Go to any business mixer, and you’ll hear everyone in the room proudly proclaiming their titles of: CEO, CFO, COO, etc., and how those titles impact their POV. If you’re really lucky, they’ll tell you all about how perfectly their POV led them to leverage UGC to move their CPG, leading to record breaking ROI. Hell yeah. 

But you’ll also hear them getting stuck in the muck and mire of how specifically tailored their marketing needs to be in order to support their “unique” business category, which they will generally break down into one of: B2B, B2C, and D2C/DTC. But what does all of that really mean, and do they truly require different approaches? 

Category Definitions

Positional titles don’t mean much to me, and I don’t really care much about their point of view (POV) outside of their goals and motivations. What I do care about is marketing, and that’s where those C-suite folks like to get hung up on business categories and how the marketing needs to change to support said categories. So let’s look at those big 3 categories I named above with some very basic definitions: 

• B2C –  Business to Consumer: A company sells their product to a normal person through something like Sky Mall or Amazon. 
• D2C – Direct to Consumer: A company sells their product right to a normal person without using a middle man. This is what Love and Science does with our awesome merch. 
• B2B – Business to Business: A company sells their product to another company, normally some kind of weird enterprise solution that normal people outside of a company aren’t allowed to buy (or couldn’t afford to buy). 

Of these categories, B2B C-suite types love to point out that their B2B organization is completely and totally different from the other categories, and therefore needs a completely and totally different method of marketing in order to move the needle. That’s their POV and they’re sticking to it. 

But are they right? 

Category Commonalities

Commonality #1: Sales

In all 3 of these categories, there’s one primary goal that keeps the businesses they contain afloat: sales. I don’t care if you’re D2C, B2C, B2B, or some other random combination of letters and numbers, you need sales in order to keep your business alive. 

Commonality #2: Brand

Without a strong, defined brand, closing those sales is a much more difficult proposition. If you can’t clearly state to me who you are and why I should buy from you, why would I? If you don’t have your brand sorted out, your audiences defined, and your value propositions for those audiences on lock, you had better be the cheapest product in your class if you want to make a sale.

Commonality #3: Humans

Whether you want to believe it or not, you are selling to people in all 3 of these categories. B2B C-suiters will kick and scream and froth at the mouth, but it doesn’t change the fact that a person (or board of persons) is ultimately making the final decision to buy what you sell. 

The Harsh Reality of B2B Marketing

You may already see where I am going, but let’s dispense with the coded words and acronyms so I can say my piece plainly: Business-to-business marketing is really just direct-to-consumer marketing of enterprise goods and services. 

That’s it. That’s the big secret. 

You are still selling to people, whether you like it or not. Sure, the tactics may change – maybe you spend more marketing dollars on LinkedIn to move your SaaS product than you would spend on TikTok*, but you still have to figure out how to motivate a human being to take the next steps and purchase your product. And that is where Commonality #2 comes into play – if your brand is a mess and you don’t know who the people are that you’re selling to and what motivates them, you lose. 

The Simple Solution

First of all, talk to your sales team. Stop worrying about the corporation you want to land, and start focusing on the people at those corporations who fit the persona of the people your sales staff have already converted. Start with some simple questions:

• What was their job title? 
• What were their demographics (Age? Gender? Education?)
• What pain points did we solve for them? 
• What do they most appreciate about your company/offerings?

From there, you have a starting point. Not a starting point on how to sell to a 30 story corporate office building, but a starting point on how to reach the people inside who make decisions. And here’s a little bonus tip: they may not be the people you expect. 

Surprise Strategic Opportunities

Over the years, Love and Science has done a lot of B2B marketing and strategy. And one interesting tidbit we’ve discovered is that the first contact with our B2B patterns generally come in through a much lower level user than our partners would expect. 

Oftentimes, it’s not a head of a fortune 500 company who is frantically Googling for answers – it’s a personal assistant, HR or accounting staff, maybe even an intern. Someone who falls into the very human-experience categories of being perceived by their peers as smart, valuable, desired, secure in their position, whatever. They are searching for answers on behalf of their bigwig bosses, and they feel desperate to deliver. If you only target the bosses, you may be shooting yourself in the foot. 

*Asterisk Explained

A few paragraphs up, I mentioned that your tactics “may” change between standard D2C and B2B marketing, and specifically cited LinkedIn vs. TikTok. Here’s the thing: when we’re talking about people instead of corporations or even titles, we have to recognize that human behavior is still human behavior.

I have seen big B2B leads close that came in from LinkedIn. I have seen closes that came in from major news sources like CNN. I have also seen B2B leads close from an ad placement on Candy Crush and other games or time-wasting apps – and I’ve seen a lot more of those than you would expect. 

People do people things. They have worries, wants, wins, and Wordle. Don’t stress over marketing to a business, and start worrying about making your brand appealing to the people who fill its offices.