Research by the Content Marketing Institute shows that B2C marketers are improving their processes, day- by- a day, to achieve measurable objectives. 38% of B2C marketers use their documented content marketing strategy, whereas, 36% have an undocumented strategy.
Content is king and content marketing is a hugely effective marketing strategy. It helps you increase your blog traffic by 232% and has a major impact on revenues. If you’re marketing your products and services to consumers directly, you need to learn content marketing strategies. This definitive guide will help you use content marketing effectively to broaden your target audience, improve organic traffic, and enhance brand awareness.
Guide to B2C Content Marketing
This guide will cover the following areas:
- What is B2C Content Marketing?
- The Goals of B2C Marketing?
- The Difference Between B2C & B2B Marketing
- What Do B2C Marketers Do?
- Is Automation Helpful for B2C Marketing?
- Leverage Automated Communication
- Does Retargeting Help to Increase Sales?
- How to Build the Best B2C Marketing Strategy
- Key Elements of B2C Content Marketing
What is B2C Content Marketing?
B2C (business-to-consumer) marketing differs from B2B (business-to-business) marketing as it involves the best emotional practices used to promote products among consumers through the use of fresh, informative and engaging content.
The Goals of B2C Marketing?
- Increasing engagement
- Raising brand awareness
- Getting more leads that turn into consumers
- Creating customer evangelists
- Boosting customer retention and lifetime value
- Driving more sales
The Difference Between B2C & B2B Marketing
Many people confuse between B2C and B2B content marketing. While both seek to create brand awareness among people and ultimately spur repeated sales, there are a few key differences among these two marketing tactics.
| B2C | B2B | |
|---|---|---|
| Target Market | Large | Small |
| Buying Process | Single Step | Multiple Steps |
| Buyer | Individual | Business Entity |
| Sales Driver | Brand Awareness | Value Proposition/Relationships |
| Sales Funnel | Spontaneous | Complicated |
What Do B2C Marketers Do?
B2C marketers sell their brand by creating catchy content/headlines that ensures the brand remains on the mind of consumers they need or want to buy.
- Marketers must evaluate a company’s past performance and make future predictions accordingly.
- Gathering accurate marketing performance data is challenging. But to get success, marketers often have to estimate budget and compare with the previous one.
Why is Automation so Important for B2C Marketing?
Marketers are busy persons. They don’t have sufficient time in the day to manually complete all the tasks. That’s why marketing automation process is leading the industry and has become an important aspect of today’s marketing world. Marketing automation is critical.
It allows marketers to control (without manual task) campaign aspects from one central location. Marketers can rely on automated solutions to free themselves from day-to-day execution while handling big picture strategy and performances. Marketing automation helps target the right consumers for higher leads and increased revenue.
Leverage Automated Communication
Marketers rely on marketing automation to reach large audiences and allow to optimize email marketing processes to take campaigns to the next level. It includes:
- Onboarding emails.
- Incentives and offers.
- Repurchase programs and ratings.
Does Retargeting Help to Increase Sales?
Retargeting sounds like a boring concept, but it’s simple and effective. It’s all about reconnecting with those customers who aren’t currently part of your business and who have connected with you in the past. Retargeting would help you get your old consumers back on the track. It’s an effective strategy for B2C marketing.
How to Build the Best B2C (Business to Consumer) Marketing Strategy?
You cannot get success unless you make a connection with our consumer’s thoughts and purchasing ability. So, if you want to build number one e-commerce website, you need to follow a number of critical steps.
1. Understanding the B2C Customer
Be familiar with the psychology: For a high-performing B2C strategy, you need to understand the psychology behind customer decision making.
2. Identify Consumers’ Goals
B2C content marketer must have to identify customers’ goals. Consumers buy products only when they expect those products to meet their demands and solve their problems. A marketer should answer: if my product or services meet my customers’ needs?
3. The Power of Emotions
Understanding consumers’ emotions can increase long-term conversions. In your content, add the right emotional words (as necessary) that can capture the reader’s attention at first glance and give them a reason to buy from you.
4. Grab Consumers with Catchy Headlines
How to get their attention? It’s simple. A good headline highlights the benefits in the active voice and the present tense. Use specific keywords in your heading. Also, influence your target market by adding high-quality, meaningful product images that catch their attention at once.
5. Timing is Everything
You need to calculate timings to launch your product so that you can reach the audience before your competitors do. Right timing will increase your sales.
Key Elements of B2C Content Marketing
1. Brand identification
A good campaign highlights your company products and services by recognizing consumer needs; identifying products they search for, evaluating options, and much more.
2. Establishing Value
The most important phase is to establish value while using white papers, blog posts, case studies, articles, and another in-depth resource with useful information. These will help customers to see you as a valuable resource and aren’t about closing a sale. People want facts and figures to support their decisions, therefore, make use of it wisely. For this reason, the social media platform is more common and has become a major content sharing platform to attract customers.
3. Build a Website
Your website plays an important role in showcasing your brand image to the world. So be careful when you hire a web designer. A good designer will build a site keeping in view the nature of your business, target audience and other factors.
Suppose you are in the business of selling makeup products so here your target audiences are girls and women. If your site looks dull to them will they visit again? Also, make sure to add colorful makeup related images because an unnecessary image will also turn their heads to your competitor’s website.
Once you build a website, keep it updated with the latest blogs posts and articles. SEO keywords are incorporated in blogs and articles to help businesses to reach their target audience. For this, you need to hire the best SEO service provider in the town. The more your content will get optimized, chances are high that your website rank higher in the search results.
4. Enhance Value
Recommend additional items to the consumers or offer them deals and discounts that will help them to take action. Customers buy on feelings— they’ll buy from you if they feel like you’re offering the best value. Everyone loves a contest. You can create a contest because the idea of winning something, without many efforts, for free is almost too attractive.
5. Create a Contest
You can host a contest on your Facebook page blog or anywhere else. You might give away something useful and expensive that audience would love to have.
For example, give a new flat-screen television, but if your business has nothing to do with TV, the audience will not feel connected, and the contest won’t have the desired result. So, it is important to choose a giveaway that’s related to your business.
6. Add a Free Offer With Purchase
If you plan to give a gift with every purchase, it will add more value to your brand. In other words, people love to get free items, so this will encourage them to make purchases from you.
7. Create Membership Programs
Gamification (membership programs) encourages consumers to avail your products or services so they can rise up their membership levels. A membership program, aka, loyalty program, combines competitiveness and rewards. It benefits consumers as they move up the levels; they gain access, which enhances their relationship with your business.
There is no hard and fast rule of creating membership levels for your business, for example:
- Bronze: if a customer is at the bronze level he or she will receive free discounts every quarter.
- Silver: customers who reach this level get special rewards in addition to the discounts.
- Gold: customers who reached the top level will receive bronze and silver rewards plus free consultation every year.
These loyalty programs will help you boost your sales.
Conclusion
From the above guide, we can conclude that a well-rounded and a well-documented B2C marketing strategy can boost your campaign and revenue. B2C marketing measures the results of each campaign and identifies ways to communicate with your target audience.
The best strategy persuades your audience to buy your products or services over those of your competitors.