the place people come to connect with friends and family, meet new people and simply have conversations. Your business has the opportunity to create a dialogue with your audience, when they comment or message you leave a reply. It helps you with building trust and credibility, as you’ll be able to answer any questions they have, join in on conversations, offer them advice or simply leave a response to a comment that they’ve left you. Showing your brand is authentic, cares about its audience and appreciates their contributions is the first step to influencing their behaviour. 

Social proof is a powerful tool that can have a big impact on whether or not consumers buy from you. Think about when you’ve gone to purchase something online – often, you’ll look for reviews, unboxings, recommendations, and so do many others. In fact, 87% of buying decisions begin with research conducted online before the purchase is made as reported by CXL. You need to consider this when it comes to your business - customers will trust others who have had experiences with your products, as they’re likely to be similar people to them and looking for the same problem to be solved. It can be hard if you haven’t already been selling online and are a new business to get this social proof – which will take time to build up, but if you have a relative digital marketing presence that you’re wanting to shift towards social media, then you can use these reviews in posts, get in touch with niche influencers who’ll promote your products to their audience, and leverage any user-generated content you find to help persuade your audience that your product has worked for others like them, so will for them too if they make a purchase. 

How relevant is your content? Algorithms are highly tailored to the needs and wants of your audience, being created from their online habits, accounts they follow, interactions, even sometimes other sites they’ve visited and what they’ve interacted with over there too – so you must ensure your content is hitting the mark. You need to be reaching the right people at the right time, which can help to increase how impactful your message comes across as. Get on trends as soon as they begin, ensure you have a consistent approach not just on social media but in all digital marketing fields when it comes to your style, tone of voice, posting time and response time. You have to be relevant to you audience, and you must understand their social media activity and interests in order to form your business’. Your content needs to resonate in terms of relevance, but it also needs to be relevant in terms of emotion – create a deeper connection and create emotional narratives that hook your audience in and speak directly to them. 

Social Media is great for building brand awareness – it’s often where consumers discover new businesses and products, but its just the start of their customer journey. They become aware of you, but if you impress them enough for them to make a purchase and this also leaves a great impression, they may keep coming back for more – turning them into a loyal customer. Social media can be their starting point, but it can also be the place they continue to have an ongoing relationship with your brand – they may even turn into advocates and consumers that help to drive your long-term growth. Ensuring you are recognisable, innovative and most importantly, attracting a community of people who want to engage with your business both on social media and through purchasing what you have to sell. 

Making social media a bigger part of your selling strategy can be a great move, and one that you can build on when it comes to paid options further down the line (if it begins to bring you results). By ensuring all of these tips are in line when you approach your social media marketing, you can have a positive impact on your audience and influence them to turn from followers into long-term consumers of your business’ products and services. 

 

B2C Marketing is something we’ll often encounter every day from other businesses. Known as Business To Consumer marketing, this style of content often concerns general people who you’re looking to engage and turn into customers. You’ll need to convince them to purchase your product or service by answering their pain points and offering a solution, directly targeting a specific set of people that you desire to be the main target audience base for your business. 

One of the biggest differences between B2B and B2C is the target audiences. Each marketing type has a niche audience set, which helps you curate a core marketing message and strategy that works for your business and the people you’re looking to reach. B2B marketing’s main focus is on people already in your industry – they’re often people you want to connect with, whether that’s to simply form valuable business relationships or you’re after some kind of partnership or investment opportunity. You’ll be looking for decision-makers, meaning your methods will be much more professional, the lingo you use will be industry-specific and you won’t often be bound by demographics. 

 

B2C Marketing however, is all about targeting based on demographics, such as location, age, gender, income and interests. You’ll be whittling your audience size down to a very specific group of people. Known as your audience persona, you’ll create your ideal customer and target you messaging towards that person – helping to turn them from potential customers to loyal ones. These are the people that will be buying your products and services, so perfecting your targeting, copy, graphics is key to ensuring you engage the right audience and persuade them to trust and purchase from your business. 

Consumers are more emotionally-led with their purchasing decisions, so explaining to them what benefits your product will bring to their lives after solving the issue they have will help to drive their purchasing decisions even if they aren’t in instant need for the product at that moment in time. This is relatively similar for businesses – they’ll want to know the benefits of buying into your business, and what it’ll do for them. If you’re looking to solve their pain points, you need to clearly define how you’ll do this whilst also displaying what you will require in return for working with them. The funnel for B2B marketing is much longer than B2C marketing, as B2B will often require you to be in contact with more than just one person, or will require the person you are in contact with to communicate with others within their company. B2C marketing means you’re most likely reaching out to one singular person, making their decision to make a purchase a lot faster, speeding up their time in the marketing funnel. 

B2C marketing is about retaining relationships – delivering further benefits to consumers after their initial purchase, trying to retain them for a longer period of time rather than just one singular sale. With B2B, you’ll likely be fixed into a longer-term relationship which allows you to build up trust, grow and develop alongside one another. However, where B2C marketers continue to innovate their ideas to provide an excellent service to their customers, B2B marketers can often fall into a transactional way of relationship building – which eliminates that slight personal touch that can make all the difference for consumers when it comes to purchasing. 

LinkedIn is the ideal place for B2B Marketing. The professional social media platform, LinkedIn has over a billion worldwide users who belong to thousands of industries. You’re pretty much guaranteed to find the people on LinkedIn you’re looking for, and connecting with these people allows you to build beneficial business relationships. Whilst you can try other platforms like Facebook or X for B2B marketing, LinkedIn has positioned itself as the go-to for B2B marketing, and can provide great value to your business if you choose to use this platform. 

B2C Marketing can work on most social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X or even LinkedIn. Facebooks Ad options provide incredible targeting options that allow you to specifically reach out to the audience you desire, and create highly-optimised campaigns that, when done correctly, can bring great success to your business. 

B2B and B2B are both important marketing techniques, and hopefully this blog helps you to understand the differences between both, allowing you to adapt to the right method for your businesses marketing plans.