Cultivating More Customers: The Essential B2C Marketing Tips
There are more than 27 million small businesses in the United States, and a large portion of them are in the B2C (business to consumer) space. As a company, how in the world can you stand out from the crowd?
This can be a tough question. But one of the best things you can do is ace your B2C marketing. When you do this, you'll connect with your audience and convince them to become customers.
Here's how to make it happen with some essential tips.
Utilize Social Media
It's no secret that social media is a massive part of our society. More than 65% of the population uses some form of it.
As a business, this means great opportunity. Social media is the perfect place to cultivate an audience, educate prospects, and generate leads and sales for your company.
Depending on your goals, you can even nurture current customer relationships, helping to retain them and also upsell them. The possibilities are endless.
It's all about deciding your goals, picking the platform that aligns best and getting started. It will put you on the path to social media success.
Respond Professionally to Negative Feedback
Any time you have an online presence as a company, it’s essential to monitor your online reputation. Customers will leave reviews on sites like Google, Facebook, and Yelp, and you’ll receive a mix of both positive and negative feedback.
When you do receive negative reviews, that’s okay. Every business does. The key here is how you respond to them.
Be sure to reach out and show empathy for the situation. Issue an apology and ask them what you can do to resolve their concerns. Potential customers will see this and feel comforted, knowing that you care about your customers and are willing to help when needed.
Engage in Content Marketing
Content marketing is a valuable tool to add to your B2C marketing strategy. The idea here is reaching people where they’re searching.
Let’s say you sell shoes. Someone has a question about running shoes and types into Google, “How do I pick the best running shoes?” Well, the results that show up are just pieces of content that people have written.
And you could write that content, answering the question, and leading people to your wide selection of running shoes. It’s a fantastic way to naturally and organically generate interest in your brand, ultimately growing your customer base.
Consider starting a blog and developing a content marketing strategy for your company.
B2C Marketing Tips You Need
Now that you’ve read all about these essential B2C marketing tips, what’s next for your business? It’s time to implement these ideas into your company’s plans.
However, we know that it can feel a little overwhelming. That’s why our team of experts is here to help you every step of the way.
Questions? Comments? Get in touch with us at any time.
What Do I Need for Market Research?
Market research can be a daunting undertaking, especially for small- or medium-sized business owners that don’t have experience with conducting their own research. We’re commonly asked by business owners what they need for market research and our answer is always “it depends.”
The specific needs of your market research will greatly depend on the type of information that will benefit your business. Depending on the size and breadth of your study, you might not need much in terms of technology – but you will always need a lot of human capital. That being said, there are a few tried and true staples that are beneficial in all market research projects.
Below are a few important things for launching any successful market research project:
Questions & Goals
Before you can effectively launch any type of market research initiative, it’s necessary to have a firm understanding of what your business is trying to learn/achieve. Before beginning any project, it’s necessary to be able to clearly articulate your specific research questions. Without developing specific questions, research often becomes tangential and useless at building a better business.
Develop Specific Research Methods
Research methods are simply a very specific set of plans that designate how the research will be conducted. After you’ve developed your questions, it’s time to develop very specific methods. Research is not the time to shoot from the hip or initiate half-cocked plans. Every good market
research strategy requires a specific set of plans or methods for collecting and interpreting data.
Having well-defined methods in place will guarantee that you’re collecting the proper data to answer your questions, and will maximize the value of conducting research.
An Experienced Team and/or Team Leader
Market research sometimes appears to be simple; however, just because something looks simple it doesn’t mean that it’s actually easy. Having a research team that’s experienced, primarily composed of individuals that have received professional training, will ensure that you’re collecting valid data.
There are many tiny nuances that can greatly impact your data collection; we recommend that you speak with an expert, but if you’re eager to learn more on your own you should consider picking up a book on market research or behavioral science methods. Paying for an experienced team might be costly upfront, but it will be beneficial to your bottom line in the long run.
Participants
If you want to do any kind of primary data collection—such as interviews, surveys, focus groups, etc.—you’re going to need to find people to participate in those projects. Participant recruitment can be the trickiest part of your data collection. Never forget, it’s important that you do your best to capture a representative sample of your target customer. If your customers are females aged 34-40, your participants should fall into that category; similarly, if your primary customers are outdoor runners, then you need to include runners from a variety of different backgrounds.
As a rule of thumb, descriptive surveys require 100+ participants, while descriptive interviews will require 30+ participants. But these are just the minimums, the more people participate in your study the more data you will have!
Software
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Computer software has made life easier for many aspects of data collection and interpretation. For example, if you want to launch an online survey there are several software packages to consider (Qualtrics, Survey Monkey, etc.), for focus groups you can use transcription software, and for secondary data analysis, there’s software that can help you sort through big data.
That being said, some of these software packages are not user-friendly and can be expensive for small businesses to afford. If you foresee your business regularly conducting market research, investing in these software packages can be extremely beneficial.
Location
The old saying “location, location, location” has never been truer. If you’re collecting data in person, you need to pick a location that provides you access to an accurate sampling of your target audience. Oftentimes, unless you’re running a small study, it’s necessary to collect data at multiple locations to accurately reflect your target customers. Admittedly, negotiating for access to venues can be difficult, but it’s important that you don’t settle on subpar locations.
If you’re launching an online study that doesn’t require a physical location, you still need to think
about when/where/how the link to your study can be distributed. Oftentimes, businesses indiscriminately e-mail blast everyone they can possibly put on a list. This approach will get you results sometimes, but oftentimes businesses benefit from a more thoughtful distribution process.
Patience
Patience is a necessary virtue when conducting research. Remember, data collection is something that occurs over time. Small studies sometimes generate information that is immediately groundbreaking, but oftentimes market research requires some time to understand the bigger picture. Don’t get focused on preliminary findings that only explain the tip of an iceberg, have the patience to let research develop and tell the whole story.
So, what are the things you need for market research? To start, you need to develop specific questions that are beneficial for your business. Good questions form the foundation for great research. Be concise and specific while developing your research methodology, this will prevent you from going off track and developing useless data. After that, all you need is a solid team of researchers to find participants that are relevant to your business. There’s also a variety of software that will assist in processing the data from your market research, it’s often worth the investment to save you time in the long-run.
But at the end of the day, all you really need for market research is people. Never forget, human capital is the cornerstone of all research.
7 Questions to Ask Before Choosing a Market Research Agency
A cursory Google search will reveal dozens, and potentially hundreds, of market research agencies vying for your business. This is why choosing a market research agency can be difficult. It is especially difficult if your company does not have anyone who has experienced with conducting research.
Narrowing down which agency to choose can be tricky, and there are a number of things to consider when selecting the right one. Price will obviously be a deciding factor for many businesses, but you should never select a company based on price alone. This article is meant to give you an insight into how to choose a market research company.
Below, we’ve listed a number of questions that you should ask your market research agency before signing the contract. If a company doesn’t have adequate answers, move on to the next. There are plenty of other agencies who will be able to find out what you need:
Do the Research
What is your process for designing and implementing research?
Any research firm should be able to walk you through their research process from start to finish. It might not know every detail of what the project is going to entail (yet), but they should be able to easily explain how project design and implementation. It should be apparent who will do the research design, data collection, data analysis, and results collation.
Who will be conducting the physical research?
If you’re considering contracting a research firm, the work history of their employees should not be a secret. It should be very clear what employees are the “boots on the ground” collecting data on behalf of your company, and what makes those individuals qualified to conduct research. You have to feel confident that the research firm you choose has experienced staff that is equipped for the tasks ahead of them. What is your hiring process for choosing research personnel?
Is your firm experienced with conducting research in different cultures? Do you have an example?
Regardless of your company’s location or target audience, it’s important to hire an agency that has worked with diverse demographics. Throughout the course of any study—large or small, researchers encounter individuals from different backgrounds and cultures. If a research team isn’t prepared to account for cross-cultural variation, it’s likely that they will overlook important factors impacting the study being conducted. Further, having a team with cross-cultural experience will help them avoid making potentially offensive mistakes while representing your company.
Don’t be afraid to ask for an example of a company’s cross-cultural experience. There’s a big difference between researchers that have a theoretical understanding of cross-cultural work and those that have actual real-world experience working abroad in different environments.
Can I have access to the raw data as the study progresses?
It’s important that the consulting firm you choose is transparent with all the steps of the research process. Part of that transparency is giving you access to the raw data whenever want to see it. Even if you’re not highly skilled in scrubbing or analyzing data, having access to the raw figures is a way to stay involved and keep the market research team honest with their work.
What is your data cleaning process?
Many good studies have been ruined by poor data management. It’s certainly not the most exciting aspect of conducting research, but it is extremely important. All data needs to be “cleaned” or “scrubbed”. Cleaning data most commonly entails looking for duplicate data, scanning the data for unusual or unexplained outliers, and carefully logging any changes or corrections that might need to be made to the data. Data cleaning can be extremely tedious and not everyone is familiar with how to properly scrub data. For this reason, data cleaning is sometimes skipped over by the research team—this is a terrible mistake and can sometimes have huge consequences for the results of research.
How will the summary of results be presented?
Before you ever sign a contract with a research firm, it should be clear how you will be receiving the results of the study. Companies obviously can’t tell you the results of research that hasn’t been conducted, but it should be clear how you’ll be receiving the final report. Will there be a brief write-up, a slideshow presentation in your office, or a Skype conversation explaining your research outcomes? You need to discuss these details before you decide to sign with a company. It’s important that information is presented in a way that works best for your company.
Has the research firm ever worked in your industry before?
It sometimes helps to work with a research firm that has launched products in your industry. This isn’t always necessary because many of the tenets of good research remain the same regardless of the type of industry you’re working with.
If a company has some experience in your industry (or a closely related field) they might already be familiar with some of the hurdles specific to your company’s work.
Get the Best Results
Don’t be afraid to ask questions about the market research team you’ll be hiring! It’s the job of a good research team to seek answers to your questions; therefore, they should be capable of answering the very basic queries we’ve laid out above.