It’s fair to say that 2020 has brought plenty of unique challenges and opportunities for those of us working in the digital advertising realm. For me, that was managing my first B2B clients.
Here’s some of what I’ve learned:
B2C versus B2B
The key differentiators between B2C (business to consumer) and B2B (business to business) clients is their target audience, price points and length of sales cycle.
- B2C audiences favor simple, emotion-based messaging with a focus on benefits and solution to problems. That’s why Facebook works so well.
- B2B audiences are typically composed of decision makers who are interested in logical value propositions, saving resources and in-depth data analysis.
B2B Messaging
If only I had kept it simple, stupid. At the end of the day a B2B decision maker just wants to know that you will save them resources: time, money etc. In other words, there is very little emotion or personal details involved. We always want to focus on the logic behind how our product or service will help our decision makers in the most concise way possible.
B2B Targeting
Because audience sizes for B2B tend to be smaller in contrast to B2C, it is key to get creative with targeting. Buying entire market segments doesn’t make financial sense when you’re really only trying to reach a handful of decision makers. And while general branding is still important, focusing marketing dollars on hyper-targeted campaigns will be what moves the needle on conversions. Tactics like:
- LinkedIn by targeting users based on profession/interests
- Programmatic Advertising by geo-fencing offices of prospects
- Paid Search by bidding on industry specific high-value search terms
- Email Marketing by keeping in constant contact with new and existing clients
B2B Reporting
In my experience, clients in the B2B world tend to crave data and analytics more than others. This at times can entail more complex details of conversion tracking. At Royle Media we achieve this by using TapClicks dashboards, allowing our team to pull data from all platforms into one convenient place for the ultimate ROI comparison.
Finally, B2B campaigns have longer sales funnels – period. So don’t get discouraged when your client doesn’t start seeing immediate results. Cover your basis, be consistent and the conversions will come.