GENERATING LEADS BEGINS WITH YOUR DIGITAL BRAND
The components that make up your digital brand – your website, your social media presence, and your SEO – are constantly generating leads. Every time someone searches your business on Google, it’s an opportunity to sell a service or product.
Not all leads are built equally, and understanding these nuances are key to getting the most out of your brand. The two types of lead generation you need to focus on in a digital space are business to customer (B2C) and business to business (B2B).
The biggest difference between B2C and B2B is scope. And scope affects your strategy, voice, and psychology of how you create your copy.
B2C IS GENERALIZED
B2C methods of lead generating is what we’ve traditionally focused on in our Nao blog. From website copy, to images, to tweets, to blogging, B2C content is what you create and put out to the entire online world.
We’re well versed in B2C marketing, with goals aimed towards authenticity and relationships. But look at B2C from the perspective of scope: since you are speaking to a larger audience, your content casts a wide net. This also lets you do things like automate tweets or posts to save time.
MAKE B2B PERSONAL
Whereas business to customer lead generation involves you speaking to potentially millions of people, business to business lead generation can be as personal as a one on one conversation.
You are promoting your specific services to a decision maker at another business, be it a director of marketing or the boss. So B2B marketing decisions are much more focused on personal relationships than B2C.
Needless to say, general copy would feel impersonal in this instance. If you use the same language as business to customer copy, it gets interpreted as spam. And guess what? Spam gets ignored.
You want to get to specifics of how your services can help another business do two main things: increase sales or save time.
APPEAL TO EMOTION VS. LOGIC
Taken this way, the purchasing process between customers and business owners are on the opposite ends. When talking to customers, the goal is to stir emotion to create a purchase (brands are emotional). Less is more.
In generating business leads, you want to use logic and numbers. Focus on the features of your product or service that separate you from your competitors. Whereas you don’t want to get into the nitty gritty when talking to customers, business owners will want to know every bit of information relating to your product. Don’t get us wrong, there’s a portion of in-person B2B sales where appealing to the prospect’s emotions is an asset.
As far as inbound sales and marketing, selling to customers and selling to other businesses are two different skills and appeal to two different goals: emotions for customers, financial logic for businesses. Understand the nuances of both appeals, and your business will be versatile and successful for years to come.
