Businesses VS Consumers: 3 Key Differences Between B2C and B2B Marketing

It is often very easy to confuse business-to-business or B2B marketing with its more frequently-seen counterpart, business-to-consumer or B2C marketing. While these two approaches share similarities, they also have fundamental differences that set them apart from each other.

These differences can be distilled into three conflicting approaches to marketing:

Education and Expertise VS Brevity and Convenience

Businesses are constantly on the lookout for the next big thing to improve their bottom line. In B2B marketing, you will want your clients to view you as an expert – a teacher – that will help them do just that.

It is for this reason that B2B marketing revolves around providing useful information to your target clientele. You can promote your brand to raise awareness, but businesses are more likely to commit if they can see that you know what you’re talking about. This is why B2B marketing revolves more around providing lengthy, educational material that can impart a lot of useful information to your target clientele.

On the other hand, B2C marketing focuses more on casting as wide a net as possible to capture the attention of consumers. B2C marketing thrives on brief marketing messages bundled into easy-to-understand packages. These are easy to read, easy to comprehend, and helps raise awareness of a product or service. This approach is also useful for catching the attention of businesses, but they will not react well if they cannot confirm your expertise in your chosen field.

Growth and Relationships VS Appeal and Pragmatism

The success of your business is tied directly to the success of your clients. Your clients need to stay in business so that they will continue availing of your products and services. It is for this reason that B2B marketing focuses on a nurturing, supportive attitude to clients.

Marketing to businesses needs to be supported by a team that gives your clients their full attention. Sales and marketing teams need to be ready at a moment’s notice to attend to the concerns of current, potential, and former clients. If you want to close a lucrative deal, these teams must learn how to proactively attend to your clients instead of waiting for them to come around.

On the other hand, B2C marketing revolves more around getting as many people as possible people to notice you. To this end, sales and marketing teams focus less on individual clients and more on statistics – analyzing which tactics reach the greatest number of people and cause them to actually pay for a product.  You spark the interest of consumers by getting them to come to you and not the other way around.

Contracts and Obligations VS Purchases and Discounts

And last but definitely not least, B2B marketing is all about laying concrete reasons for businesses to make a major investment in your products and services. All marketing efforts must then revolve around a long-term philosophy.

This is a lot like drawing up a contract. B2B marketing needs to present your products and/or services in a way that makes it attractive for clients in the long run. Your objective is to get clients to select you even after giving the exchange a great deal of thought. You will need to prove that your products and/or services will prove beneficial to your clients for months, years, maybe even decades after you’ve sealed the deal.

B2C marketing is less about long-term and more about short-term. Selling to the average consumer is about getting him or her to commit to the purchase as soon as possible. Products and services need to be as attractive as possible in as little time as possible. Deals and discounts are a very useful tool to achieve this end; enticing them to commit now or miss out on a discount.

Keep these differences in mind, and you will be less likely to encounter problems as you adopt marketing strategies from B2C to B2B marketing and vice-versa!