Copy Considerations for B2C Customers

As a digital agency catering to both B2B and B2C clients, we recognise that there are very different drivers and motivators that result in massaging sales in these two business environments.

To start with, it is important to grasp a very basic rule of thumb regarding the main headline difference between these two groups when it comes to sales messaging.

Very generally speaking, B2B customers tend to prefer sales messages that are supported by hard stats, while the B2C customer is best converted by appealing to the emotions.

While there are many exceptions to this general rule you have to understand and internalise the rules before you can effectively break them, as I learned many years ago while studying classical piano and composition.

So, in this article, based on this rule of thumb, I will be looking at the sort of sales messaging and copy we would recommend for B2C clients.

Emotions Versus Data

When targeting the B2C market, sales copy is often at its most effective when it plays on the emotions. Copy that focuses on how your products or services will make the customer feel or how it will fit into and augment one’s life in some way resonates with the buyer.

So using the example of copy for a spa hotel, your customer might be less interested in the fact that your hotel has 30 rooms and 40 highly trained members of staff, yet possibly more interested in an invite to be a guest at an intimate boutique hotel catering to only a small handful of exclusive and privileged clients, where peace and tranquillity are paramount to ensure total relaxation throughout your stay.

Storytelling versus Facts & Figures

To develop the previous point a little, some of the best copy concepts for B2C copy involve the telling of stories in some way or another. This is because stories provide an excellent opportunity for emotional triggers and are very easy to relate and spread virally from person to person.

The story can be about a person using a product or service, or about how a person (or group of people) was able to achieve something meaningful with the product or service. It could even relate how the product changed lives for the better, etc.

It can be anything really, as long as it is positive and as long as it is true – call me old fashioned but in my humble opinion, true stories have a better chance of sounding more credible and therefore have a higher probability of spreading organically.

Harnessing Impulse

In the B2C environment, quite often we are talking to individual decision makers or smaller groups of influencers. For example, if you are promoting a restaurant, you are more often than not targeting a couple or a family or a small group of friends. Decisions are often not rational and are often made on the spur of the moment. What we in business call, “seat of the pants”, except in the B2C environment, it has positive connotations and is almost a good thing.

For this reason, in addition to more emotional drivers as mentioned above, calls to action are also very important to facilitate the sales process.

Messages such as “Buy Now!” and “Hurry while stocks last!” are commonly used in B2C copy and trigger emotions of urgency.

Be Prepared to Break the Rules

If your business is primarily B2C then I would almost always suggest a copy strategy that focuses on emotional triggers. However, as I mentioned above, rules are made to be broken and the world is rarely black and white, so you might find that there are scenarios in your content programme that are best served with less emotion and more fact.

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