March 6, 2018

B2B vs B2C: Understanding The Difference Between Customer And Consumer

Knowing who your target persona is, and how your product or service can help them, is an essential part of mastering the basics of a marketing strategy. Profiling this persona can help dictate the channels you use, the language you use, and the success you achieve.

The first step in defining your target persona is to understand the difference between customer and consumer and whether your brand is B2B (business to business) or B2C (business to consumer), and how to adjust your marketing efforts accordingly.

Language Used

When writing for B2B, you can assume a certain level of industry expertise and therefore can use basic sector jargon. However, when appealing to consumers, who will not have this prior knowledge, your tone should be relatable and straightforward.

Type Of Relationship

Although many consumers become loyal to brands and make return purchases, they’re unlikely to want to get to know your team on a personal level and build a relationship with your organisation. However, B2B customers are more likely to be interested in your company story, your brand ethos, and building strong and lasting relationships between you and their business.

Buying Cycle Length

With this in mind, it’s important to realise B2C marketing should be attention grabbing, whereas B2B marketing should be attention retaining.

In general, the B2C buying journey tends to be considerably shorter than that of the B2B process and will satisfy immediate needs.

With approval often needed to make a purchase or seek services, as well as long-term goals, B2B customers require nurturing and more attention. This means longer, more in-depth content, and remarketing campaigns that last weeks or months, rather than days long.

Consider Your USPs

Different personas will value different benefits. For example, B2B clients are more likely to be seeking efficiency and expertise, with a decision made on rational, logic, and data. So that means bullet pointed features, expected ROI, and other general benefits to the user.

Whereas B2C buyers tend to be emotionally triggered (cost, desire etc) with deals and entertainment key concerns. So, persuasive language plays a huge factor.

Goals And Objectives

B2C brands tend to focus their campaigns on generating brand awareness, whereas B2B organisations focus on customer satisfaction and retention. This reflects the different purchasing behaviour of these demographics eg multiple consumers make one-off purchases vs. fewer organisations with multiple return purchases over a long term.

Do You Understand Your Customers?

If you’d like to delve deeper into audience analysis, learn more about what is B2B marketing, or how to build B2C brand awareness, sign up to attend one of our upcoming digital marketing events.