What are the differences between B2B and B2C marketing in connection with conversion funnels?

Conversion funnel has been participating in a crucial part of marketing campaigns through the last couple of years. 

Funnel is basically a metaphor referring to the visitors a business can lose through their shopping procedure. Most of the time a conversion funnel contains 4 different steps, each of which is crucial to reach the next. These are awareness, interest, desire, and action. 

Awareness is the first step and it is one of the most crucial ones. This phase includes searching for potential buyers, and writing leads to get to know you.

In the interest stage, you need to answer many very important questions for your potential buyers. Why are you unique? How can you distinguish your company from the others? How do you convince your future customers to choose you? These seem to be easy questions, however, most of the businesses have yet to answer this simple thing. Be sure that you can!

When you successfully attract people's attention you have to convince them that your product is the best they can get. This is the desire phase. This step requires a lot of money, creative concepts, and a good strategy. 

In the last step, your potential customers have to be converted into real customers. This is where this funnel begins to narrow significantly. Action not only refers to buying something in this case, it can refer to a subscription, or clicking on a valuable CTA button.   

The whole story is only successful if the visitor reaches the fourth stage, and takes action. But it doesn’t mean that the customer has to buy something in the end as I wrote earlier, it could mean many more things. 

But what are the differences between the two types of marketing, and how their conversion funnels are separated from each other? This, and many more things will be revealed in this article, so stay tuned 🙂

There are two ways ahead of you when you want to sell a product. You can sell the product to businesses or the final customer. The difference between the two is, the final consumer will use the product, but the business will resell it to other potential buyers.

Since these two routes are very different from each other, both of them require a different approach.  

You have to put focus and measure your success in different things and ways. These changes affect the way you communicate with your buyers and overwrite your whole marketing strategy. So be sure at the very first minute when you create a business which of these two markets you want to compete in. 

In this article, I won’t mention all the differences, but there are many articles throughout the net which already did this. I am only taking into consideration one variable; the conversion funnel. 

However, I split the conversion funnel into its stages, (awareness, interest, desire, and action) for easier understanding. 

The strategies include content marketing, hosting events, search engine advertising, and many targeted advertising. Here, you don’t have to find an infinite number of partners, you only need a few, but with a clear intention and desire to choose you. 

In B2B marketing, this phase is all about showing your knowledge. Unlike in other cases, where you can convince your potential buyer with emotional messages, in this market, it won’t work. You need to use rational messages with a lot of proof, credible numbers, and a well-established future strategy. 

Talk, talk, and talk. This is characterizing this step in B2B marketing. As you will only have relatively few partners, you can convince them, but only one by one. You have to maintain each partner's desire and establish your campaign techniques for that specific person. 

It is also very different from the B2C market. Here, your need to write tailored contracts after each of your successful negotiations. You need to avoid or reduce misunderstandings, as it can lead to a catastrophic event here. The reason for that is your partners usually buy a big quantity of you, which costs them enormous money. 

Here, you need to find those channels that can provide great publicity, to spread out your messages to more and more people. These can be television advertisements, radio, print media, or social media advertisements. 

You can attract the customer’s attention through their desire. Create appealing videos, storylines with emotional messages, or promotions.

You have to influence your customer’s decision-making process somehow. However, there are many methods of doing that. But alongside that, your task is to build confidence. 

It is not a good place to consider deals. You have to be really quick, or your competitors will hijack your potential customers. End the conversion, as fast as you can, even if it is a purchase or other desired action. 

B2B and B2C marketing are sometimes completely opposite things. However, in terms of their conversion funnel, it is not always the case. 

But to find the similarities and the differences, and use the perfect approach every time is a quite hard task.

I hope I helped you with this article, and from now you can distinguish the approaches every time, and you will use the appropriate path.