At the end of the day, businesses market to people, not to faceless decision-making committees or a bunch of same-demographic consumers. Whether you’re selling to CEOs or stay-at-home dads, your marketing should speak to individual customers - think “human” instead of “the client” or “the client company” - each with his or her own tastes, interests, expectations, preferences, life, and work situations.
More and more companies are breaking out of the B2C and B2B constraints and adopting the B2P - business to people - marketing strategy. In a world where advanced technology enables increased customization, the rise of social media allows greater customer engagement, and mobile solutions let customers interact with businesses 24/7, the winning approach is no longer “How can I convince the customer to buy?” but “What is the customer looking for, and how can I best present it to him/her?”In today’s customer-centric environment, switching to B2P lets you personalize what is often an impersonal approach and connect directly to the decision maker – similar to taking an Account-based Marketing approach.
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As a B2P marketer, you:
- Provide a human voice to a faceless corporation
- Target the people who make the buying decisions
- Understand not just the business client, but the customers of that client
- Listen to your customer to increase customer satisfaction and brand loyalty
- Speak to the actual person behind the job title
- Obtain first-hand insights into customer decision making to better serve your audience’s needs
- Increase your offering’s value when consumers know you took the time to understand their needs
- Let decision makers connect emotionally to your brand and its values
GET OUR TIP SHEET ABOUT COORDINATING B2B2C COMMUNICATIONS
As the name implies, B2P is a two-way street, and your strategy should follow suit. Achieve B2P marketing success by:
- Continually educating and informing your audience with high quality and valuable content
- Using social media for ongoing customer engagement
- Sending personalized one-to-one messages in your blog posts and tweets
- Provide easy and timely customer support to your end users
- Achieving consistency in communication via a personal manager who can regularly interact with high-value clients
- Optimizing your customer data storage policy to avoid leakage and illegal use
- Customizing your product or service to better fit your customer
- Enable customers to try your solution before buying
- Responding swiftly and respectfully to customer queries or complaints
- Creating a low-friction medium for customer suggestions or, feedback
LEARN ABOUT THE B2C CUSTOMER-FIRST APPROACH
Whether it’s Amazon using customer information to suggest other items of interest, retargeting by sites you’ve recently visited, or Windows allowing you to personalize your PC, speaking directly to an audience of one is driving more marketing strategies -and sales – today.