Company models are changing. As digital continues to grow and transform the market, brands have new opportunities to run their businesses differently. Gone are the days of having to choose between a business-to-consumer (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B) structure. Today, companies can have both. Meet B2B2C, the business-to-business-to-consumer model.
The B2B2C model looks something like this: Business 1 sells to Business 2 who sells to consumers. This approach blurs the line between B2C and B2B, allowing for flexibility and a heightened shopper experience. In fact, Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce even said, “We really see every B2B company and every B2C company becoming a B2B2C company.” This approach is becoming more and more popular, as we see B2B2C models enabling companies to keep up with the rapid growth of technology.
So what does this mean for marketing? B2B2C brands come with a unique set of creative challenges. Not only do they need to cater to other businesses, but B2B2C brands can’t lose sight of the consumer. To help you get started on your marketing strategy, here are our top tips for B2B2C creative production:
Know your personas
Marketers are all too familiar with the phrase, “know your audience.” Although every brand should heed this advice, it is especially important for B2B2C companies. This is because B2B2C enterprises are marketing not only to businesses but to shoppers as well. Both have very different relationships with the brand. They must understand the pain points and goals of their target businesses and also learn the wants and needs of shoppers.
Successful B2B2C brands recognize these different personas and communicate relevant messages to each audience accordingly. During a recent Celtra study, we found that more than half of consumers (56%) find creative assets from brands not to be relevant to their likes and interests. That’s why it’s so important for these brands to learn their audience and then apply what they know to their marketing campaigns. A one-size-fits-all approach simply won’t work for B2B2C businesses, which means creative variety is a must. When brands produce custom content with a variety of messaging, it keeps the creative feeling fresh and exciting. To prevent ad fatigue, brands must find new ways to scale creative relevancy.
Prepare to pivot
Traditional business marketing moves fast. B2B2C marketing moves faster. With the acquisition of new business clients and growing shopper channels, marketing campaigns need to keep up. As B2B2C brands grow their in-house teams to increase brand assets, old-school workflows wreak havoc on their output. That is why it is crucial for creative and marketing teams to rethink how they organize their production.
Traditional workflows don’t work in today’s market. Our study found that 66% of consumers find creative assets (ads, promotions, social posts, etc.) from brands to be repetitive. This is because manual production is slow and cumbersome, so designers don’t have the bandwidth to produce creative variety. It takes time to create assets one-by-one, let alone adjust creative based on performance or new audience needs. For B2B2C brands to be able to pivot their marketing campaigns quickly, they need to turn to software to automate repetitive and time-consuming creative production tasks.
Build your omnichannel experience
When it comes to branding, consistency is key. For B2B2C brands, their digital presence is everything. From social posts to paid media to web pages, it is crucial to create customized experiences across each channel while maintaining a consistent look and feel to establish brand value. We found that 60% of consumers are bothered or distrust a brand when ads or content doesn’t match the brand’s website or app or store. When B2B2C businesses incorporate customer businesses into their enterprise, it becomes even more important to develop high-quality, consistent branding. Ultimately, maintaining this pixel perfection and growing it at scale is what helps B2B2C companies achieve success.
The golden ticket for B2B2C
The fast-paced world of B2B2C needs production that can match. To create content variety at scale, make quick campaign changes, and maintain creative excellence, automation is the winning solution. Introducing automation software into your creative production workflow not only increases the capacity of your design team but also buys back time.
Celtra allows brands to maximize their resources and time without sacrificing creative quality. Celtra users have found that they can create triple the creative volume while cutting the campaign production cycle in half. Our cloud-based software makes it easy for brands to update creatives in real-time, enabling team agility by making adjustments on the fly.
If you’d like to learn more about Celtra, check out this video or contact us today!