Best B2C Marketing Strategies in 2024

Business-to-consumer marketing, more commonly known as B2C marketing, has been shaken up in the past year thanks to the AI boom we saw in the first half of 2023.

Because of this, you might be left wondering what marketing strategies are best for B2C businesses. In this guide, we’ll share ten ways to make your B2C marketing stand out in 2023 and beyond, including:

1. Understand Your Audience

The foundation of any B2C marketing campaign is a good understanding of your audience.

In today’s world, there’s more competition, more noise, more products…the list goes on.

Understanding your target audience is one of the best ways you can work towards standing out from the crowd.

You should think of your potential customers as more than just age, gender and location.

You need to consider what drives them, what they value and why they need your product or service.

This exercise is vital for anyone who also thinks they have a clearly defined target audience.

Reviewing this can help you find new opportunities you haven’t noticed before and help take your B2C marketing above competitors who haven’t put in this work.

How to Define Your Target Audience — Step-by-Step

Review your product or service

Start by looking at the benefits and features of your product or service and how buying from your business might appeal to potential customers. This includes ethical business practices, excellent customer service, fast shipping times, products made using a specific material or process or good product guarantees.

For example, earplug brand Loop makes the benefits of its product clear right away on its homepage — “innovative earplugs that look and feel good“.

Loop likely researched its target audience and found the common pain points — earplugs are uncomfortable and look unappealing — and realised it could highlight how Loop earplugs differ to appeal to its target customer.

Understanding what’s great about your product, service or business will help you understand who your business should target.

Conduct market research

Next, conduct market research by studying competitors and your industry. You can conduct surveys and interviews for a more hands-on approach, or you can take to social media and forums to see what your ideal customers are interested in and the comments they leave about your business or competitors.

You don’t just need to look at their comments concerning your business — pay attention to the type of things they post on their social media — this will give you a more rounded view of what your target customers are like as people, which will help you later when you create a buyer persona.

Analyse existing customers

Analysing your existing customers is one of the easiest ways to learn more about who you should be targeting. Not everyone who buys from you will be an “ideal customer”, but they will help you understand why they buy from you.

You can send out surveys to your existing customer base, look through reviews and conduct phone interviews with them.

Remember, customers need guidance through this process — if you ask them what their buying habits are, they will likely get confused.

Asking them questions like “Do you tend to buy on impulse or spend lots of time researching?” would be a better way to understand their buying habits.

Segment your audience

Now that you’ve gathered this information, you likely have a few different customer types. Spend time sifting through all the information and segment customers into different groups.

You may find that one segment is unexpected, and it’s up to you whether you’d like to lean into this unexpected audience or change your positioning to focus more on a different segment.

For example, an earplug business could be aiming to target people who struggle to sleep but then realise that young concertgoers are making up a large part of its customer base.

It may decide to rebrand to get more concert-going customers or analyse its positioning to see why it’s attracting concertgoers over people who struggle to sleep.

You can see how choosing to target one of these two audiences would change the brand image, the way it’s presenting itself in paid advertising, the tone of its marketing campaigns, the marketing channels it’s using to promote itself…all of its digital marketing!

This is why understanding your target audience on a deeper level than age, gender and location is so important.

Create a buyer persona

Finally, you should take things a step further and design a buyer persona.

Buyer personas focus on individual consumers you’ve made up based on research — essentially, your ideal customer.

You give them a name, add a stock photo and describe their buying habits, family life, job, hobbies, values and more.

This process helps you visualise your ideal customer and will influence a lot of your marketing. When you create an ad, you’ll think, “Would this appeal to our buyer persona?”

You don’t have to do just one — if you have a couple of customer types, create more. Just don’t create so many that you lose track.

2. Reposition Your PPC Campaigns

In an AI-driven search landscape, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising will become an even more powerful tool to help businesses get the necessary visibility.

With the rise of AI search experiences, organic website traffic could drop by as much as 30-40% for some businesses. If you experience a drop in organic traffic, you’ll want to drive traffic through search PPC and non-search PPC platforms like social media or the Google Display Network.

An example of how shopping ads will look in Google’s SGE

However, you won’t be alone in this endeavour.

With the introduction of AI-generated ads, the number of businesses using PPC will increase, meaning costs will rise. Whatever quality AI can produce will become the new standard, so you must make something better.

Example of AI-generated backgrounds from Meta Ads

The quality of your ads will be crucial. Well-written and highly creative PPC ads will stand out from the crowd, as the quality of AI-generated ads can vary significantly.

Google has already provided previews of how PPC will look in the new search format, with ads appearing above AI-generated responses and sponsored shopping results within the response. Microsoft is testing ads within its Bing Chat AI, indicating an increase in PPC clicks compared to non-AI search.

Example of ads in Bing Chat

If your Google search ads are not converting as effectively in the new AI search experience, consider moving more of your ad spend to platforms where you’ve succeeded, such as a specific social media platform.

However, following best practices and leveraging AI tools available on platforms like Meta and Google, you can still get a strong start with search ads when the new generative search experience becomes the norm.

3. Nail Your Brand Positioning

Brand positioning is a crucial element that needs to be part of any B2C marketing strategy. It will help you stand out from the crowd and give potential customers reasons to buy from you.

What Is Brand Positioning?

Brand positioning is the core of your brand’s identity. It defines who you are and helps you stand out from your competition.
Let’s look at two vegan shoe brands on Instagram as an example.
Will’s Vegan Store targets wealthier customers and uses serene nature images, neutral colours and higher-priced boots.

Screenshot of Will’s Vegan Store Instagram

On the other hand, KOI Footwear appeals to a younger audience with vibrant colours, urban fashion and more affordable boots.

Screenshot of the KOI Footwear Instagram

Both brands sell vegan shoes, but their unique positioning attracts different types of customers.

To create a brand position that helps you stand out, consider your competition, where you fit in, customer needs and how you’ll put your positioning into action.

Analyse Competitor Positioning

To stand out, you first need to understand what your competitors are doing.

Look at their websites, social media presence and PPC ads. Identify their strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps they include excellent customer service as a benefit of shopping with them, but many customer complaints on social media go ignored.

Example of negative customer feedback on Facebook

This will help you improve your digital marketing, clarify your target audience and address any customer issues with your competitors.

Consider why customers might choose your competitors over you based on their positioning, but also think about why your competitors’ positioning might turn potential customers off.

Use this information to adjust your positioning. You shouldn’t copy your competitors by any means, but seeing what’s out there will help you find ways to stand out from others.

Understand Your Customers

Examine your current and ideal customers — focus on their problems, concerns, demographics and buying habits.

Use surveys, market research, social media insights, customer emails, reviews and live chat responses to gain a deep understanding of your target audience.

Pay attention to what customers do and don’t like about your brand and your competitors. This information will help you identify their pain points and tailor your brand’s positioning to address those issues.

It’s important to be authentic and highlight what sets you apart from your competitors while meeting your customers’ needs.

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Define and Implement Your Positioning

Based on your analysis of competitors and customers, it’s time to define your brand’s positioning.

Sum it up in a few words that capture your values, such as personalised service, trustworthiness or ease of purchase.

Let’s compare two life insurance brands to illustrate this point.

Dead Happy positions itself as a rebellious alternative, using catchy phrases like “make a death wish” and emphasising simplicity and affordability.

Polly life insurance positions itself as the go-to brand for mums, using emotional language and stressing affordability.

These are two brands with totally different positioning that essentially sell the same thing — life insurance.

Once you’ve defined your positioning, ensure it’s consistently reflected across your website and all your marketing efforts.

Putting Your Positioning in Action

Your brand’s positioning should be seamlessly integrated into your marketing and the entire business as a whole.

Consider the customer journey and how each aspect of your positioning connects with customers at different stages.

For example, if simplicity is part of your positioning, make information easily accessible at the beginning, provide detailed product descriptions in the middle and ensure a straightforward checkout process at the end.

Mastering brand positioning is crucial in a competitive market.

By understanding your competition, analysing customer pain points, defining your positioning and implementing it consistently, you can create a unique brand that resonates with your target audience.

Remember to be authentic and ensure your positioning aligns with the actual brand experience. Consistency across all touchpoints is essential.

61% of consumers consider company ethics and values before making a purchase.

The type of things that consumers look for in ethical businesses are:

They sell ethically sourced products
They treat staff well
They are transparent with customers
They avoid false marketing claims
They strive for constant improvement.

Ethical marketing promotes products or services produced or carried out ethically or promotes environmental or social causes as part of a broader marketing strategy.

Any causes the business promotes should be reflected in the business’s practices.

There’s no point in sharing mental health content on social media if you don’t care for employee health or sharing recycling tips if nothing is happening in the office to reduce waste.

Examples of ethical businesses include Simply Business, Candy Kittens, Betteridge & Milsom, Butternut Box and us at Thinkplus.

Simply Business promotes mental health support for small business owners on social media.
Candy Kittens offers discounted products through The Outlet to reduce food waste.
B&M promotes people-first causes and collaborates with businesses that share similar values.
Butternut Box highlights its ethical values in its marketing, including low-carbon recipes and donations to dogs in need.
Thinkplus (that’s us!) emphasises transparency, diversity, employee benefits and community support.

You can learn more about marketing an ethical business in our guide.

5. Make Use of Personalisation

Brand personalisation is one of the most essential B2C marketing strategies you can use in 2023 and beyond.

Consumers want to feel a connection with brands, and a personalised experience can help build that connection. It also gives individual consumers a better experience by focusing on the products and services that are the most important to them.

Amazon is great at this, and so is Netflix. Both businesses suggest relevant “products” to users when they visit, based on their past searches and purchases on Amazon and watch history on Netflix.

There are a few different ways you can personalise your marketing campaigns. Here are some examples:

Tailored Recommendations and Dynamic Website Content

You can use customer data and algorithms to provide personalised product recommendations like Netflix and Amazon.

This can be based on the customer’s browsing history, previous purchases or preferences they might have set up when registering with your site or signing up for your mailing list.

Your website can also dynamically display content based on visitors’ browsing history, geographic location or past interactions. For example, a food delivery app will use the user’s location to show restaurants in their area.

Personalised Email Campaigns

You can segment your email subscriber list based on customer preferences, purchase history or demographic information.

By sending targeted emails with personalised product recommendations, exclusive offers or tailored content, you can increase open rates, click-through rates and conversions. You’ll also reduce the number of people who unsubscribe because they feel the content isn’t relevant to them.

Customised Landing Pages

You can create unique landing pages for specific customer segments or marketing campaigns.

These landing pages can be personalised to match the interests, needs or demographics of the target audience, resulting in higher engagement and conversion rates.

If you’ve looked for local services and landed on a page that says something like “Top Plumbers in Lincoln”, even though you can see it’s a national business, then you’ve experienced this type of customised landing page.

ERG Facilities has a landing page for Lincoln with a local number for potential customers to call.

This is a different number from the one on their main homepage, meaning the landing page offers a more personalised experience.

Personalised Ads

You can use customer behaviour, preferences or demographics data to deliver personalised PPC ads. These ads are more likely to convert as they’re more relevant to the person seeing them.

This is better than running the same set of ads for everyone if you have a few different customer types — the same with email.

Looking for B2B marketing strategies? Check out this guide:

Best B2B Marketing Strategies in 2023

6. A Solid Digital PR Strategy Is Key

Digital PR will be one of the top ways to compete with AI-generated search results.

It’s the ideal way to get your brand in front of prospective customers where they already spend their time, such as reading online publications, reading the news or browsing social media.

Here are some digital PR strategies that help B2C businesses thrive in this AI world.

Publishing Original Studies or Stats

Publishing stats or studies is an old-school but effective method of digital PR.

These don’t need to be brand-new studies either — you may already have customer data you can use to inform these studies as long as no identifying customer information is used.

Not only are great studies often linked to big publications, but they may also give you an advantage regarding SGE.

If someone is searching for specific data or stats in their industry, we hope the SGE will want to credit a source, even if they don’t link to you.

For example, a search for “digital marketing statistics” could return “according to Thinkplus, 55% of marketers struggle to understand why their target audience doesn’t convert”, which was pulled from our digital marketing ROI survey as part of the AI response.

The best studies share new information or creatively share existing knowledge — or even better if it’s new info shared in a cool way.

One of the best ways to do this is through infographics.

Here’s a fantastic infographic from Household Quotes about the most popular dog breeds worldwide. This infographic has a beautiful design and is cut down into smaller sections that can easily be shared if you want to share certain countries.

Image source

But how does this help a business that helps searchers find tradespeople to work on their homes?

Well, taking a closer look at the internal links, we can see readers are redirected to pages about how to make their homes pet safe, which may require a tradesperson to work on the house.

An infographic like this isn’t going to attract people at the bottom of the funnel, but it’s one of those where the business decided to cast a wide net with a study that will help get a lot of eyes on it.

This is the type of topic humans love — it’s focused on dogs — so people will want to share it on social media and show it to others.

It almost turns into word-of-mouth marketing, despite its roots being a digital campaign.

It’s likely that some of the people who see this will need a tradesperson at some point and may want to use Household Quotes to get quotes.

Or, they’re potentially choosing a new dog based on popular breeds and will move down the funnel after this infographic. They decide to get a dog → realise they need to dog-proof their home → then get a quote through Household Quotes.

Newsjacking

Newsjacking is another form of digital PR where brands jump on a trending topic to get eyes on the business by taking part in a meme or offering an expert opinion on recent news.

Let’s be real — we do it all the time on our YouTube channel with AI. But that’s because, as marketers, we can offer an expert opinion relating to AI news and communicate it in a way other marketers and business owners can understand.

Brands sometimes take part in newsjacking more casually, speaking about recent events or just sharing a couple of memes.

For example, local businesses in the USA recently spoke about how Taylor Swift concerts impact their business, with one hair salon in Houston, Drybar, describing how they saw an influx of bookings around the week of the concert. They took the time to learn different hairstyles that Taylor Swift is known for to appeal to customers.

If you realise your business is connected to an event or news story, you can reach out to publications with an expert or first-hand opinion, like this hair salon.

DryBar did miss a trick here — as far as we can see, there are no social media posts from around the time of the concert promoting that they were taking bookings for Taylor Swift styles that weekend. This would have been a quick and easy way to newsjack this story and get even more bookings for that weekend.

Coining a Term

If you created a new process in your industry or found a better way of doing an old process, which doesn’t have a name, you can use this as an opportunity to coin a term.

Create content around this term and reach out to publications whose readers could benefit from this knowledge.

Then, people will be more likely to search for “What is the X technique?” or “How to use the X technique”.

As you are the originator, your site will likely be used to corroborate the info — and put your brand at the top of SERPs.

Alongside that, if people are nice, they’ll credit you with the idea — “The X technique, coined by Y” — which is likely to be picked up by SGE and included in the generated results.

For example, Hubspot coined the phrase Surround Sound SEO.

Here is Semrush using the words “coined by Hubspot” while talking about the surround sound technique.

You’ll also get more backlinks if your term takes off. Remember that linked and unlinked mentions will fuel the knowledge graph, so even if sites aren’t linking to you, it will help your brand name appear alongside the term you’ve coined in the AI-generated search result.

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Link Insertion

Pay attention to the websites that appear the most often for searches around products like yours, and then see how you can get featured on those websites.

One of the simplest ways is to get featured in a top 10 list.

These lists will potentially become more prevalent in an AI search world, as consumers may want a more human opinion on the products they are considering.

It’s also likely that the more often other sites mention your product in a positive light, the more likely Google will choose it to feature in an AI-generated search response.

By doing this, you’re almost reversing the buyer journey by featuring on the websites that appear in the queries before the final transactional queries.

Image Source

Brand Blast

A Brand Blast refers to a digital PR campaign you plan to launch all on the same day.

It’s commonly called a “simultaneous launch” or “embargoed launch”. However, the gist is that you get everyone involved to wait to publish their content on the same day.

As a result, potential customers who read various publications related to your industry will see your story on all their most-read sites.

This will require some pre-planning on your part, as well as publishers agreeing to post about you on a particular day.

A brand blast will be most effective when you have a new product launch that gives publications a good reason to discuss it on a specific day.

But, if you have a story that’s big enough or interesting enough to share, you can often create a brand blast about it, too.

While these campaigns might not immediately help with Google’s SGE, your target audience becomes aware of your new product and brand’s existence while supplying new information to Google’s Knowledge Graph.

It then uses this for future SGE results, both informational and transactional.

Think of it this way; if there’s enough early positive press about your story, that positivity will fuel more mentions and comments that Google can pull into their answers as time goes on.

7. Master Video Marketing

Video marketing is an integral part of any solid content B2C marketing strategy.

We don’t mean big-budget productions, either.

One of the biggest entertainment YouTubers, Mr Beast, has said in interviews that although he could afford to make his videos into cinematic masterpieces, he opts for a homemade feel instead because his audience likes the more personal vibes.

The same goes for brands.

Look at Kylie Cosmetics.

Kylie Jenner’s YouTube channel is essentially the cosmetics brand’s YouTube channel. But because it feels like Kylie’s personal channel, the videos feel less like adverts.

And when she does share a professionally filmed ad on her channel, her audience feels like she’s sharing a cool achievement with them. It’s like, “Hey friends, look at this cool ad I made”.

So, how does Kylie make money from her more casual videos?

Well, this 11-minute makeup tutorial is just an ad for Kylie’s 24k Birthday Collection. But it has 12.2 million views.

It’s performed so well because the brand knows what its audience wants to see — Kylie and how they can look like her.

It just so happens they can look like her by buying her products.

If you’re selling a service, you can still create engaging video content.

One of our clients, Golf Course Lawn, shares regular videos about caring for your lawn.

The founder, Ron Henry, has created videos on tackling nearly every lawn problem and has gained over 50,000 followers.

Ron gives away lawn care secrets for free but suggests products he sells to help customers achieve the results he shows in the videos.

Because he’s sharing the results and his passion, it shows that his business is legitimate and that his products get results.

And most of his content is filmed with a handheld camera. It feels personal and doesn’t feel like a business has made it, which is one of the reasons why it’s so successful.

How to Start Video Marketing

Start by researching the type of video content that’s popular in your niche. Short-form video is a better fit for you than long-form, or vice-versa.

It’s also important to look at what’s popular outside your niche.

No one expected a language learning app to create content using current TikTok trends and internet memes. Still, Duolingo decided to take that leap and now has over six million followers on TikTok, with videos that regularly get hundreds of thousands of views.

Half the time, the videos aren’t about learning a language; they’re just silly videos that happen to include the Duolingo owl, which gets the brand in front of as many people as possible.

Video Screenshot Source

Duolingo is quite an extreme example, but it shows how you can do excellent video marketing by replicating current trends, even if others in your industry aren’t doing the same.

Although 2023 has been a tumultuous year for social media marketing (we’re looking at you, Twitter), social media is still an essential asset in any B2C marketing campaign.

The key to great social media marketing, especially in the B2C world, is creating organic-looking content on the channels your ideal customers are spending their time.

If your demographic hangs out on TikTok, you need to create content there. If they spend a lot of time on Reddit, you need to find a way to incorporate Reddit into your marketing strategy.

Find out more about which demographics use which social media platforms.

Another way to find the best platforms is to check out competitors and see where they’re most successful. Check out the profiles of people commenting on their posts and see if they match your target customer or buyer personas.

If you have strong ethical values in your business, this may influence your choices. For example, the ice cream company Ben and Jerry’s recently stopped running paid ads on Twitter as they noticed a significant increase in hate speech on the platform.

Air travel company Ryanair noticed a gap in the market for airline content on TikTok. Many competitors weren’t using the platform, as in their eyes, the TikTok user base was too young to be able to book holidays or flights.

But Ryanair saw this as an opportunity to connect with their future customers. TikTok users would become familiar with Ryanair, and then when the time came to book their first holiday, they’d choose the low-cost airline they’d come to know and love on their favourite social media platform.

Ryanair also used TikTok to handle objections and clarify exactly what the Ryanair experience is. If you’re paying £20 for a flight, you won’t have a luxury experience. They don’t try to pretend to be something they’re not, and they even make light of it.

Video screenshot source

9. Incorporate Influencer Marketing

There have been rumours that influencer marketing is on the decline, but with Google releasing its Perspectives filter, we’re likely to see it have a resurgence at the end of 2023 and beyond.

The Perspectives filter lets you filter Google search results only to show perspectives from people around the internet. This could be short videos, long videos, Reddit threads, answers on Quora or more.

Because of this, brands will want to use online creators and influencers to appear in Google’s Perspectives.

With AI search on the horizon, businesses will likely see a drop in traffic, so influencer marketing is a great way to connect with customers outside of search.

Even without these upcoming changes, influencer marketing has been an important part of any B2C marketing strategy for the past few years.

To get started with influencer marketing, take a look at any influencers who are in your niche. You may want to work with a fitness influencer if you sell wellness products. If you sell tech products, you could work with a tech influencer.

But that doesn’t mean you’re limited to those niches. Family influencers will have an audience interested in tech, and gaming influencers might be a good fit for your wellness brand. Outside-of-the-box thinking can help you stand out.

For example, Loki the Wolfdog is an account dedicated to showing the life of some wolf dogs whose owners take them on many outdoor travel adventures. At first glance, you might think, “ok, dog influencer, I can’t work with them if I’m not a pet brand”.

But their biggest sponsor is car manufacturer Toyota.

Because of the owner’s travel lifestyle, their photos are often out in the wilderness — in deserts, forests and mountain ranges. In the background of many of these images is the rugged, off-road-ready car they use to get to these locations, and it just happens to be a Toyota.

Toyota identified that many of Loki’s followers aspire to live this lifestyle with their dogs. When the time comes, they’ll look to Toyota for a great adventure car that can handle pets and rugged terrain.

If you want to get an authentic look into the best influencers to work with and have a social media presence, look at who your followers follow. Check your follower’s accounts to see if they represent your ideal customer or buyer persona, and then see if any influencers pop up across a bunch of their accounts.

These are the people you want to be working with.

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10. Omnichannel B2C Marketing: Reaching Customers across Multiple Platforms and Touchpoints

The best marketing strategy includes multiple different channels with a combination of the strategies we included above.

This is known as an omnichannel marketing strategy. This approach uses multiple digital marketing channels and touchpoints to create a seamless and consistent customer experience across multiple platforms.

It also takes into consideration the experience customers have outside of the digital world, such as visiting a store or interacting with you at an event.

The goal of omnichannel marketing is to create a unified brand experience, no matter where customers interact with the company.

When running omnichannel campaigns, you must ensure consistent messaging across all channels so customers get the same info and experience every time they interact with your brand.

To do this well, you need to understand the customer journey and what they need at different touch points. If customers on social media are likely at the start of their journey, you want to avoid bombarding them with content about making a purchase then and there.