B2B and B2C marketing: What’s the difference?

B2C vs B2B marketing

B2C marketing targets the needs, interests, and challenges of individual consumers making personalised purchases based on their needs and desires.

In comparison, B2B marketing targets the needs, interests, and challenges of individuals making purchase decisions on behalf of their organisation. 

This fundamental difference changes the goals, purchase motivation, timeframes, and key decision-makers in the purchasing process. 

B2B Marketing Goals

B2B customers are focused on ROI, efficiency, and expertise. Providing marketing content that can be discovered, accessed, navigated, and assimilated quickly is paramount to generating qualified sales leads. It's how you deliver pre-qualified leads to your sales team.

B2B marketing purchase motivation     

Customers are driven by logic and financial incentive. While this process has an emotional element, most purchasing decisions come down to a pragmatic list of priorities. Your marketing strategy should have easily discoverable online resources for purchasers to access.

These resources (e.g., Well maintained SEO-driven website and relevant social media profiles) should be formatted to support each stage and critical decision maker in the sales cycle.

B2B marketing drivers     

B2B Customers want to be educated but are also time-poor. Customers need your help building a more comprehensive understanding of the business challenges and opportunities that drive their research. 

Their goal is more than just selecting a service or product provider; they need to build knowledge that helps them present within their organisation as a subject matter authority. Your marketing content strategy should support this goal.

B2B marketing purchase process

The right B2B marketing strategy will deliver prequalified sales leads to your sales team, reducing sales timeframes and improving conversion and retention rates. B2B customers prefer to work with account managers and salespeople. Access to salespeople near the end of the sales cycle gives them confidence and cover on purchasing decisions.

From the sales team's perspective, the right marketing strategy and resources will allow team members to focus more on fulfilling the needs of individual customers and building personal relationships. 

Unlike the B2C sales process, your B2B marketing strategy should facilitate seamless integration of your marketing and sales process, prequalifying leads and providing Business Development managers with actionable insights to close more sales. Your B2B marketing strategy should also provide the qualification tools and resources that allow account managers and salespeople to spend less time selling your business model.

People Involved in a B2B purchase. 

 B2B customers often need to consult with key decision-makers and stakeholders before purchasing. Your B2B marketing campaign should provide online resources for procurement and project leaders to include and educate others involved in the decision-making process. 

This content should be easy to discover and written in a tone and style accessible to many decision-makers with varied understandings of the challenges and the solutions you provide.

Visual content also plays a crucial role in disseminating critical purchase information, acting as an executive summary and shortcut to understating solutions and services.

B2B purchase purpose

B2B Customers' purchase decisions have real-world consequences. B2B takes longer than B2B sales; however, the rewards are more significant. As such, B2B sales require more qualification and group consensus.

Your B2B campaign goals should include content and technology that helps shorten the sales cycle, build trust, and maintain long-term business relationships beyond the involvement of the individuals who made the initial transaction. 

When adequately resourced and executed, a B2B campaign can help increase the number of connections and engagements your sales team have with an individual or business over a year. This connectivity will help you to qualify new clients while revitalising existing relationships.

Fewer clients, greater relationship value and complexity

One of the most common mistakes made by B2b companies is that their reputation and understanding of their products and solutions precede them. Even the most prominent companies can be unknown to leads. The other assumption made is that clients are all seeking the same information.

Assumptions and generalisations lead to systemic failures in B2B marketing strategies. High-value, long, complex, niche sales cycles that drive B2B lead generation and conversion work best with a detail-oriented marketing strategy.

Under resourcing your B2B marketing strategy is a recipe for failure. While elevating the resourcing, roles and responsibilities of your marketing is not a guaranteed way to hit the mark of high-quality lead generation on your first attempt, misunderstanding the importance of the part of marketing in B2B sales is a guaranteed way of creating unpredictability in your sale pipeline.