How to Set Up Proper Growth Marketing Processes at a B2C Business
In a previous post we looked at the importance of establishing the proper growth marketing processes within a business. While this is central to any type of business at any stage of its development, what to do as part of these processes will be different with different type of businesses.
Over the course of the next several articles, we will be examining the growth marketing processes at different sort of businesses and at different stages.
In this article, we will be examining what is entailed in terms of setting up the growth marketing processes for B2C businesses.
What Exactly Is B2C Marketing
B2C stands for business-to-consumer. B2C marketing is the process of selling services and products to individual consumers.
In contrast to B2B (Business to Business), B2C marketing is often more focused on generating an emotional response among its target audience, as opposed to simply demonstrating value.
B2C marketing works on the basis that customers look for goods or services to meet an immediate need. Therefore, they tend to purchase without doing much research on the product or service. With B2C purchases, users typically complete their purchase within the first hours or days of becoming aware of a product or service. For a successful B2C campaign, a business owner should understand their customers’ buying habits, what is currently happening in the market, and what strategies best reach the customers they are targeting where they might potentially congregate when considering how to go about making a decision as it pertains to purchasing the products/services you offer..
Here are some examples of B2C companies:
An over-the-top platform that offers premium movies and TV show subscriptions
A retailer that sells sporting goods and apparel
A personal training subscription service for those looking to improve their fitness
In a B2C context, growth marketing as a strategy is oriented around nudging existing customers towards repeat purchases, upselling added services and new products and encouraging higher average spends over time. This is especially true because B2C products and services tend to be used only when they are needed. In order to avoid selling to customers only once and having them never buy again from you, the aforementioned emphasis is necessary.
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What are the Fundamentals of Generating Revenue Growth with B2C Marketing
Before we delve into the specific processes or ways designed to generate growth, it’s important to understand the B2C sales and marketing cycle. So here are a few key things that characterize B2C businesses, independent of the nature of the product or service being offered.
A short sales cycle: Unlike B2B marketing, in which the sales cycle is much longer, B2C clients don’t spend hours on research, hesitating, and comparing every single feature and tend to rely on feedback from friends and peers when deciding what to buy .
Emotionally-Driven Decisions Rather than Rational Ones: This relates to the previous point. B2C customers look for instant solutions to their problems based on their desires. They rarely think strategically over the purchase but tend to rely on feedback fromthose around them. They are just looking for a fast solution that will satisfy their needs here and now. So if a brand manages to provide them with this solution, they will definitely return to for the same emotional experience.
The main focus is on the end-user: B2C companies usually deal directly with the consumers of their products. This makes it easier to convince a person, find the right words, and use special techniques. While in B2B, a salesperson needs to negotiate with multiple influencers who make decisions on behalf of the entire company.
The pre-eminence of social media as a way of reaching the end consumer: Selling to end consumers is extremely difficult to do today without investing in social media marketing. While choosing a product, people desperately look for customer feedback and specifically for social proof. Social media can serve as a way of sharing content that provides an emotional connection and confirmation to let them know that the products they are considering are worth purchasing.
Understanding the B2C Sales Funnel for the Purpose of Optimizing the Growth Marketing Process
Given that we now understand the various characteristics involved with B2C marketing, let’s take a quick look at the various stages of the purchasing funnel, and tactics that can make sense at these various stages.
Top of Funnel (TOFU):
This corresponds to the stage where businesses are looking to generate awareness of their products or services, as well as the various problems or needs that their products/ services can help to solve for consumers. Blog articles and social media ads work to increase visibility of what companies do, and help to instill top of mind awareness in the minds of their target consumers.
Middle of Funnel (MOFU):
This corresponds to the Interest and Desire stages of the growth marketing funnel. B2C businesses can use retargeting campaigns, email reminders, and product comparison guides to help capitalize on the interest that prospects have shown at the top of the funnel.
Bottom of Funnel (BOFU):
This corresponds to the Action phase of the growth marketing funnel. This is where prospects decide ultimately whether to choose or look more into the products or servidces you offer. B2C businesses can take advantage at this stage by working to remove barriers to purchase or taking action, such as with one click checkout, trust badges, and personalized discounts.
Examining the Growth Marketing Framework As it Pertains to B2C Businesses
Now that we have established the particularities of B2C businesses and the uniqueness of the B2C sales cycle, let’s now evaluate it as it pertains to the popular AAARRR growth marketing framework.
AAARRR stands for Awareness, Activation, Adoption, Retention, Revenue, and Referral. This growth marketing model attempts to follow the various stages that a prospect is likely to follow before, while and after they show interest in and purchase a product or service that your business offers.
With that in mind, let us now examine the various stages of the growth marketing framework, and cite examples of instilling a growth marketing process that are applicable at these respective stages from the perspective of a B2C business.
1. Awareness
The first stage in the funnel, awareness, is the first stage that your customers discover you and know that you exist.
This creates a cycle where new customers/users, interacting with a company for the first time, pass through each of the funnel stages, and as they exit, they recommend other people to your company to start the cycle over.
Key ways that one can measure awareness includes
It’s worth noting that getting traffic for traffic’s sake is where many brands turn awareness from a valuable metric into a vanity metric. You want to get the right kind of traffic, meaning the people most interested in what you offer and, therefore, most likely to buy from you.
Finding the right growth marketing channels involves understanding your target audience in the initial awareness stage. Key to this is understanding why they might be looking for what your business offers, whether they currently use an offering or service comparable to what your business offers, and why they are looking to switch to or purchase/procure what your business offers.
How B2C Businesses Can Entrench Growth Marketing Processes at the Awareness Stage:
Content marketing can help build brand awareness, establish authority, and drive sales for those who can benefit from the products and services your business offers.
Prospective clients aren’t ready to make a purchase during the awareness stage, but they want information. At this point in the buyer’s journey, the targeted audience is likely to have only just become aware of your brand and its products. The content creation for this awareness stage would need to be primarily focused on establishing yourself as an industry expert and building trust with this audience.
2. Acquisition
The second phase of the consumer life cycle is acquisition and it’s about making potential customers engage with you and your service.
The key to acquisition as well is to find the right customers, not just as many as possible.
As alluded to earlier, one can be helped to accomplish this by clearly defining your customers by establishing buyer personas. Creating B2C buyer personas helps you visualize your ideal customer and design campaigns that matter to them. Whether your buyers are busy moms, young professionals, or outdoor enthusiasts, understanding their lifestyles allows you to craft the perfect messaging and product offerings.
How Growth Marketing Processes Should Be Established at the Acquisition Phase
What is involved here is simply converting more visitors into customers.
A report from AdRoll a few years ago suggested that just 2% of website visitors make a purchase on their first visit.
The other 98%, need to be re-engaged in some way and persuaded back on-site a second time (at least).
Retargeting ads will continue to play a role in this, but engagement rates remain low (approximately .7%).
By contrast, a targeted push notification typically performs 3 – 4 times better than, with a personalised campaign performing better again. The reason is it’s not competing for attention out in the wild with a dozen other messages like a display ad is.
3. Activation
Activation is essentially where you guide users from simply being aware of your product to actually starting to use it. This is key because it is when they use your products or services that customers start to see the value in what you offer. This in turn, can confirm or turn them off of what you offer based on whether they feel investing in you product or service is justified.
How Growth Marketing Processes Can Be Set Up at the Activation Phase
Onboarding is one of the more important aspects of the customer journey and is something that is quickly becoming a priority as companies learn how many customers are turned away at sign-up. There's no replacement for that first impression and you have to make sure the user is guided through initial sign-up to become an active user.
Asana (a leading project management tool) tries to on-board a new user with a series of emails with short form video explainers. They highlight the common painpoints that their users encounter(IE internal email overload) and how using Asana can alleviate that pain.
4. Retention
Retention is mainly analysed by looking at a company’s customer churn rate.
In short, customer churn is how many people stop using your products or services within a given timeframe, for example, a month or a quarter, or buying your products only once in the event of an ecommerce store.
The cost of acquiring new customers can amount to up to 5x as much as selling to existing ones. This shows why there should be a heavy focus on customer retention strategies.
The end game here is to successfully reel back those customers on the brink of churning recognizing and mending the roots of their dissatisfaction before they choose to sever ties. It’s an essential part of growth marketing that paves the way towards scalable growth.
An Example of Growth Marketing Processes At Work During the Retention Phase
Recovering more abandoned carts. With +70% of carts abandoned at the checkout, there aren’t many more impactful growth marketing tactics for B2C businesses at any point of the growth marketing process.
The two key elements here are timing and channel. So how soon after the cart is abandoned are you re-engaging the customer and are you sending them an email, SMS or push notification?
Increasingly they have shown that push notifications dramatically out-perform email. For best results, we recommend using both channels in tandem as a part of a multichannel approach.
5. Revenue
This stage tells us how much money is earned from each customer, also known as the ‘customer lifetime value’, or CLTV.
For customers that continue to spend with a company, the CLTV will be greater.
The CLTV metric is important because it tells us which types of customers are loyal and continue to produce revenue for the business.
How Growth Marketing Processes Should Be Oriented At the Revenue Stage
Cross-sell and up-sell to existing customers
An automated, data-driven up-sell or cross-sell campaign offers significant potential.
Essentially, what we’re asking is; based on the customer’s behaviour to date, and especially their most recent purchase, what other products do we have that they are likely interested in?
Let’s say you’re an online bicycle retailer. If someone buys a new bike then you should be engaging them with offers for helmets, lights, repair kits and other accessories in the days and weeks afterwards.
What’s more is that it’s not just retailers selling consumer products that can do this. Any brand that sells “experiences”, using that term loosely, can benefit from this type of up or cross-sell campaign as well.
6. Referral
The final stage in the AAARRR framework is rather self-explanatory and it completes the process. Essentially, this is about the users who love your product or service so much, that they tell other people about it.
How to Establish Growth Marketing Processes at the Referral Stage.
Some companies have dedicated referral campaigns embedded in their email marketing strategy after a purchase.
This feedback can also help to update your customer journey for a seamless customer experience.
Other forms of referral include social media sharing buttons, reviews and testimonials, and inviting friends to a service product.
However, proactive customer service is really the key to not just retaining customers for B2C businesses, but also to get customers to speak to those they know about your business.
Certainly, establishing a customer service culture can involve simple things such as:
Responding quickly to inquiries to show customers they’re a priority.
Personalize interactions with friendly messaging through email, chat, or phone.
Make returns hassle-free so customers feel comfortabl buying from you again.
Product inserts are a low-cost way to enhance the post-purchase experience. Include thank-you notes, how-to guides, or discount codes to stand out. Many Amazon sellers use inserts to politely request reviews, boosting visibility and trust.
But solid customer service can also be used as a way to directly spur repeat purchases.
When customers feel valued, they’ll keep coming back. Investing in customer service and experience boosts repeat sales, increases reviews, and turns buyers into brand advocates
Tactics That Ought to Be Part of the Growth Marketing Processes at B2C Businesses
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 an efficient growth marketing strategy. Here are 8 of them.
1) Influencer 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:
Establish 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 are 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.
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 Marketing:
Content marketing 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 strategy based on building a site’s expertise, authority and trustworthiness, you are essentially creating a long-tail SEO strategy where people looking for solutions to the problems that they face that your products/services can fix will keep finding your website when doing research. This in turn not only builds up credibility due to the expertise you show, but also in turn builds up an increasing amount of brand familiarity..
For example, a B2C company that sells health supplements might create a blog post explaining how to choose the right brand of creatine monohydrate for your goals, a video on how to use creatine correctly correctly, or an e-book that provides tips for optimizing your creatine monohydrate supplementation. By providing valuable and informative content (regardless of the format), the company can attract and engage potential customers and establish itself as a trusted authority in the skincare industry.
4) PPC
Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) is a type of online advertising in which businesses pay whenever one of their ads is clicked. PPC is an excellent way for B2C companies to reach potential customers, increase brand awareness, and drive more sales.
A key advantage of PPC advertising is that it is highly targeted. You can select specific demographics, locations, and keywords to target, meaning your ads will be seen by the people who are most likely to be interested in your products or services at the very point when they are looking for them..
With PPC ads, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, which means you can control your advertising costs and maximize your return on investment. There are many PPC ad vehicles out there from, Google Ads and Microsoft ads which are tied to search engine, to Facebook Ads to Instagram Ads that are tied to social media.
5) SEM:
Search Engine Marketing is a form of PPC advertising that 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
Enables 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
The key benefit of search engine marketing is that you reach customers when they are searching for you and more importantly, what you offer. What’s more, is that once you start to optimize your campaigns, from landing pages, to keywords, copy and ads, generating results from campaigns becomes almost automatic. Even more importantly is that it becomes a long-term growth driver as you re-invest in these campaigns once results start to come in.
6) Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies for B2C companies. It can help you increase brand awareness, engage potential customers, generate leads and sales, and build/strengthen relationships with your existing customers.
For example, a B2C company might use email marketing to send subscribers a newsletter or product updates. The company may also send personalized emails to customers who have recently purchased products, such as offering special discounts for their next purchase.
With email marketing, you can reach many people quickly and cost-effectively. You can also track campaign performance to determine which campaigns are working and which aren’t. Reviewing your analytics allows you to make adjustments and optimize your future campaigns for the best results.
7) Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is one of the most popular marketing strategies for B2C companies. It lets them connect with potential customers, promote their products and services, increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, and generate leads and sales.
It is important to know exactly where your audience spends their time and attention and then focus your efforts on those platforms.
For example, a company selling corporate training courses might find its ideal audience on LinkedIn. instead of trying to manage platforms on other channels simply because they are popular, what’s more optimal is to specialize in the most profitable and best-aligned social media platforms. As a result, they can invest more in social ads, post more frequently, and regularly engage with other users.
8) Mobile-First Marketing:
The world has moved 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.
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 are actually ready to purchase.
As a result, there are a number of mobile-focused tactics that B2C businesses can benefit from at various points in the growth-marketing framework.
Send SMS messages to reach mobile users to let them know about limited-time offers.
Run in-app ads to catch them while they are using different mobile apps.
Use QR codes to allow customers to engage with your websites from their phones, or to make contact-less payments.
9) Loyalty & Referral Programs
How can you get your customers to come back again 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.
What’s better than customers that come back to you time and time again? Friends of such customers. Discounts and free merchandise that incentivize referrals can be an integral part of referral programs. Better yet, Trunk Club has a referral program that provides $50 to both the referral and the referee once a purchase from the new customer has been made,
Establishing the Processes that Generate Growth Within Your B2C Business: A Strategic Marketing Approach
Establishing the processes that form the foundation of a growth marketing strategy is an extremely iterative process. By understanding the growth marketing framework and how it applies to B2C businesses , one can work to drive consistently proven, data-driven processes that cumulatively foster growth.
Of course, depending on your situation, devoting the time and attention to this can be challenging. Especially with so many considerations and processes that make up entrenching revenue growth, it can seem overwhelming to know even where to start.
This is where the support of a growth marketing consultant can help.
With that in mind, why not reach out to one of our growth marketing experts for a free, no-obligation consultation. We will happy to sit down with you, examine your business, understand what struggles you may be having and work closely with you to determine what processes we can work on to start to establish a growth marketing mindset and orientation within your business.