The way I see it, effective marketing is effective marketing and focusing on the labels blinds us to what’s important.
Effective marketing, whether you’re in B2B or B2C, is about persuading people to act.
No matter what kind of brand we lead, it’s still about results. We still have to meet prospects where they are. Some will know a lot about your brand. Some will know next to nothing. And some will know all the wrong things. We need to know what our audiences care about now – and what they really should care more about. We can’t sell anything to anyone until we know what they know. Stay passionately curious about who your prospects are.
B2B marketers still have to figure out how your brand is uniquely different, why that unique selling point (USP) makes a difference for their customers and why your brand deserves to be trusted. They need to know a lot about their product, a lot about their competition and a lot about what their prospects need but aren’t getting yet.
When some people say B2B marketing is less sophisticated than B2C marketing, there are times they’re right. Here’s what B2B marketers can learn from B2C marketers to take marketing to the next level.
1. Don’t be boring. Especially if what you’re selling is highly technical, prospects need to feel excited about it. Help people imagine how much easier their lives are with your brand. Leverage emotionally compelling language and dynamic visuals. This is still an attention economy and you can’t sell to people who are tuning out your messages.
2. Focus on the right growth market segment. B2C marketers are experts at selling to growth market segments. In B2B, the growth segment you need to care about most is the prospects that your solution fits so well they can’t help but succeed. Word of mouth is still a tried and true marketing vehicle: nothing beats happy customers telling other prospects just like them how amazing your brand is.
3. Build the right internal connections for alignment. In B2C, it’s usually vital to build strong relationships with market research, product, legal and your agency partners. You can do that in B2B, too – and when you do, make sure to partner with sales. They often know prospects better than anyone else in the company. Seek them out and listen more than you talk. I promise you’ll gain game-changing insights that may just give your marketing campaign that extra edge it needs.
The marketers who understand this, the ones who don’t let themselves get hamstrung by labels, can and do move seamlessly from leading B2C brands to leading B2B brands and back again. Learn to think like Dara Treseder and you can lead marketing at a B2B brand like Autodesk as effectively and creatively as she led it at a B2C brand like Peloton.
Effective marketers know that brand marketing and performance marketing are not opposites, but a vital combination that – when used properly – seeds long-term growth today, creating the new prospects that you’ll harvest later.
I was about to write that no matter what kind of audience we’re talking to, at the end of the day they’re all humans. But then I realized… wait a minute, not necessarily!
Increasingly, we’ll all be marketing to AIs, whose job will be to weed out the marketing fluff and get to the point. We’ll all need to make our marketing smarter and sharper than ever while still pushing for the creativity that inspires actual humans to buy. AI is reshaping how prospects research, compare, and buy. AI is projected to influence more than $260bn in global e-commerce, which means we’ll all have to master marketing to AIs and fast.
And speaking of AI, it can be an amazing tool for any B2B or B2C marketer. AI is brilliant at tackling things like creating and sharpening email subject lines, analyzing data, helping you optimize content for personalization and then analyzing performance and a lot more. If you’re not sure where to start, pause for a second and check out the interactive IAB AI in Advertising Use Case Map to identify, test and benchmark relevant AI capabilities throughout your advertising campaigns. (See how I subtly snuck a call to action in this post? It always works if it serves the reader.)
The more work you can get the AI to do for you, and the more you can automate that work (with human-oversight of course), the more time you’ll have for higher-value brand building, storytelling and customer experience work.
By all means, read extensively about your product category. Our job is to understand our brand and our category as deeply as possible.
But don’t stop there. Be curious.
Read broadly about all kinds of marketing, everywhere. How are consumer electronics marketers thinking about e-commerce in China? How are fashion marketers piggybacking on industry events in Milan and Paris? Which brands are doing the most effective work in generative AI? Better yet, get out there and network with real live people who aren’t necessarily in your industry.
Inspiring ideas can be found everywhere. I hope you found a few in this post.
