Business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing share a lot of things in common – at least on the surface. Both involve the development of buyer personas, data driven ROI and a harmonious alignment of your sales and marketing teams. Given the right data and the set up, you develop a go-to-market plan and hit the ground running. When you really get down to it, however, B2B and B2C sales strategies diverge on some major variables that really shake up the game and your content marketing strategy needs to be tailored accordingly.
Key differences to shaping a good B2B strategy
- Market size: B2B markets are always a fraction of the size of B2C markets. They’re small, vertical and often niche.
- Relevant Data: Because of the nature of the two markets, the type of data that’s relevant to your team is considerably different. B2C marketing teams are interested in things like age, race, income, hobbies and interests. B2B marketing revolves more around job titles, company scale and budget size.
- Decision Makers: B2C sales generally involve the decision of a single buyer. You usually only have one person to convince. B2B sales, on the other hand, involve the input of a team including anyone from managers and tech staff to stakeholders and executives.
- Purchasing Process: Because of the scale of purchases and the impact of decisions, the B2B sales cycle is much longer and more involved. Whereas the jump from lead to sale can be instantaneous in B2C, B2B sales can take months to years.
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Do Your Research
Given the size of your market, your campaign needs to be precisely targeted and the only way to accomplish that is to obtain as much information as possible about your niche. Analytics are your new best friend. You should have hard numbers regarding budgeting and ROI for the companies you seek to convert. It’s important to develop priorities and identify key decision makers within an organization.
Get Technical
B2B sales entail larger risks than B2C. Purchases are much less emotional and involve a lot more input from multiple decisions makers. What that means for your marketing campaign is that you shouldn’t shy away from the technical in order to make a strong rational case for your product. Things like whitepaper, e-books and datasheets are going to take the place of priorities like social media or extensive advertising.
Set Conversion Goals
Not every piece of content you produce is going to be a call-to-action. The B2B purchase cycle is longer and more involved, so you’re going to have a lot of content guiding the buyer through the process. Setting conversion goals for content allows you to organize the stages of your campaign, check for hiccups, refine and optimize.
Establish Quality Control
Keep in mind that B2B sales, in addition to being lengthy and involved, have also been refined by the companies you’re doing business with. They’ve looked over past-decisions, crunched numbers and done their research. To stay on top of your game, you need to have a similar process of refinement for your marketing process. Performance reviews and active monitoring of your numbers will help establish quality control of your content.
To sum it up, coming out on top in B2B markets involves knowing your product, knowing your clients and making your data work for you.
