What Is B2C?

B2C is when you sell directly to the consumer, it literally stands for BUSINESS TO CONSUMER. There are no intermediaries between you and end consumer - your marketing and promotional efforts are all targeted at the end consumer to encourage purchase - THAT is B2C marketing.

B2C In Practice

Here are a few examples of how it is used:

1. Phone Apps: Developers build these apps in hopes that individual consumers would download it onto their own phones. They may offer promotions such as Free Download This Week! to get more users on their app.

2. e-Commerce Retailers: You subscribe to plenty of these emails. Marketing tactics used by these B2C retailers include sending you emailers on Summer Sales, Winter Sales, Christmas Sales, Friends and Family Sales - all types of sales - to get you to buy online. Admit it - it's worked on you before hasn't it?

3. Services: Business Coaches, Realtors, Accountants - these parties all serve individual clients, and they could offer a 'free first time consultation' or a percentage off their hourly rates to entice clients to sign up for their services.

How Can You Use It?

The B2C marketing tactics are similar and applicable across different industries. Below are a few examples of B2C marketing tactics you can implement for your business:

• Limited time discount offer

• Seasonal sale offers

• Friends and Family sales

• Valentine's Day discount

• Limited edition gift with purchase

• Free consultation - for services business

• Referral discount - encourage growth of community of users

• Share campaigns - share this post for a chance to win! Helps to gain more awareness for your brand.

So you can see that the first few options have the objective of driving SALES, whereas the options near the bottom of the list help to grow the customer list or to gain awareness - which tactic works for you depends on your marketing objective so choose wisely. 

How Can You Measure It?

First you need to determine if you are a B2C business or a B2B business. If you are marketing directly to the individual end consumer and NOT to other businesses, you are in the B2C business. In terms of which B2C marketing tactic to use and when, think of and then observe the buying behavior of your clients. If you want to use a combination of email, direct and social media marketing to drive consumer traffic to your website, make sure you are MEASURING the effectiveness of these channels. How can you do that? The easiest way is to generate a different discount / promotional code for each channel. 

For example:

• Email Newsletter Subscribers receive discount code EMAIL20

• Direct Marketing consumers receive discount code DIRECT20

• Social Media Subscribers receive discount code SOCIAL20

Every channel gets 20% off, but depending on the code they use you can tell WHERE they heard about your B2C discount.

To see our Cultural Marketer video on this topic, visit here.
Want to learn more about Chinese Digital Marketing? Visit our Cultural Marketer YouTube Channel here.