2025 LinkedIn demographics: Key stats and what they mean

B2C (business-to-consumer) sells products and services directly to consumers. Additionally, B2B companies have longer sales cycles that involve multiple decision makers and B2B businesses typically have higher retention rates than consumer goods. Since B2B companies sell products and goods to help other businesses operate efficiently, B2B transactions usually involve larger quantities of goods, higher sales prices, and higher-value transactions than B2C.

ABM works best for B2B companies with high-ticket products and services that require complex decision-making processes. By leveraging firmographic data, businesses can refine their outreach and maximize marketing ROI. Understanding these differences helps businesses create more effective segmentation and targeting strategies. Understanding customer needs, behaviors, and decision-making processes enables businesses to deliver personalized experiences, build trust, and foster long-term relationships. By categorizing businesses into well-defined segments, companies can craft tailored marketing strategies that maximize engagement and conversion rates. ABM is a highly personalized approach where marketing and sales teams collaborate to target high-value accounts.

Without that, fractional CMO and bestselling author Joe Lazer says, your audience won’t feel seen and understood. However, building personas through older methods may reveal shortcomings that outweigh their utility. An actionable guide on building your digital marketing strategy from the ground up. While the two approaches intersect on a few levels, you need to think from a different lens to strategize for each approach.

Built-in intent data

The company takes strong stances on public issues, even when those issues have nothing to do with selling ice cream. Planet Fitness is a gym chain that positions itself as a “Judgement Free Zone” for people of all fitness levels. Duolingo's approach to audience targeting works because of its emphasis on progress instead of fluency. Instead, they lean into budget cooking and life's everyday chaos.

Having explored the ins and outs of this industry, I define B2B marketing as a way for businesses to build relationships with other businesses and gain buyers’ trust. It describes businesses whose customers are individual consumers rather than professional buyers. From target audience to brand positioning, I’ll break down eight parameters to explain how these two approaches differ and intersect at times. Marketing to businesses is a long-term endeavor involving a lengthy buying process. As a seasoned Go-To-Market leader, Haley Katsman brings a wealth of experience in building and scaling high-performance teams across Sales, Strategy, Operations, Enablement, and Analytics.

Consumers have unique values that impact how they live their lives and which brands they monetarily support. B2B brands focus heavily on social selling, i.e., using social platforms B2b target audience like LinkedIn to connect and interact with potential customers. Research suggests that B2B marketers consider relationship-building an important factor for cross-selling and upselling buyers.

Typical types of firmographic data you can expect to collect include company size, industry type, operating locations, revenue, and growth trends. It should be clear by now that there are many types of market segmentation methods, but some are more commonly used. By segmenting target markets, companies have doubled their conversion rates.

Step 1: Research Your Actual Buyers (Not Who You Think They Are)

Without a defined target market, even the best campaign creative lands on the wrong accounts. This guide covers the full process from defining your target market to translating segment data into actionable B2B audience targeting. Before you can personalize any content or messaging, you need to identify your target market. Get the strategies & techniques the fastest growing brands use daily.

This includes data on form submissions, lead conversions, and the effectiveness of different calls-to-action (CTAs). Consider trying a customer survey or using social listening tools to gather data on what values align with your product. The product aligns with customers' values by being plastic-free, natural, vegan, and cruelty-free. Examining customer values can also help you identify industry trends.

How do you define your B2B target audience step by step?

Marketing isn’t effective unless brands keep the audience in mind, and no other audience is as fickle and critical as business customers. If asking customers to “tell their friends” hasn’t worked, try building a system that guides them through specific, rewarded actions instead. Remove friction from the referral process, and brands see more participation. The Champions Hub gives them clear actions (write a review, join a case study, attend an event) with transparent point values. Customers don’t have to figure out how to refer people or worry about whether they’ll get credit. Leveraging employees at the company who know the industry can lead to building new relationships.

What is the difference between B2B and B2C customer relationships?

• Also, I can see what values it brings to the marketplace and what it could make special from others.
• Rethinking your B2B target market is a strategic decision that can have a significant impact on your business’s growth and success.
• And because I want to talk about B2B marketing you need to understand not just who you selling to, but also the type of marketing as well.
• You know the basics of building a plan, managing the sales process, and aligning GTM teams.

B2B marketing focuses heavily on relationship-building during the sales cycle. From my experience building and managing customer relationships, I’ve noticed how these can bring referrals and increase sales through positive word of mouth. It’s not solely connected to revenue; brands run campaigns targeting metrics like consideration, loyalty, and brand recall. For B2B businesses, marketing ROI is directly connected to revenue. There can be some overlap between the two approaches in terms of marketing goals. That means people buy products — even if they don’t have an immediate need — based on how well you market the benefits.

"Instantly is the exact email outreach solution / always wished existed. None of the others even comes close to the combination of features and ease of use." All this will give you a better understanding of their marketing strategy and the groups they’re aiming it at. Analyze your customer data to determine when they’re most active online, which will help you create the most effective campaigns. This is especially relevant for digital-first businesses. Google Analytics offers a wealth of data about who’s visiting your website, and this includes your customers.

See how unknown connections in our eco-system can impact us.

But if you nail it, you’ll be able to craft the perfect messages that will get both your target market and your target audience on board. As you can see, defining your target market and your target audience has a profound impact on your entire B2B marketing strategy. That’s your target audience, which is a subset (aka a specific segment) of your target market. Visualize your B2B target market as a big circle, and inside that is the general population of your potential customers. They also tend to have bigger budgets than B2C customers, which means it takes a lot to convince them to choose a company over everyone else.

These answers will provide you with a baseline of which companies you’re actually trying to serve. Rather than identifying the unique needs of one individual — you’ll need to identify the unique needs of multiple people along the purchase decision making line. And since they’re focused on the big picture, you need to be too.

Doing so can help them become more familiar with your customers and prospects. Your persona should include functional insights related to their job and details related to their engagement behaviors and content preferences. Persona development is a customized process because it addresses your organization’s unique marketing challenges and opportunities. Those advantages include pinpointing new customer segments, accessing richer data, and increasing loyalty through personalized conversations. As Andi outlines in her Content Marketing World presentation (below), personality refers to differences in people's characteristic thinking, feeling, and behavioral patterns. To find that muse, Joe recommends spending as much time as possible with the people you're creating content for.