The Subtleties Between B2B and B2C Marketing Data

From my experiences as both a B2C and B2B marketer (and fresh from the DMA conference), I’ve concluded that consumer data is much easier to come by and that consumers are noticeably easier to conduct direct marketing campaigns for; in general, B2C is far less complicated than its B2B counterpart. For B2C, demographics are usually enough to conduct a direct marketing campaign.  All you need is the person’s name, address, gender, age, and any psychographic “good to have” information that is specific to the product being marketed.

However, in a B2B marketing environment, it is not nearly enough to know a contact’s name, title, and the company’s demographic information such as revenue, industry, or number of employees. You also need to know if your contact is an end user, influencer, decision maker, or simply a researcher. This is why marketers tend to address various individuals within the same company hoping to find the “right” target. To further complicate the process, the information necessary to find that “right” target is arguably impossible to get through 3^rd party providers, costly to gather by phone, and it would be a complete waste of effort to market to all the contacts.

So what’s the solution? I’ve found that e-mailing a generic message to all prospects in the same company, then monitoring the recipients’ online behavior is a systematic approach to uncovering what further marketing information to send, and to whom I should be sending it.

Now what happens when a person you’ve been marketing to is no longer at the company— the e-mail bounces-back, the phone doesn’t ring anymore? If you’re lucky, you will have other people from the organization in your database. If not, you have to start from scratch and hope that person will remember your company from previous correspondence. The lesson here: timing is everything on the B2B side. Conversely, for B2C marketing this would not be an issue at all having access to services such as NCAO available through most postal service providers.

In theory, there seems to be very little difference between B2B and B2C marketing. In actuality, unlike B2C marketing, in B2B you have to be aware of the time sensitivity and the complexity that comes with finding the right person. Yet, you also have the luxury of dealing with fewer variables which allows you to make better and faster decisions when marketing to businesses.

B2B and B2C marketing data and campaigns each come with unique challenges. When marketers have a deep understanding of these challenges and how to go about addressing them, marketers are well on their way to improving marketing effectiveness.