If you’ve ever sold, advertised or marketed to both B2B and B2C clientele, you’ve probably noticed that there is a significant difference. Yes, their money spends the same, and you use a lot of the same sales and marketing techniques, but there is a different psychology to it—you get a different emotional response when you sell to a consumer than when you are selling to someone who represents a corporation.
B2B buyers probably know what you are selling better than you do; they know everything there is to know about your service or product—as well as what your competitors have to offer. They don’t buy products and services only based on quality and price—like the B2C buyer.
Is There a Difference in Advertising Between B2B and B2C Advertising?
Certainly. There is a big difference in advertising between the two. The type of advertising, the strategy—every aspect is different. There are some key takeaways that are important for those in the B2B business to remember as plan your advertising strategy, but the most important to remember is time. The time is takes to run a successful B2B advertising campaign online is considerably longer than a B2C campaign, and here are the top reasons why.
B2B Sales Involve a Greater Number of Involved Stakeholders
When dealing with the purse strings of an organization, especially if it is a large one that has a lot of bureaucracy and capital, you’ll deal with a lot of stakeholders. You aren’t just selling one person, or two people. You are selling a person, their boss, a division, the CFO, and maybe even the CEO.
This means that you can’t just hit them with one ad and call it a day. Once your site and content gets in front of each of these people, it is important that over the next few months, while they are waiting for RFPs and decisions from other internal stakeholders, you are continuing to remain present with strategies such as remarketing, that you made sure that you didn’t just serve ads to a lowly person who can’t really make an impact on the purchasing decision, that your ad spend is used strategically to get you quality leads.
Conversions Lead to Leads, Not Sales
Unlike B2C, where conversions often translate into sales; in B2B, conversions translate into leads. It is important to optimize your ads in a way so that you can capture leads accurately. You need to create an awesome landing page that has a high-quality score and will help your ads rank higher than your competitors’.
While we can’t help you land sales, we can ensure that you get the best ROI for your advertising and ensure that you have a higher quality leads and lower Cost Per Acquisition than you were getting. For sales, it is important to not just rely on advertising who will earn you leads, but also your sales team who will close deals, and be persistent with following up during the long sales cycle.
It Takes Time to Get Good Data
It takes a lengthier relationship with the people you are trying to sell to, so why wouldn’t it take a longer relationship with your advertiser? If you are selling in the B2B market—as we’ve covered—it takes more stakeholders and decision makers, thus more time; and B2B advertising mainly gets leads, not sales. Because of this it is important that the money that you are putting towards advertising really pays off.
If you cut the process short, you won’t take the time to optimize your ads and ensure that you are getting good, QUALITY leads, this takes time and data to improve your campaigns in the long term. Once your sales teams begin to get leads and determines the value of them, advertisers can better determine how to further optimize your targeting, ads and landing pages.
Using Ads to Generate Leads for B2B
Gone are the days of cold calling for B2B sales. You CAN make them come to you, it just takes time and an advertising budget on the front end to get your name out there and to weed out the weak leads. The key to all successful B2B advertising campaigns, is heavy optimization, A/B testing and above all else – patience.
