Forget B2B or B2C, it’s Human to Human

I recently read a great post by Marcus Sheridan on LinkedIn. It was a topic that I’ve been bleating about for a number of years and one that we discuss with our clients here at Digital Clarity.

The topic is about the blurring of lines between Business-to-Business marketing (B2B) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) marketing.

LinkedIn as an example

You only need to look at how LinkedIn has changed and by all accounts, there is now way it is going back.

LinkedIn was a formal business focussed social network. It still is, but it changed with the impact of 3 or 4 different events.

  1. The age group of LinkedIn started getting younger and more diverse
  2. Microsoft’s $26.2-billion acquisition of LinkedIn aimed to grow the site and integrate it with Microsoft’s enterprise software
  3. Emerging social channels were more engaging and started taking market share, namely Instagram and TikTok…yes, TikTok.
  4. The pandemic happened.

The above blurred the lines and changed the landscape of how professionals shared content about their companies, talked about themselves and in many cases share challenges and solutions in a more human way.

The post on LinkedIn

The post on LinkedIn talked about a report published by HubSpot on the difference between B2B and B2C marketing.

Marcus Sheridan shared the post and gave his views. Those that don’t know, Marcus, he’s founder of Impact an inbound sales business.

On top of this he is an author of They Ask / You Answer, a book that looks at Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today’s Digital Consumer.

As the strapline reads, “To be successful, businesses must obsess over the questions, concerns, and problems their buyers have, and address them as honestly and as thoroughly as possible”.

So Marcus knows a thing or two about the market and marketing. My views echo his and I managed to get a huge amount of traction by making a comment. You can see the post here –

Human to Human

So, here’s my take. Business is not a machine, it is human.  Sales are human to human. The touchpoints of content or sales material we produce are interacted with by a living person.

That person may be a researcher, a director or a chairman. If your content is corporate, it may only resonate with one of those individuals.   

To add to the complexity of content to reemphasise the importance of having a human centred approach, it is commonly known that 95% of people engaging with you or your content, are not ready to buy yet and may not be for quite some time.

Moving forward

Remember that in the main, you are solving a pain point for the prospective client. That content may take one or more formats, in certain cases, 10 or more. Why, because different people consume at different times, across different channels.

If you would like to learn more about creating better, effective and manifold content, please get in touch.

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