Internet Marketing for Consumer Markets & B2B Markets

Date Published: 4-May-2013 | By: Pete Dubaka

Are B2C and B2B marketing efforts same in online space? B2B markets and consumer markets may look similar from financial variables like market size and industry growth rate. However, marketing a consumer item is very different from marketing in a B2B market.

B2B has lot less sales/sales leads compared to B2C businesses
Firstly, it is the number of enquires. Most B2C people may get a shock when they see the number of enquires or sales in a B2B market. Typically the number of customers is far fewer ranging from 10% to 0.1% of typical B2C customers. A B2C marketer may get disturbed by the low numbers and may make wrong strategic choices. For example, relevant keywords may have low search frequencies and an inexperienced marketer may ignore the best keywords and instead go for lower quality and more generic keywords because they have higher search frequencies.

B2B purchasers are seasoned professionals unlike a typical consumer buyer
Secondly, B2B customers are typically experienced professionals who tend to make objective decisions. Typically, many web designers tend to keep the theme of a business like a B2C site. However, the decision makers in B2B companies may not shortlist a business because the site does not make effort to match the persona of decision makers in a certain industry. For example, a company targeting senior IT people for its product needs to make the site’s color combinations to reflect a technology savvy business website. This will be very different than a website for wedding photographers.

Content is read more by B2B industry decision makers
Thirdly, most B2B sites need to have more content rather than less content. Well, it does not mean that you should dump a lot of words without any paragraph headings. B2B decisions makers tend to read and forward the information to others in the organization. The amount of content would be a lot more than say in a home staging expert’s website.

Here we have looked at how one difference in B2B or B2C can make in defining the Internet marketing plan for a business. Similarly, many other things about a business, its customers and marketplaces need to be considered before defining an Internet marketing strategy for a business.

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