What can B2B Marketing Learn from B2C Marketing?

Many moons ago I started my career in B2B marketing, which at the time, was very different to B2C marketing. Fresh out of university I dreamt of working for ‘funky brands’, but quickly found B2B marketing far more interesting, challenging and rewarding. If you’d told a younger me that I’d choose a Building Surveying firm over a beauty brand agency, I’d have laughed.  Yet, that is exactly what happened.

At the time I advised aspiring marketers to choose between agency or corporate, and B2C or B2B. Moving from agency to in-house was easier, and while shifting from B2C to B2B was possible, the reverse was rare.

Today, the gap between B2C and B2B marketing has closed dramatically, so what can B2B marketers take from B2C, and why does it matter?

Prioritise Ethics, Especially in Data

The introduction of GDPR was just the beginning. Data privacy is now crucial to business success; customers quickly distrust companies that mishandle their data. With the end of third-party cookies in 2024, first-party data becomes essential. It's accurate but hard to collect at scale, so ethical data collection is key.

B2C Solutions:

• Incentives: B2C often use discounts and special offers to collect data.  B2B can do the same by offering valuable content or discounts for new email subscribers.
• Contests: While less common in B2B, contests are a versatile way to ethically gather first-party data and provide valuable insights.  The cost of one prize could enable you to source data from hundreds of buyers.  Just ensure they align to your business, are reasonable in value for your industry and are promoted alongside other activities such as campaigns or conferences.

Embrace AI

Advertising platforms are integrating AI to simplify ad creation and improve targeting.

• Google has several new AI features for Google Ads, including semi-autonomous ad asset creation, which creates a custom image, video and text for your campaign with a few prompts.
• TikTok’s AI-powered virtual assistant helps you create better ads, and their Creative Assistant works like a chatbot which you can ask for post ideas and ad scripts specific to your brand.
• Facebook’s Advantage+ is underpinned by AI enabling continuous ad targeting improvement. It uses machine learning to automatically adjust ad target based on pixel data, conversion history, and the audience engaging with your content.

To compete for your ad spend, these platforms will keep introducing more AI features, so they're here to stay.

B2C brands quickly adopt these features, experimenting fast to compete, while B2B brands tend to be more cautious.  Exploring what you can achieve with AI is crucial, as is staying up to date of AI advancements.

How to Stay Updated:

• Google Marketing Live: Annual event where they announce key updates. You can also view past content and what others have done to leverage it.
• Review Announcement Boards: Each platform has a central location where they collate announcements, so bookmark Facebook, Google, and TikTok’s versions of these pages.

Harness the Power of Video

It’s clear that video marketing generates more leads and higher ROI, and most people say they prefer watching videos to other content formats.

While B2C has long leveraged video, smart B2B marketers are getting more creative with video including the formats, filming and how they use the footage e.g. as short clips on LinkedIn to drive people to subscribe to their YouTube channels.

Yet, the key to success with videos is to keep them simple and authentic, showing real people rather than impersonal stick imagery and animation. This means it is accessible to all and doesn't need to cost the earth to produce. So, if video feels daunting, there are a few things you can do to post video content that generates more engagement:

• Keep it simple -you don’t need expensive equipment and a crew, using just your smartphone and a cheap ring light you can create a simple, authentic video of an expert making a complicated topic easy to understand.
• Repurpose content - even simple videos take time to create, so make your effort go further by slicing them up for multiple channels. Create an attention-grabbing thumbnail and post it to YouTube, embed them in your blog articles or share a snippet as an Instagram Story.
• Use TikTok to showcase your videos - Gen Zs are becoming decision-makers and over 57% of them say they use TikTok to search for answers rather than Google. It’s always been essential to be where your buyers are, so if you’re not on there, they won’t find you. If you’re new to TikTok:
• Try TikTok ads to get in front of your target audience before you’ve built a large organic audience using their marketing platform which has some impressive ad features like custom audiences.
• Make sure your TikToks have a strong call to action that is only two to three words, starts with a strong verb like “join”, “buy” or “contact” and is prominent - not buried in a long caption.

Build Communities

Human nature dictates that we want to be part of a tribe of like-minded people. B2C brands have used this to build communities of ambassadors for their brands successfully for some time, for example Sephora’s Beauty Insider Community has over 5 million members generating their own content and acting as product experts while evangelising the brand.

It’s time for B2B marketers to think about how a community can generate ethical first-party data, enable trustworthy third parties to endorse your brand, promote new offerings and encourage peer engagement.

If you create a community, it must be unique to your business, and you’ll have to commit to it for it to be successful. 

Community Building Tips:

• Platform Choice – decide between creating your own platform where you have more control but it is harder to get off the ground, or a third-party one where it’s easier to ramp up members but you’re at the mercy of their rules and capabilities.
• Foster Engagement - don’t be too sales drive.  Your community regularly allows you to be in front of a group of loyal customers so it is better to spend time fostering conversations and support between members and offer the occasional exclusive offer.
• Stay Active - People like to be heard by the brands they support, ask for opinions, spotlight community members, and hold Q&A sessions to keep the conversation flowing. They are a vital, reliable source of feedback on what you’re doing well which you can use in all sorts of ways.

Leverage Influencers

B2C brands have successfully worked with influencers for years.  B2B can also benefit from these brand advocates and they don't have to be external.

Influencers can come from within your business - those who share your content, announce launches and campaigns, and help recruit new team members. What's important authentic engagements that feature real people and offer relatable insights and solutions.

How you do it will dictate how well it works, so consider the following when developing your influencer marketing strategy:

• Micro-Influencers - someone with a smaller, but relevant and engaged following in your specific market could deliver a huge return. Their followers also have a network, so you could gain visibility well beyond the initial audience.
• Incentives - if social media isn’t a part of someone’s daily job, it takes more thought for them to promote your brand especially if they are doing so to their personal network they have taken time to build. Consider offering a small thank you in exchange for their effort. Just because they work for you doesn’t mean they have to promote you.
• Clear Goals - Set clear goals from the start and understand what a good payback looks like for you. Get senior management buy-in on your metrics.

Be Original

AI brings efficiency, but originality is key. B2C brands were early adopters, and we can learn from the experience. Google started taking action against AI posts, dropping them from the ranks and negatively impacting website traffic.

What B2C brands learnt was that original content like customer stories, primary industry surveys, and deep dives into internal data far outperform AI generated content.  It’s also a magnet to others to backlink and share with their networks.

Anyone can use original data and some ideas you could use are:

• Customer Stories - customers who are a great source of stories and insights about your industry. Get them to talk about their journey to success, what benefits they get from working with you or to highlight a common industry challenge and how they overcame it. By using their original experiences to educate their peers you are helping your customer talk about themselves, be more visible, promote their business, all while creating amazing content and cementing your relationship with them. Other customers will also see how supportive you are of your customers.
• Internal Data – what data do you already have about your customers and market and whether it’s useful to others. For example, if you are an accountancy, you know your busiest time is the first quarter of the year in the run to the end of financial year, sharing what businesses should be doing at this time will prompt people to consider their current provider and if you are a better option.
• Company Journey - every business starts somewhere and has their own growth story. Other businesses are interested in hearing how you became successful, what challenges you faced and the lessons you learned.  Sharing an honest account of your journey not only helps others to avoid the same pitfalls but it helps them feel less concerned about their own challenges and builds trust.

As we move through 2024 and beyond, the B2B marketers who remain stuck using old strategies will find their creative contemporaries overtaking them.  At the same time those who embrace new trends, seek to learn from others and experiment, will find B2B marketing gets even more exciting and rewarding.

If you would like to discuss any of the ideas raised in this article please feel free to drop me a message.

Sarah Donnelly is a passionate Marketing Leader with over 25 years experience and a demonstrable track record of supporting businesses to achieve their objectives, raise their brand profile, drive profitable growth and build market confidence.