Why Your B2C Company Needs Customer Value Marketing

Business-to-consumer marketing has long been differentiated from its counterpart, business-to-business marketing, based on the idea that while the former focuses on quick solutions and enjoyable content, B2B marketing is more concerned with building relationships and proving a product's return on investment for a business customer. As customers increasingly spend more time researching brands and their reviews, online, however, the marketing landscape is changing.

The B2C purchase process is becoming more nonlinear and less predictable and resembling B2B in some ways. New client acquisitions are becoming more expensive and requiring more touchpoints. More market fragmentation also means a greater degree of customer segmentation and the need to not only market your product more specifically but build loyal followers that will buy your product repeatedly and evangelize your brand to others. With B2C, it’s no longer just about quick, easy, replaceable transactions.

The cost of retaining existing clients is often 10 times lower than the cost of acquiring new ones. Why? Well, for starters there’s a 2-in-3 chance that a customer who bought your product once will want to buy it again. Second, existing customers are the best target audience when you want to introduce something new. Finally, as people increasingly rely on reviews, delighting existing customers can become a cost-effective way of obtaining new ones since you are simply relying on free word-of-mouth.

Customer Value Marketing, therefore, includes these three characteristics of the B2C sector, but not by leveraging automation strategies to focus on acquiring new clients; rather, it uses automation to put a strong emphasis on keeping and maximizing profit from existing customers in hopes that they will buy repeatedly, and that their friends and followers will come along for the ride.