What’s The Difference Between A B2B And B2C Marketer, And Which Is Right For Your Career Goals?

Marketing is not all things to all industries.

When considering a career in this most fast-paced and varied of industries, it's wise to start your journey with understanding the basics of the two primary schools of marketing - B2B (business to business), and B2C (business to consumer).

The purpose of marketing is ostensibly to help encourage a customer to purchase your product or service over another. The many, many ways in which you do this - direct marketing, email marketing, advertisements, influencer marketing, billboards, flyers through a front door - will only be, more or less, effective insofar as you understand your customer needs - Who are, what do they want, and why should they buy anything from you? 

Cutting through the marketing noise can be a labor of love, and even then the results can be negligible without a nailed-down marketing strategy that opens the right doors, and grabs the right attention, of the right people, consistently. 

Hence, the importance of understanding whether your style of marketing and your passion for the industry sits better in front of businesses, or consumers…or both!

What is B2B marketing?

B2B marketing refers to business to business marketing. This means certain service or product makers direct their marketing efforts to other businesses, in the hope that they choose to integrate or purchase their product to make their business more effective. 

As LinkedIn worded it, “Any company that sells to other companies. B2B can take many forms: software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscriptions, security solutions, tools, accessories, office supplies”. 

Almost anything, within reason, can be sold (and therefore marketed) as a B2B product, but in the main, these products or services are niche, directed at certain industries, and made specifically for business tasks and improvements, rather than customer need or consumer habit.

For example: take a Point of Sale SaaS company. While many consumers use POS units and exchange money via POS terminals with retailers and company owners, the marketing and sales of POS products is exclusively a B2B transaction. Therefore, any marketing strategy built in support of this product needs to be focused on engaging the right people within the business, who then can test, personalize, and purchase the POS system.

However, despite the centrality of marketing lead generation within B2B companies, very few B2B companies commit to marketing as a major investment, with “a quarter of B2B organizations (allocating) only 5% of their total budget to marketing”. However, “nearly half of B2B organizations said they’re planning to boost their content budget in the next year”, so, despite the lack of marketing funding overall, spending in the B2B sphere is on the up.

What is B2C marketing?

The flip of the marketing coin is B2C marketing - this is products and services aimed at consumers. 

Marketing within the B2C space is much wider and less niche, a lot more inclusive of a diverse range of marketing strategies, platforms and approaches, and more “emotive” in principle and direction.

Speed, here, is a top priority. As Adobe says, “For B2C marketers, a big challenge is always staying current with — and ahead of — customer behavior predictions. B2C is fast-paced and market changes can happen overnight.”

While B2B typically focuses on logical business improvements and legitimacy of product within a closed business space, B2C is the wild west of marketing - open to huge amounts of interpretation and creative outlet, subject to the whims of trend, and its hugely competitive as a result. 

For example, cinema companies market their services - immersive film experiences - directly to audiences. Rather than focus on a solution or service, they focus on emotion and experience, engaging the consumer by highlighting the environment, nostalgia and escapism of a movie theater.

In this battle for attention, authenticity plays an outsized hand. “91% of consumers are prepared to reward brands for their authenticity”, and channel management and innovation is all-consuming and growing, with “42% of marketers plan to increase budget in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR)...61% of content marketers expect increasing spending towards in-person events in 2022…33% of marketers who don’t use automation or artificial intelligence (AI) plan to in 2022”.

How do I know which marketing type is right for me?

While both B2B and B2C fields have their own nuances and strategies, there is a lot of overlap in marketing approach between B2B and B2C products and services, especially in social media marketing, traditional advertising, and when products straddle both B2B and B2C markets (such as electronics, clothing, or SaaS tech platforms).

The trick to knowing which line of work suits you comes down to your own marketing horizons, and how each marketing field packages its workloads:

Platform management: The strategies and platforms marketers use to engage businesses and consumers are, largely, the same. For example, SEO and keyword research is vital in both B2B and B2C marketing; effective, creative advertisement and savvy copy still turn the heads of both business and consumers in both B2B and B2C audiences. However, certain fields need specific skills - the niche nature of most B2B businesses means those skills need to be hyper-focused on certain channels to make maximum impact.

The human element: After all, people are people, and you still need to communicate your solution to a problem in clearly defined, creative, concise ways for both businesses and consumers. We urge every marketer to explore how they build relationships with clients.

Your passions: B2B marketing is traditionally seen as containing more elements of niche marketing than B2C - naturally, this is because you’re marketing to fellow experts in a field, and therefore your language, content and marketing design has to be, mostly, professional and authoritative. However, B2C offers a fuller, more varied range of marketing options, especially in the agency field where you’ll be working across a slate of clients, all with their own marketing needs and audiences. 

So, in light of the above…which marketing type are you?