B2C Go-To-Market Strategy
The focus of this section is developing a go-to-market strategy for B2C businesses. B2C may be a lesser-known term than B2B, but it refers to a very common type of business that sells directly to the consumer.
B2B has become synonymous with SaaS (software as a service) companies pursuing suitors for their latest product or service.
The rise of B2B businesses shouldn’t come as a surprise. The COVID-19 pandemic has left its mark on the way we do business, opening the door for software suites to solve remote communication and project management issues.
Yet B2C businesses certainly still have their place, with consumers looking for new products to enhance their quality of life. Global e-commerce sales have increased for many B2C companies during the pandemic, but for others in industries such as travel, there’s been a sharp drop-off.
What is B2C marketing?
B2C marketing involves a business-to-consumer model, which can manifest as any of the following:
- Online and brick-and-mortar retailers
- Companies with customer-targeting ads
- Subscription-based services
Since you’ll be marketing to individual consumers as opposed to businesses, your approach should reflect the need for personalized communication. This section will deal with B2C marketing best practices such as considering the buyer’s journey, developing a content strategy, and generating leads.
Read on to discover exactly what it takes to create an effective go-to-market strategy for B2C businesses.
B2C marketing best practices
In years gone by, B2C marketing would involve cheesy infomercial ads on TV, in-person sales efforts, and other methods that many would look down upon in this day and age. Now, with the rise of online marketing and new social media platforms, you’re spoilt for choice.
To save you some energy, here are some B2C marketing best practices you can bank on to get your product to market successfully:
Consider the buyer’s journey
If you’re not familiar with the buyer’s journey, now’s a good time to brush up on it. It goes a little something like this: Each consumer has to jump through several hoops before a purchase is on the cards. Each stage presents a new opportunity for businesses to grab the consumers’ interest with various marketing strategies.
- Awareness: The first stage is all about making customers or prospects aware of your product and the problem it solves for them. If the word isn’t out yet, here’s where you should focus most of your marketing efforts.
- Consideration: In the second stage, prospects are actively looking to address their problem, so you just need to convince them that you have the perfect solution.
- Decision: Here, your prospects are on the verge of making a decision. Now’s the time to let them get hands-on with the product or service with a trial or entice them to choose your product with competitive pricing.
Develop a content strategy
Once you’ve identified what stage of the buyer’s journey your prospects are in, you can start to come up with content marketing strategies. Better yet, you can reach prospects at all three stages by diversifying your approach and using various marketing channels in your GTM strategy.
To ensure your content marketing efforts are successful, you should tailor your content to your customers’ interests and needs. Using your imagined ideal buyer’s persona and market research, create content from which prospects will derive value.
Here are just a few ways you can appeal to your audience and build up a catalog of content that will help you scale search engine rankings, become more visible online, and bring in potential leads:
- Blog posts
- White papers
- Videos
- Case studies
Generate leads
While content is one way of bringing in leads, it isn’t usually enough on its own to build and grow a significant customer base. SEO and social media should arguably form part of any B2C go-to-market strategy, on top of a compelling content strategy.
SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, is a term that many people know, but few people understand. This often misunderstood concept underpins many successful lead generation strategies and can help your content make its way to the first page of Google.
So what is SEO? Essentially, SEO is just a way of driving more traffic from search engines to your website or a particular web page.
Why is this important? Well, when you consider that more than 360 billion searches were made through Google in 2021, it seems obvious that you’d want to pour resources into optimizing your SEO. Consumers use search engines like Google to answer many of their questions, so why not present yourself as an authority on a topic and drive organic traffic your way with good SEO practices?
To implement SEO into your B2C marketing, you can try the following:
- Sprinkle relevant keywords into your content
- Have an SEO expert audit your website
- Use catchy title tags and meta descriptions
Social media
Social media is another excellent way to bring in more leads for your new product launch. Social media represents a wealth of opportunities to capitalize on the sheer number of eyeballs on it day-in and day-out.
It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in; there’ll be an audience for your product on the right social media platform.
Whereas B2B businesses may focus their efforts on a business-focused platform like LinkedIn, B2C businesses would be better-served using everyday platforms such as Twitter, TikTok, and Facebook to appeal directly to prospects.
