Business to customer (B2C) marketing or e-commerce is a marketing strategy that leverages online platforms to sell products and services to specific consumers. Most consumers make purchases using their digital devices. According to statistics, 51% of Americans are known to prefer online shopping. Also, 96% of Americans have also made an online purchase in their life, further emphasizing how important online shopping has become. If you run a B2C business, understanding how B2C marketing strategies work will help you build a successful B2C business and make a massive profit in no time.
This article discusses everything you need to know about B2B marketing strategy. Here, you will get to know what B2C marketing is, the examples of B2C marketing companies, how B2C marketing works, and how to attract B2C customers using the top 10 B2C marketing strategies. These are valuable skills that can transform the performance of your business. Let’s get right into it!
What is B2C Marketing? – B2C Marketing Meaning
B2C stands for Business to Consumer marketing. This implies that B2C marketing or business-to-customer-marketing is a type of marketing where a business or brand sells products or services directly to an individual consumer. In B2C marketing, products and services are directly communicated or marketed to an individual consumer rather than a company. Today, online channels are rapidly outdoing physical brick and mortar mediums. Read more on the best b2c website features for small businesses to take advantage of this current trend.
What are the Examples of B2C marketing?
Good examples of B2C marketing include a TV advertisement for a particular product or service targeted towards certain individuals. Let’s say a sanitary pad to ladies or a tasty snack to teens and children. The TV commercial is focused on a targeted consumer who decides whether or not to try out such products.
However, the B2C marketing model does not necessarily revolve around physical products. Most times, the B2C marketing model often refers to e-commerce marketing. E-commerce marketing is the type of marketing that involves creating or increasing the awareness and selling of online products. E-commerce marketing includes promoting an online product using an online store to generate sales.
Real life examples of online B2C marketing includes:
- Marketing a knowledge commerce products from online courses to membership site
- Another B2c marketing example is websites such as Amazon, ebay or Flipkart that sell a product without having the sellers and buyers owning the real product.
- B2C companies that use targeted ads to lead consumers to their websites using applications such as Facebook.
- Netflix, an online streaming platform that allows consumers to have access to movies at a monthly fee.
B2C marketing or E-commerce marketing uses digital content, B2C marketing strategies on social media platforms, email campaigns, and search engines algorithms such as Bing and Google, to attract consumers and generate sales online.
What are B2C Marketing Companies?
A B2C company is a company that focuses on meeting the needs of an individual rather than another business or company. They design their services around helping businesses reach their respective consumers better
B2B Marketing vs. B2C Marketing – Difference between Business to Consumer and Business to Company Marketing
The following outlines the difference between B2C and B2B marketing:
1. Target Audience:
They include:
B2B marketing:
B2B marketing campaign strategy is targeted towards other businesses.
B2C Marketing:
The target audience is everyday consumers who directly use the product or services. A B2B marketing example is a TV ad for a PlayStation targeted towards kids of range 2-12 or even men generally.
2. Buying process:
The differences include:
B2B Marketing:
Business to business marketing decisions is usually made based on logic. B2B consumers, that is other businesses make their purchases after much calculation and an informed decision. B2B consumers want to be highly informed before they make any purchase decision.
B2C Marketing:
Business to consumer marketing decisions is usually made based on emotion. Consumers can be moved to purchase a product after seeing a TV commercial. How do you attract a B2C customer? B2C marketers should base their stories on the benefits and value the product or service will add to the consumers. It should however be an interesting one.
3. Buying Time:
Lastly, the differences include:
B2B Marketing:
The buying cycle takes longer for a B2C marketing channel because decisions are not made by a person.
B2C Marketing:
The buying cycle for a B2C marketing channel is short because decisions are made by a person with little or no influence from family members.
What is B2C Marketing Strategy?
Business-to-consumer marketing strategy or B2C marketing strategy refers to the marketing tactics or strategies that a brand uses to promote its products and services to individual consumers. These B2C marketing strategies help a brand prepare for sales, anticipate responses, and track progress.
How does B2C Marketing Work?
B2C marketing strategies focus more on relating on a personal level with your lead. The goal of any B2C marketing strategy is to convince a lead to purchase a product or perform specific actions. The goal of a B2C marketer is to move the lead through the customer journey or B2C marketing channels. The customer’s journey is in 3 stages:
- The Awareness Stage: The stage of B2C marketing is the stage of how and when a customer first becomes aware of your brand
- The Consideration Stage: This is the stage of B2C marketing when the customer considers your brand as an option to solve his or her pressing need.
- The decision Stage: This stage of B2C marketing is when the customer narrows down his options to a brand and is ready to take action. Here the final transaction takes place.
In the customer’s journey, a lead becomes a prospect and a prospect becomes a consumer. B2C marketing works by introducing and encouraging the consumer to interact with your business by taking the consumer through the three stages.
Top 10 B2C Marketing Strategies
Do you own a B2C business? We have compiled a list of the best B2C marketing strategies you may want to consider in 2022. With these B2C marketing strategies, you don’t have to ask “how do you attract a B2C customer for your business” anymore. You will also find answers to questions like “what are the best B2C marketing strategies in 2022”. Here are the top 10 B2C marketing strategies you should start applying right away:
1. Connect with your Prospects on a Personal Level:
The top B2C marketing strategy is connecting with your potential leads on a personal level. Emotion is a great factor in purchasing a product. Knowing your prospects’ pain will better put you and your brand in the best position to solve their problem. This is what is known as customer empathy. It involves putting yourself in the shoes of your customers.
You will get the best results in your B2C marketing campaigns when you focus more on creating relatable experiences for your target audience.
Take for example, if you own an online platform where you help people on a journey of weight loss. You will connect better with your targeted audience when you share your own experience of your weight loss journey. Sharing pictures of yourself before and after losing weight for example will give your audience a feeling that you’ve been where they currently are and understand their struggles. Most importantly, it shows them that it is not impossible to achieve.
This B2C marketing strategy will build trust between your brand and your audience. It will move your targeted audience to the decision stage where they purchase your product or service
2. Utilize Content as a tool to gain your customers
Now that you have gotten the attention and understood your prospective customers and the best way to solve their problem, the next B2C marketing strategy you should employ is the use of content.
The best B2C marketing strategies make use of engaging content to connect and reach more audiences in the digital market.
Michael Brenner, CEO of Marketing Insider Group noted that “The biggest challenge for many B2C marketers is often reaching and engaging their customers in this digital age”
Creating engaging and interesting content to better address the needs of your prospects will go a long way in making your B2C marketing campaigns a successful one. Creating engaging content that relates to your brand will also help you generate traffic to your site and attract more audiences.
The content you create for your B2C marketing strategy should position you as an expert in your niche. The content will and should explain more on how your brand will solve the problem and meet the needs of your prospective customers.
Some B2C marketing strategies on social media that you can employ include blog posts, videos, Demos, social content, how-to-webinars, case studies, etc.
Your prospective consumers don’t need ads or content that are unnecessarily long. Most importantly, your content should be engaging.
3. Utilize Social Media:
Leveraging social media for business to customer marketing strategies is another excellent strategy. There are many ways to get people to relate to your brand on social media. Research has it that 54% of the global population spends an average of 2 hours, 25 minutes on social media platforms. Also, more than 91% of social media users make use of smartphones to access these social media platforms.
The best B2C marketers leverage social media to reach more audiences and grow their business strategically. Social media platforms like Facebook can help you connect deeper and individually with your audience on a personal level.
Moreover, B2C marketing campaigns can be done on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Even if you’re on a low budget, you can focus more on building your audience through strategic business marketing organically.
In addition, B2C marketing strategies on social media marketing provide individual consumers with content and products they have already been looking for. People can also share, like, and comment on a product allowing it to gain a wider reach and get more people to know about the brand.
4. Leverage on Influencers:
You want to know the answer to “how do you attract a B2C customer?”. Try leveraging an influencer. Great products are sustained by reviews. Most purchase decisions, about 97% of customers testify, are based on reviews they’ve read. One of the best B2C marketing strategies is the use of influencers. These influencers have a lot of loyal followers who believe most of the things they say. Leveraging social influencers and the reviews they give on your brand will go a long way to not only market or promote your brand but also build authenticity and trust for it.
5. Try the Free Mode:
There’s a good chance you have run out of data in the past or didn’t have access to the wifi. To ensure you remain online, Facebook created a free mode. This is one B2C marketing strategy that has worked for a big platform like Facebook.
Taking a leaf off their page, you can choose to add a free offer with every purchase. A free offer adds value to the product you sell. You get paid for your product and your consumer gets an extra offer, and everyone is happy with the transaction.
However, when using this B2c marketing strategy, ensure you don’t get less of your product’s worth. The free offer can also be related to the product being sold, say an e-book to serve as a guide to use your product or a complimentary item.
If you take, for example, a professional course online in the field of digital marketing, for an effective B2C marketing strategy, you can organize a free training webinar. Then set up a paid B2C marketing campaign on social media and make your targeted audience (aspiring digital marketers) fill a form to register for the free training. After the free training, you can gather their information and market other mouth-watering aspects of digital marketing. However, this time, you’re marketing a paid course. Get it?
Moreover, giving out rewards like this gives your consumer a feeling of satisfaction that makes them keep coming back for more.
6. Create Membership Programs:
Creating membership programs for your consumers is a great B2C marketing strategy as it helps customers feel they are part of your business family. This creates a bond or an attachment with your brand and in return, you get their loyalty.
Loyal customers will consequently help to increase your brand awareness, bring new clients, and increase your ROI in the long run.
Remember, your clients are your money-making machines. Therefore, provide them value by creating a membership level game that combines a competition and reward system to encourage them to relate more with your brand. As members buy more into your brand, depending on your discretion, they can get:
- A discount for their next purchase
- A silver, bronze, or gold membership medal
- Or a membership card with benefit
In the end, you, and your loyal customer wins, but you get the bigger win, sales!
7. Don’t Forget the Retargeting Program Strategy:
Running retargeting programs as an example of a B2C marketing strategy on social media helps you reconnect with your past customers and even convert new ones in the process. Retargeting programs may cost you a lot of funds but in the long run, it is beneficial to the growth of your business.
How do retargeting programs work with B2C marketing strategies on social media? Have you ever visited a website, spent some time, and bounced off the site only to come back to your social media platform, say Facebook, and you’re faced with the ad from the website you just left? That’s a retargeting campaign working.
Once a person visits a website and spends some time there, a sequence of events is triggered. The next social media platform he visits has the advert facing him or her.
This B2C marketing strategy helps register your brand in the memory of your web visitor. He/she may not purchase your product now but will definitely do once he needs your brand.
Retargeting programs are an investment for B2C businesses and may put a dent in your business finance but if used well, will yield a great ROI in the long run.
8. Be Mobile-friendly
As a B2C business owner, getting a mobile-optimized store is now a necessity. You know why? 63% of online shoppers including you will prefer to get reviews with their smartphones on a product first before purchasing in a store. In addition, a higher percentage of people access the web using their smartphones than tablets or computers.
Moreover, Shoppers will first visit your website to check out any product before deciding to purchase. So, it is important that your website and e-commerce store looks great on mobile phones. As a business owner, one of the best things you can do would be to have a mobile-optimized store and website.
If you need help with redesigning your website or e-commerce site to a mobile-friendly one, contact a professional website designer today.
9. Direct Selling:
Direct selling as a B2C marketing strategy permits consumers to purchase goods and services directly and offline. This marketing strategy allows consumers to see and try out products before purchasing. This B2C marketing strategy can also be an option for brick-and-mortar stores. A major advantage is that it helps develop a face-to-face relationship with the consumer
10. Feedbacks and Testimonials
With the increase in cybercrimes, it is easy to get mixed up with ungenuine B2C marketers. This is why most consumers today trust only stores with feedbacks and testimonials. Asides from telling people that you’re real and are existing, it’d help build trust in your brand.
Testimonials reveal to new leads what other customers are saying about you and your brand. It also helps your customers connect with you on a more personal level. This is one B2C marketing strategy you should utilize in 2022 if you want to stay in business.
Andy Crestodina, a co-founder and strategic director at Orbit Media Studios said: “Almost immediately after showing what business you’re in, it is time to start building credibility. Ratings, best sellers, reviews, top-rated products, testimonials, logos of companies, awards, press mentions, endorsements and certifications, all help add social proof”.
You see, don’t joke with your testimonials and feedback from customers. They are one of the best B2C marketing strategies that help you stay in business and distinguish you from competitors.
Final Thoughts
Building a B2C business can be a bit difficult at the start, however, with a little determination, it can really turn out successful if you follow these B2C marketing strategies. If you have all set to achieve this including a website with a landing page built to attract customers and convert, go ahead, and make multiple sales!
However, if you don’t have a great website with a compelling landing page, why wait? You can always use a professional web developer to start the ball rolling for you.
