The Business Owners' Guide To B2C Marketing

B2C (business to consumer marketing) is highly competitive with a full array of extremely similar products, all fiercely competing for their share of owning their unique category, but how is that even possible when all these products and consumables are a dime a dozen? In this article, we unpack exactly that, how to own your unique category share, how to stand out in a sea of competitors, and how to find your unique edge and become the preferred leading brand in the eyes of your consumers.

What makes B2C marketing rather unique is their short purchase cycles, often low-price points and small volume purchased but get your marketing on point and make consumers fall in love with your businesses, and you will be on a home run to repeat business as often as their purchase cycle ends and the new one begins without them even thinking twice about switching to another brand.

Below are my business marketing tips for your B2C brand:

Have a goal in mind

As with any execution, you need to have a clear goal in mind, what are you trying to achieve, why, and by when do you need to achieve this by?

Establish precise marketing goals based on your business objectives, perhaps you need to increase sales from your e-commerce store for a specific category by 15% within the next three months or perhaps you need to increase newsletter subscribers by over 2k in 6 months.

Be specific, be intentional and be measurable with your marketing goals and make sure you are communicating this to whomever is managing your businesses marketing in all 3, short, medium and long-term goals that are all specific, measurable and attainable and have a time deadline.

Partner with the best

In order to really nail your marketing, you need hire a professional team, but why? So many startup entrepreneurs and small business owners usually ask me this believing they can simply manage it all, and the reason is because you need to focus on what you do best, running your business.

Planning and executing your on and offline marketing requires a team of professional copywriters, designers, developers, media planners and buyers, marketers, PR specialists, social media managers etc.

By outsourcing this to an agency you won’t need to hire all those skilled professionals internally, and nor will you need to skill up on each of those professions in your spare time. But rather you will have all these skilled professionals under one roof who are all working together seamlessly to attain your business and marketing objectives.

A good marketing agency are experts in this field for a reason, they will be able to take your business objectives and translate this to attainable marketing objectives and tie this to marketing KPIs which they will be responsible for achieving each month.

These short, medium and long term goals or KPIs (key performance indicators) will indicate to you if they are succeeding with your businesses marketing or not- removing all the risk.

Identify and celebrate your unique USP

Your businesses USP (unique selling proposition) is possibly the strongest angle any B2C product or service has and this is where you need to capitalize on. Your agency will work closely together with you to try and uncover this, so have a think about why, why should a customer pick me over a leading competitor? What makes us so different, so special, so desirable, what is our edge?

Is it perhaps because your packaging is 100% recyclable, or perhaps 20% of your proceeds go to a worthy charity and help uplift deserving communities, or perhaps your brand offers organically and ethically sourced products that are sustainable to our planet, or even free bespoke gift wrapping and a fast delivery service.

Whatever that draw is, whatever makes your company, product or service so special – that’s your headline-maker and should be used in all your marketing material and will ultimately sway your buyers in your favor.

Relook at your brands CI

Have your agency look at your brands Corporate Identity, that’s your logo, corporate colours, design elements, tagline, all the items that make up your unique look and feel and ensure this is unique enough, stands out amongst your competitors, is modern and with the times and is bold and consistent throughout any and all mediums.

The same goes for your brands website, it needs to be functional for whatever your businesses main objective is and look good simultaneously.

Solidify who your brand is in it’s unique market

By partnering with a good ad agency you elevate your game plan with detailed strategies on brand, marketing, content, social media strategies and other offline strategies where needed.

These critical strategy documents will entail detailed information on who your brand is, why you exist, what your USP is and how to communicate it effectively across your platforms and where your brand stands in the market.

These documents will give you a deep understanding of who your target audience is by unpacking things like what are their typical demographics, what do your unique buyer personas look like, what makes them tick, where can you find them, what problems do they have that your product or service can fulfill etc.

As well as important info on your competition such as who your competitors are perhaps this is vastly different to your offline competitors, what are their success stories and failures and what are their marketing channels.

And of course guidance on where to market, what channels and platforms to utilize throughout the typical user journey, why, what performance can you expect and how much it will cost you.

Know your channels

In any B2C inbound marketing strategy, setting up your website for organic search traffic should be a high priority. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) helps bring potential customers to your website month after month without spending any advertising money but does require monthly SEO efforts on an ongoing basis.

It’s also important to know which on and offline marketing channels really work for your industry things like social media are renowned for being fantastic marketing channels for B2C markets, Google Search works really well for your business to be found for certain keywords (even based location wise like “ladies hairdresser Bryanston” for example.

Google Display Network are also fantastic channels to showcase products and even remarket to an audience who have clicked on your product but failed to actually check out in their shopping cart. Perhaps your brand sells baby products such as prams and car seats etc.

It might be beneficial to run a display campaign for your latest car seat on Parent 24 but if your company were in the fitness industry selling the latest fitness watch you might be better off marketing on Fitness Mag.

The point is you need to reach your customers where they are and market to them there and then lure them into performing your desired action.

Really unpack and have a clear plan of your always on campaigns (your everyday marketing efforts) and adhoc campaigns (seasonal, adhoc competitions, specials, promotions, new product launches etc, have a look at your year in advance and plan out when these adhoc campaigns might be) and list each channel and budget allocated to both always on and adhoc.

Spice things up

I always think it’s imperative to utilize 90% of your budget going with the tried and tested channels that you know work month in and month out and save 10% of that marketing budget to trying something a bit left of centre.

This could be partnering up with a social influencers for a specific duration or campaign to help build social proof and brand advocacy, advertising through Waze this works well for a business whereby you want customers to come to your shop for example a fast food outlet or even a clothing or food retailer, or even running a competition through social media, your newsletter or even through a third party placement.

Perhaps something innovative for your business could include doing something different with your banner ad, like a scratch and win banner ad, or an interactive game element or even push notification ads for your App, reminding users of redeemable promo codes or a special you might be running.

Measure, monitor and tweak

Once you have a very clear idea of who your brand is, where it’s going, and the in-depth steps listed above, you need precise and accurate ways of measuring and monitoring your performance.

Analytics across all digital campaigns allow you to monitor the performance of all your digital marketing activities closely. Track what’s working — and what’s not — so you can turn up the dial on effective strategies, abandon futile tactics, and generally respond with agility to move closer to your achieving your goals.

If you would like help in executing your B2C company to market and establish critical brand loyalty as well as repeat business, then email us at enquiries@fusebox.co.za. You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Tags: B2C Marketing, Marketing, Digital Marketing