what is B2B Marketing and B2C Marketing? It is essential to understand the differences between the two concepts when planning marketing campaigns and to be successful in our strategies. To make it very clear, we will explain the metrics for B2B marketing and B2C marketing, what they are and their main differences to take into account.
what is B2B marketing?
B2B (business to business) marketing is mainly oriented to the sale of products and services between companies and not directly to the consumer. It has different characteristics to B2C, so it is important to take them into account when defining our objectives and planning campaigns.
B2B and B2C marketing campaigns have some common elements, but there are some marked differences. Firstly, the needs of businesses are not the same as those of consumers, as business needs are linked to more objective factors, such as profitability or productivity. In general, a company acquires a product or service in order to be more efficient and subsequently obtain a return, i.e. to obtain something that benefits the operation of its business.
In B2B it is more complicated to have a relationship with our potential customers, firstly because the number of companies that require your services or purchase your product is much smaller and, secondly, because they belong to a much more segmented niche, so it is not so easy to communicate with them through more general channels, such as social networks.
One way to show your offer to these interested companies are events such as fairs, seminars or congresses using them as a B2B marketing strategy, although an email marketing campaign can also be very effective if it targets the right contacts and takes into account aspects such as the specific needs of our client-companies.
Metrics for B2B Marketing
how can we measure the success of our b2b marketing campaigns? Sometimes it is a challenge to be able to measure the ROI of our content campaigns, so we propose these five metrics to start measuring these results in B2B Marketing in a simple way:
- Interaction with your emails: this metric focuses mainly on knowing how good your email marketing strategy is. If the titles you use on your website or blog with the same as in your emails, you can get an idea of its success on all your platforms.
- Social media interaction: you have already caught the attention of your target audience. One of the ways to measure the value you bring to your users is through the number of posts shared on social media, or interactions with your content through social media. If they are interested enough to share it, you are on the right track.
- Navigation on your website: your content must not only provide value to your audience, it must also be related to the mission of your company. When users access your blog or website it is important that they continue browsing through internal links to other posts. This way you will have a control of which pages have a higher bounce rate and which are the last to be visited before leaving.
- Lead conversion: The next step is to convert people who consume your content into potential customers, so you need to convert them into leads and get them to leave their details, for example, in exchange for a free ebook.
- Revenue: The ultimate metric, because in order to measure the results of a marketing strategy it is essential to know how sales have gone. Only then can we know the return on investment of our actions and plan future strategies.
what is B2C marketing?
On the other hand, we have Business to Consumer (B2C), where actions are always aimed at the end consumer. In this type of marketing, the emotional factor is very important , so the success or failure of our strategy will depend on this component.
In general, sales in the B2C market are of lower value and more impulsive. The consumer does not give so much importance to the objective characteristics of the product, but rather to what it brings to his life or how it makes him feel. For this reason, in this type of marketing, communication is more creative, subjective and emotional.
The purpose of b2c marketing is to express an idea or reflect what is desired with advertising. When communicating our product, reflecting a feeling will be much more relevant than an objective and therefore colder campaign.
Metrics for B2C Marketing
how can we measure the success of our B2C marketing campaigns? These 4 metrics are key to understand if our plan is working:
- Conversion rate: i.e. how many of your website visitors have finally become customers, so you can see the quality of your traffic. In the B2B world, with much longer sales cycles, conversion to leads is usually measured, but here the process is quicker and more direct.
- Steps to conversion: If you want to improve your revenue, you will need to know the "path" that leads your visitors to become customers, i.e. what are the steps that these visitors follow until they make a decision. It is essential to know this path to establish how you can facilitate this process.
- Acquisition cost: when trying to obtain new customers it is important to know how much we invest, the lower the amount, the higher the profit margin.
- Brand awareness: this is possibly one of the most important metrics for B2C marketers, however, it is complicated to measure. You can keep track of this metric by monitoring data such as Google searches, visits to your website, mentions on social networks, opinion sites, Google Alerts or online and offline surveys.
what are the main differences?
In conclusion, B2C differs from B2B marketing in that, instead of thinking about the objective function of a product, it appeals to emotion and feelings with the intention of creating a need in the individual buyer. It focuses on advertising, creating valuable content in various formats and designing campaigns across multiple channels.
Any company that sells directly to a non-professional consumer uses B2C marketing to develop its sales and marketing strategies. It is the most widespread today because of the commonality of the buying and selling process with this audience.
By definition, it is the one that is usually attributed to more traditional marketing, the one that thinks about the consumer and their needs to attack them directly through a more emotional part in order to sell, or even to create new ones with the intention of expanding their market.
On the other hand, B2B focuses on long-term relationships, on personalised offers to our buyer personas, knowing their tastes and needs and thus reinforcing the professional buyer as a point of interest.
Nowadays, the type of relationship between companies and between companies and customers is very different compared to years ago. The way to collaborate with other businesses was enough with a good catalogue full of the characteristics of our offers. And the way to advertise our products or services was enough to supply the basic needs required by our customers. But nowadays this alone is not enough.
