How B2B and B2C Became B2H: We’re All in the Business of Attention

Traditionally business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing were treated as two fundamentally different marketing approaches.

For some reason, B2B marketing has a reputation of being fact-based, formal, somewhat distant and cold.

While B2C marketing is considered to be emotional, entertaining and fun.

But here’s the thing:

Even though the two approaches might have started differently, they’re now converging on near-identical objectives.

They both focus on selling and they both do it by focusing on the customer’s needs.

B2C marketing is now concerned with conversion rates and leads as a way of measuring the success of marketing campaigns while B2B focuses on buyer personas, emotional messaging and branding to better connect with their audience.

All marketing is now B2H – business to human.

Why are B2B and B2C Marketing Not Relevant Any More?

B2B and B2C marketing have lost their original meaning because all companies are now in the business of getting attention.

As a customer of any type of business, you are bombarded with thousands of marketing messages every day.

The company that can get your attention wins.

It’s simply not humanly possible to process all of those thousands of marketing messages. Only the ones that stick out and speak to our needs get a chance to be considered.

It’s all about attention – the scarcest resource today!

Hence, integrating super-personalised marketing into your strategy is a way for your business to say:

“I’m listening. I know what you need, and I can help you to get it.”

We’ve developed a unique approach to persona research that allows you to run super-personalised marketing campaigns at scale.

You’re either a B2C or B2B business. We can help you to understand your audiences and build a beautiful website that actually converts.

Interested in knowing more about how exactly we build personas at Digivate? Download our FREE step-by-step guide here.

All Our Buying Decisions Are Emotional, Not Logical

All of our decisions are subconscious – we are just not aware of it.

All humans are made of the same neurons that trigger emotions and drive us to behave in a certain way.

No one can switch off emotions when they go to work and switch them back on when they arrive home. You can try to mute them, but you will always be unconsciously driven by them.

Scientific research about the human brain shows that 95% of decisions are driven by subconscious urges, the biggest of which is emotion, which we then justify with logic.

The decision to buy is made subconsciously, and these subconscious decisions are based on a deeply empirical mental processing system that follows a logic of its own.

Our subconscious decision to buy is then communicated to the conscious mind via an emotion. The conscious mind then searches for rational reasons, and that’s how we complete the circle: We justify our emotional signals to buy with logical reasons.

It’s human nature.

Both B2B and B2C Customers Use the Same Channels

Another reason B2B and B2C marketing is more similar than different is because of the omnichannel environment we live in.

Everyone hangs out on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn all day, regardless of whether it’s for work or personal reasons.

This is why both B2B and B2C businesses are using social media to target their customers in the same place.

Marketing is becoming more platform-specific than strictly B2B or B2C.

This means that if your target customer is a ‘marketing manager’ on Facebook and you want to get their attention about your B2B product, your messaging will need to be fun and emotional as opposed to dry and fact-based because that’s what the person browsing Facebook expects and that is what your competition is doing.

Platform-specific marketing considers a person’s state of mind on that particular platform as well as the competition (i.e what are other B2B and B2C companies doing on that channel to get people’s attention).

Summary

No matter who you’re marketing to, it’s crucial to always remind yourself that you are simply human marketing to another human and in order to market to humans, you need to get their attention first.

Attention is the new currency of any business.

You can only get a person’s attention if you know something special about them. Or in other words, something that makes them human.