purchases, there are only investments. Investments of time, money, brains etc etc. Which is also why the customer values the experience provided by a business. The question is no longer “Why should I buy your product?” It is now, “Why should I spend my time buying and using your product?” People invest when they feel the emotional urge. There’s no fixed manual on how to create an emotional urge but it’s just up to from here. At the same time, ensure your interactions are personalized. A “Dear Customer” is next to useless. Address them, identify their problems and offer solutions.
Lay your cards on the table
Convention is that because B2B purchase values are big, only executives research and take opinion before closing a deal. Reality closing a simple B2C purchase is as difficult before consumers are better informed, are doing more research and reading more reviews on their smartphones and closely scrutinizing the competition before finally purchasing, even if it’s a low cost tablet. And then they also scrutinize the post-purchase experience so it is essential you don’t ruin it and force them to write a really bad review that can haunt you forever. Lay your cards on the table and tell them everything there is to tell. There’s no vendor lock-in in B2C so it’s really important you do this.
Focus on existing customers
Customers are volatile and prone to getting irritated. Don’t piss them off. Don’t spend all your energies on acquiring new customers. After a point, divide your focus between existing customers and acquiring new customers. Majority revenue is generated from existing customers so it’s not enough to devote just a loyalty program tool but a lot of retention strategy as well. This is not really a new thing to say but businesses tend to ignore this in a bid to expand their customer base.
At the end of the day, modern day marketing is all about data. Only data can help you beat the paradox but you’ve got to make data flow freely. Change its state.