Is Your Business B2B or B2C?
Sometimes it is worth asking: whether your market is business to business or business to customer; B2B or B2C? Take care, these designations can be misleading.
They assume you are a business. The first B is your business and so anyone who makes an offer is a business. However, the recipient does not necessarily make a difference by being designated as a business.
Business or Customer?
Let’s assume your offer is marketing. There are two ways to approach this.
You can offer marketing services. This means you would be asked by a business to market some aspect of their business on their behalf. This would be a DFY (done for you) service. It is something that attracts small to medium-sized businesses that can afford commercial prices for a commercial service.
Alternatively, you might offer a coaching service. Here it is likely the client will do most of their marketing themselves (DIY) or you might work closely with them (DWY). My concern here is not to consider the pros and cons of these approaches but to point out this is where B2B and B2C can become somewhat academic.
The DFY approach is likely to appeal to companies with resources to spend on receiving a specialist service. They are less likely to choose a coaching service for marketing unless they need to train staff in some specialist branch of marketing.
The DWY approach is more likely to be chosen by freelancers who cannot afford to pay for marketing and want to learn the basics for themselves. Some of these may be companies and many unincorporated. So, are the lone workers B2B or B2C?
This matters because the expectations of incorporated businesses are likely to be very different to those of a lone worker. It may be inappropriate to offer something designed for one to the other.
The lone worker in a B2B arrangement may find they lose control of their business because someone markets for them. An established business in a coaching arrangement may find they are not using their resources as effectively as they could.
All these businesses may think they are in a B2B relationships, even though for the lone worker the relationship may be more like a B2C arrangement.
It’s probably not crucial but worth bearing in mind.
Please let me know if this is helpful and if there are any points I could expand upon.