What makes B2B different?

Fundamentally different

B2B is a different animal. This is because of a few fundamental differences between B2B and B2C marketing. While many of the principles are the same, the strategies and tactics must shift to ensure success.

Generally speaking, B2B is more complex than B2C. The products and services, buyer journeys, distribution channels, number of people influencing a decision — all are often significantly more complex. That doesn’t mean success is more elusive or expensive than it is for our friends in the B2C world, but it does mean that you have to take a different approach to get there. While many of the same strategies and tactics are used in both B2B and B2C marketing, B2B applies them in different ways, leveraging different data and calls to action that reflect a more considered path to purchase.

This guide is designed to highlight those fundamental differences and help B2B marketers approach their specific challenges more strategically, creatively, and effectively.

Go big or go home

This aspect of B2B marketing and sales also changes the emotional investment that customers make. While it doesn’t mean that snap decisions and impulse buys don’t happen, B2B customers will often form much deeper emotional connections to a brand. Don’t believe us? Try getting a farmer with a green tractor to drive a red one.

High value. Low volume.

When going through initial discovery with a new 2RM client, we often hear some version of this statement: We could fit all of our customers on a school bus. Rarely are B2B marketers engaging in mass marketing. High-value, low-volume customers and prospects are the name of the game. And that single dynamic has a dramatic effect on which strategies and tactics B2B marketers find most effective.

When target audiences are smaller but the average customer is much more valuable, the pain of losing a customer is magnified. It hurts more because it’s a lot of revenue walking out the door and because it can be significantly harder to find a new customer. In short, churn hurts more, so B2B companies must work harder to retain customers who may not interact with them as frequently as B2C customers do. Providing useful content between purchases, increasing personal touchpoints, and other tactics help strengthen those relationships and inspire loyalty. It also means that marketing has to be more deeply integrated across the organization — departments with a lot of customer contact, like sales and customer service, can have an outsized impact on the effectiveness of a marketing campaign.

The upside of this high-value, low-volume dynamic is that B2B marketers can often narrow their target to the individual level — with highly personalized, highly relevant communications that speak to an audience of one. This results in marketing communications that are ultimately more effective and can often deliver a higher ROI.

Partnership isn’t a hollow word

"Your partner in family nutrition since 1971."

Your grocery store is probably guilty of saying things like this. The laundry detergent on your shelf claims to be “your partner in clean,” and your cellphone company is fond of calling itself your “wireless communications partner.” Maybe, in the very best instances, there’s an ounce of truth in those statements. But chances are, the idea of partnership doesn’t really apply. You need a thing, they sell a thing, but there’s not really an ongoing person-to-person connection. But it’s different in a B2B world.

Transactions are fewer and farther between in a typical B2B customer relationship. Major transactions may only happen once every few years. But building and maintaining a solid long-term partnership with your customers makes sound business sense. One, the transactions are big enough to justify the investment of time and resources in between. Two, the sales cycle is often long and complicated, requiring a lot of attention to ensure that things come to fruition. Three, there are often multiple smaller (and more profitable) transactions — parts, service, maintenance — along the way. And four, they just feel good to be taken care of and attended to that way.

All of this adds up to honest-to-goodness partnerships that most B2C brands can only dream of. It changes the marketing conversation from “How do we grab attention and compel action?” to “How can we help someone be smarter, more efficient, more confident, and happier?”

Your audience is an expert. You need to be, too.

There’s nothing general about a B2B audience. You’re almost always targeting a very specific group of people. And because it’s a business audience with business needs, you’re speaking to people about something complex and highly technical that they may have spent decades studying, learning, and doing every day. You’re speaking to engineers about engineering, city planners about city planning, or growers about growing crops. That’s very different from a B2C marketer who might be speaking to those very same people about fat-free yogurt, Caribbean cruises, or vacuum cleaners.

This presents a special sort of challenge for those people writing and developing your marketing communications materials. They have to understand your industry as well as your audience does — even if this isn’t reflected in their marketing background. This isn’t an issue for B2C marketers because there’s almost always an expectation that the marketer knows more than the audience does about whatever product or service is being marketed. B2B is the exact opposite. We’ll rarely know more than our audience, so we must strive to rise to their level.

The only way to do that is to deeply immerse the marketing team in the business and industry and to rely heavily on the experts inside your company (the chemists, engineers, etc.) to help your team learn. That goes double for any and all agency partners.