Growth Marketing for B2C Brands in 2023
Make it stand out
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Growth marketing is often called “customer marketing”, and is a marketing strategy centered around nudging existing customers towards repeat purchases, upselling added services and new products, and encouraging higher average spending over time. In other words, it’s about getting more value (and revenue) from your customer base (existing and new).
Turning a profit is all about understanding your CAC. That’s the cost of acquiring a customer, which is getting increasingly more expensive, now up an eye-watering +60% since 2014 according to Profit Well.
Side by side with this, CLV (customer lifetime value) is steadily falling. That’s the amount that the average customer spends with you in total, across multiple purchases over the course of any number of years.
The bottom line is that more money is being spent on acquisition and less money being made back means tighter margins and less profit. So for B2C marketers looking to move the needle in the right direction, it presents quite a dilemma.
In order to begin to address this, and to create a true B2C growth marketing framework, we need to understand the nuances of the B2C sales and marketing cycle.
So let’s take a look at the 3 stages you need to consider in the B2C growth marketing funnel, including the best practices to follow:
Top of Funnel (awareness). Introduce your target audience to your brand for the first time. At this stage in their journey, your target audience may well have never heard of your brand, and they might not even be aware that they need your products. This is commonly known as the research phase because your target customers are likely to be starting out looking for solutions to problems they’re facing.
Middle of Funnel (consideration). At this stage in the funnel, your target customers have defined their problem clearly, and are now considering products that will solve that problem. This is the funnel stage where you target your audience with content that shows how your products solve that problem.
Bottom of Funnel (conversion). When your customers reach the bottom of your marketing funnel, they’re primed to make a purchase. This is the place to go hard on the sale, with marketing techniques like urgency, FOMO, and discount incentives. Work to set your brand apart from your competitors and use social proof like customer testimonials and reviews to set your product apart from the rest, as well as paid advertising to drive your B2C brand’s distinct selling points.
Now that you have an understanding of how this B2C growth marketing funnel could work for your brand, we should work on establishing the tactics that might work within the B2C growth marketing funnel. But before that, let us work to get a bit more of an in-depth understanding of B2C marketing and what it entails.
B2C Growth Marketing
B2C (Business to Consumer) marketing is any marketing activity that helps businesses communicate with consumers. This is opposed to as B2B (Business to Business) which focuses on businesses that market products or services to other businesses and organizations.
Any organization that focuses on serving the needs, demands, and preferences of individuals can be called a B2C company. Here are some examples of B2C companies:
Special events and premium movies and subscription service
Sporting goods and apparel retailers
A resume writing service for college graduates
Most brands that succeed in B2C digital marketing have gone through a lot of trial and error. This should not be a reason to fear experimentation. Testing often results in new learnings and can be done for relatively cheap. More importantly, testing is fundamental to growth marketing, period.
How to Set Up a Foundation for a Growth Marketing Strategy for B2C
The first step in B2C marketing is to create a simple marketing funnel that puts your brand in front of prospective customers. Here’s an example of a funnel:
Introduce the potential customer to your brand
Encourage the prospect to engage with your brand
Lead the potential customer toward making a purchase
Once the funnel is in place, it’s time to create an effective marketing strategy that helps marketing teams streamline communication and boost campaign results
Creating a Growth Marketing Strategy for B2C Brands
Make it stand out
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Develop a buyer persona
Every B2C business has a picture of its ideal customer. Go deeper and create an imaginary buyer persona with demographics, preferences, and related information.
Understand the buyer journey
Each buyer goes on a unique journey to reach your brand. Here's how it typically looks:
Awareness stage: Prospects realize they have a problem
Consideration stage: Prospects are clear on the reason behind the issue and are actively scouting for solutions
Decision stage: Prospects have shortlisted their preferred brands and Personalization
Customer experience can make or break a brand. 89% of customers say they would make a repeat purchase from a brand if they had a positive first experience.
When crafting your inbound marketing strategy, make sure to create content that matches buyers on each of the three stages of this journey.
Connect with customers personally
B2C buying decisions are guided by emotions. Focus on creating personable and relatable connections with your target audience. Let that personal touch reflect in all places you connect with your potential customers.
Whether you're writing a blog, recording a podcast, or posting a story on Instagram, keep everything real, grounded, and authentic to your business and what it stands for.
Growth Marketing Tactics Suited for B2C Brands
Now that we have established the basis for creating a growth marketing-focused strategy oriented toward B2C brands, we can now examine some tactics that B2C brands should consider for crafting said efficient growth marketing strategy. Here are 8 of them.
1) Influencer Partnerships/Marketing: Influencers are content creators, typically with large online followings, that your audience is likely to view as authority figures.
By partnering with influencers, you can help:
Social Proof – 61% of consumers trust recommendations from influencers. Partnering with influencers gives your B2C brand the added legitimacy you need to overcome new customer objections.
Boost brand reach – By partnering with influencers, you’ll tap into new market segments, increasing your audience size and boosting your brand reach.
Cultivate fresh content – When you let your B2C brand partner with influencers, they’ll likely create content to promote your brand’s product range. You can use this content to engage customers and continue to build trust across your own marketing channels.
Looking to find influencers for your brand? Scour your tagged posts and hashtags relevant to your products and reach out to them or their agency to discuss a potential partnership
2) Remarketing: By including data-driven retargeting in your existing marketing strategy, you can give customers that have bounced prematurely another chance to buy.
Try creating highly relevant and targeted advertisements using first-party data. Ultimately, the goal of retargeting is to boost retention, customer reach, and revenue.
It’s commonplace for B2C brands to use programmatic ads to expand reach or to issue banner ads to retarget customers. These tactics are hit-and-miss. The better option is to use data to re-engage lost contacts where they spend their time and in ways that feel native to that platform.
3) Content-Directed SEO: With SEO, amping up the traffic takes longer, but once it’s working, it can keep driving consistent web traffic and brand exposure for years.
Combined with the rising costs of paid social traffic, SEO is a truly effective, scalable strategy for growing your brand audience and winning new customers.
SEO gives B2C brands an unmissable opportunity to drive relevant, targeted traffic to their site from an audience seeking product information and solutions to their problems.
By devising a long-term SEO strategy focused on building a site’s expertise, authority and trustworthiness, you can use SEO to drive consistent and predictable site growth.
4) Mobile-First Marketing: The world is moving in a mobile-first direction. Many people don’t own laptops or desktop computers anymore. They do all of their computing via tablets, phones, and even watches.
That’s why it’s critical for B2C marketers to adopt a mobile-first strategy. Figure out how your content will appeal to your audience best on mobile devices. It starts with a responsive website. Additionally, you’ll want your posts to look great on mobile, from your blog to social media. Condense your images, use readable fonts, and make yourself accessible on mobile.
It’s a good idea for B2C marketers to implement mobile-first marketing strategies to reach customers in different stages of the funnel — from when they’re doing their initial product research to when they’re ready to purchase.
Here are some mobile-first marketing ideas:
Make your website and landing pages mobile-friendly with a responsive design
Send mobile-friendly emails to your newsletter subscribers
Create social media posts and ads that are optimized for mobile viewing
Send SMS messages to reach mobile users
Run in-app ads
Use QR codes
5) Contests as a Way of Increasing your Customer Base: People love entering contests and you always want to increase customer engagement. Whether it is on social media, email, or your blog, you can engage followers with a fun contest.
Running contests are a great way to build email lists, encourage users to share your content on social media, and get more eyes on all of your online platforms, building up brand awareness. Contests can even help you generate new leads that will eventually become customers.
6) Create a Customer Loyalty Program
How can you get your customers to come back time and again? Most small business owners want more loyal customers, ones that return time after time to make purchases. The best way is with a customer loyalty program. Such programs reward customers for shopping in your (online) store or buying products. A loyalty program increases customer spending and encourages return visits, while also increasing the average size of each order
7) Content as a way of Providing Information to Potential Customers: A solid content marketing strategy can help your B2C business reach new prospects, nurture leads, establish expertise, and foster loyalty among your customers.
Use the content types that appeal to your audience. Explore using any of the following:
Blogging
Infographics
Podcasting
Short-form or long-form videos
Video tutorials
Make sure the content you share is relevant and useful for your customers in different stages of the buyers’ journey. For example, let’s say you’re in the business of making pet products such as dog leashes. In such a case, you can create a video about indoor activities you can do with your dog during winter that highlights the use of leashes.
8) SEM: Search Engine Marketing can broaden your reach, expand your market and drive your sales off the charts largely due to the fact that it is:
Cost-effective
Produces fast results
Easy to test and control
Allows targeting
Allows your brand to show in SERPs even with low domain ratings
Data from pay-per-click (PPC) ads can improve your long-term SEO strategy
From keywords to landing pages, there are certain differences that need to be kept in mind while setting up and running B2C paid search campaigns. However, the bottom line is that SEM allows B2C brands to instantly reach a receptive audience more likely to take action (ex; purchase). However, after some time with considerable learnings gleaned from the Google Adwords interface, the process of running pay-per-click campaigns can become nearly automatic.
Growth Marketing for B2C Brands in 2023:
A successful growth marketing strategy oriented towards B2C brands, designed and executed correctly, can generate tremendous acceleration in customer acquisition, retention, and revenue growth. While these tactics listed are just some of the possible growth marketing tactics that can comprise a solid growth marketing strategy for any B2C business in 2023 and beyond, hopefully with some of the fundamentals provided your B2C business can help growth marketing to become an essential part of your business.
If you are looking for help in terms of creating a growth marketing strategy for your B2C business, then why not arrange a meeting with our expert growth marketing consultants? We will spend time with you to get to know the finer details of your business, and to help determine what tactics and strategies might work best for your business.