Wireframe tools, Prototyping tools, and mockup tools play a vital role in the development of an app or website. UI/UX is the main feature, and you need the best wireframe tool to design these features for your app or website. If you are planning to build a new website or an app, a wireframe tool will help you create a high-quality UI/UX design.
In this blog, we will cover the best wireframe tools, which will make it easy for you to design the UI/UX for your app or website.
List of best Wireframe tools for UI/UX designers in 2020
Adobe XD has all the tools for creating the concepts in the UX/UI toolbox. It is a member of the creative suite along with an illustrator and Photoshop.
Pros:
It comes with Responsive resize. Designers can use this feature to resize multiple objects for web and mobile app views.
You can tag developers, teammates, and stakeholders in real-time right in the app for reviews, remarks, and presentations.
You can share your designs and communicate with the Adobe support team.
Easy to use.
It has various tools and plugins to expedite up the development process.
You can create your prototype design.
Cons:
Many features are accessible in premium versions only.
It has less reshaping tools and has no layer panel tools for vector design.
The platform has many tools, but designers want those tools that can solve specific problems.
Cost:
Adobe XD for teams: Per user cost is 22.99 $/month. It will have unlimited design specs and prototypes. Also, it will have 100 GB of Adobe hosted storage, Adobe font library, admin controls, and onboarding.
Moqups is an all in one design tool for UI/UX designers. It is a web-based software that you can use in creating a wireframe for your mobile and web applications. You can use Moqups for developing diagrams and prototypes, and this platform has more than 1.5 million designers globally.
Pros:
Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and web are compatible with this platform.
It comes with drag and drops pre-made templates for simple access.
Lots of font and styling options are available for users.
It has integrated stencil kits for use.
Moqups has plenty of icon-sets available for use.
Paid plans range from 13$ to 19$ pm. The no of users also comes defined with it.
Cons:
The free version only allows one project.
Provides only 5 MB of storage
Restricted to 300 objects.
Cost:
Personal Plan: 13$ per month. It allows only one user with unlimited projects, storage, and objects. Creative Plan: 20$ – 345$ per month. It allows 3-50 users with unlimited projects, storage, and objects. It comes with team management features.
An organized and simple wireframe tool, Wireframe.cc has a clean interface and doesn’t have many toolbar and icons, unlike other wireframe software. It gives people the option to sketch their ideas as fresh as they come into their minds. A free browser-based wireframing tool, Wireframe.cc comes with a basic UI that is perfect for quick mockups.
Pros:
You get the freedom to draw anything you want with a mouse. Drag the mouse over the canvas and start creating your sketch.
Variety of stencils to pick.
Simple features, and it doesn’t have any complicated handlings.
It can deliver excellent results.
Wireframe.cc provides seven days of the free trial.
After saving a wireframe, you will receive a URL that can get shared with others. Although, this feature is available on premium version only.
The simple UI makes it easy for designers to design their UI/UX.
You can send live wireframes to other members of your team through the team features.
Cons:
You cannot create your account with the free version.
If you are developing a wireframe in the free version, it will be public by default.
You can only develop single-page wireframe in the free version.
Lack of integrations.
Cost:
Free version: 0$, all wireframes are public, no user accounts, and one wireframe per page only. Solo version: 16$ per month, wireframes are private, one user account, multi-wireframe pages, revision, and exporting features included. Trio version: 39$ per month, three user accounts, includes all features from the solo version.
Enterprise version: 99$ per month, unlimited users, and includes all features.
You can design a wireframe quickly with Balsamiq Mockups. With this digital tool, you will get a unique feeling of drawing with a pencil.
Pros:
Platforms such as Windows, macOS, and Web-based are supported.
You will get simple to use drag and drop interface for smooth handling.
You can print prototypes and perform online tests.
The platform has a lot of wireframe skins and sketch skins.
You can work offline.
It supports integration with third-party apps.
It will provide you a vast library of UI elements.
Cons:
The trial version comes with limited access to UI elements.
It offers only 30-days of free trial.
Cost:
Basic plan: 9$ per month, two projects, and one user. It comes with all the wireframing features. Team: 49$ per month, 20 projects, and multiple users. It comes with all the features of the basic plan. Enterprise: 199$ per month, 200 projects, and multiple users. It includes all the features of the other plans. On-premise: 89$ for a single-user license for Windows or Mac systems.
An open-source, designer tool, Fluid UI can deliver high-quality wireframes very quickly. It uses the newest technologies, such as HTML5, CSS, and Javascript.
Pros:
It comes with three premium plans, which you can select as per your needs.
The maintenance feature is easy to use.
iOS and Android are compatible with Fluid UI.
You can choose from over 2000 in-built components.
You can use any device to test your wireframe.
It has a Skype chat and a live video calling for user feedback.
Fluid UI allows you to communicate with the UI design through different screens such as Tablet, Mobile, Wearables, and Desktop.
Cons:
The free plan comes with only one project.
You can create only ten pages.
No feedback and comments
The video presentation cannot be uploaded.
Uploading is not allowed.
Cost:
Solo: 8.25$ per month, one user, and five projects. It comes with all libraries, unlimited reviewers, and multi-device playback. Pro: 19.08 $ per month. One user and ten active projects. Exporting, commenting, and all the features of the solo tier gets included. Team: 41.58$ per month. Five users and unlimited projects. Team collaboration, reviewers, and all the features of Pro tier gets included.
Conclusion
When you shortlist the wireframing tool that is best for you, make sure to consider all the features that you need. You may require various wireframing tools to solve different problems. We hope you found this blog useful in determining the right wireframe tool for yourself.
After years of talk, experimentation, and plateauing smartphone sales, foldable devices are finally entering the market. Samsung, Huawei, and Motorola have all released phones with foldable screens, and tinkering away behind the scenes the likes of Apple aren’t far behind. The ‘foldable web’ is coming.
Its devices are taking various forms, from laptops to phones to newfangled dual-screen hybrids. There is no catch-all definition for this new class of gizmos, but most fit into one of two categories. ‘Foldables’ are devices in which the screen literally folds, while on ‘dual-screens’ the screens are separate but can be used as one. Where web design is concerned the two types will likely play by similar rules. Should the technology take off in a big way then web design could be looking at its biggest shakeup in well over a decade.
It all sounds very exciting, but what does it actually mean? The ‘foldable web’ will bring with it new challenges, new opportunities, and, in all likelihood, new syntax. The web could be in for its biggest shakeup since the smartphone. Users and coders alike have gotten rather used to the playing field: desktop and mobile with a sprinkling of tablets. Not any more. If you thought you knew responsive design before you ain’t seen nothing yet.
New Web Standards, New Experiences, And New Problems
Flexible screen technology has been researched since the 1970s but has only been developed in earnest since the turn of the millennium. It’s only in the last couple of years that consumer devices have started to enter the market — in all shapes and sizes.
Some, like the Galaxy Z Flip, mimic an old-school flip-phone. Others, like the Huawei Mate X, have the screen(s) wrap around the outside of the phone. Plenty more are built like electronic books, with two interior displays becoming one when the device is fully opened. Oftentimes there is a separate, smaller screen on the outside so users don’t have to unfold it when they use it.
The Huawei Mate X and Samsung Galaxy Z Flip. (Note: Dramatic shadows are not included with most foldable phones.) (Large preview)
The hardware hiccups are well documented and are being worked through. Foldable devices are coming. That is not the focus. Here the focus is on how the technology will impact web developers, UX designers, and anyone else whose business it is to deliver quality browsing experiences.
Updates To CSS And JavaScript
New hardware means updated software. Microsoft has been particularly responsive to the arrival of foldable tech, in part because the company is working on its own foldable devices. Three Microsoft developers — Bogdan Brinza, Daniel Libby, and Zouhir Chahoud — have published an explainer in which they propose a new JavaScript API and a CSS media query. Chahoud expanded on this with a GitHub post on February 3rd.
They highlight potential issues with foldable devices, including:
Variety of hardware in the foldable market.
Some devices are seamless while others aren’t, and their shapes vary wildly. The Windows Surface Duo and Galaxy Fold are both shaped like books – one with a seam and one without. The seamless Motorola Razr harkens back to the flip-phones of old, with the two ‘halves’ of the screen closer to squares than rectangles. Consider as well that it’s surely only a matter of time before a three-part foldable appears on the scene. With so much variety in the shape and size of foldables it’s important to target a _class _of device rather than specific hardware.
‘Fold area’ functionality.
The miracle of foldable screens has required a few sacrifices. A major one is the potential awkwardness of the screen(s) near the fold. Content positioned on or across the seam of a partially folded screen may be difficult to view or interact with. Books and magazines tend to avoid printing content across their folds; the same will likely hold true for foldable screens. What’s more, some usability tests have suggested touchscreen responsiveness isn’t as reliable on foldables.
In an attempt to address these issues and others, Brinza, Libby, and Chahoud have proposed a spanning CSS media feature, which can test whether the browser window is being displayed across two screens or across a fold. If it is, then content can then be positioned relative to the fold or seam. This plays into the ongoing evolution of responsive design, which increasingly has to account for more than screen size.
Accordingly, environment variables have also been proposed, providing a way to recognise segment size and orientations. Such additions would effectively allow websites to shape themselves across three dimensions. The same page can behave differently when it’s flat than when it’s an L shape.
The CSS suggestions are accompanied by a new Window Segments enumeration for JavaScript API, which would allow sites to behave more dynamically. For example, what’s displayed could change depending on whether the screen is bent or not, or behave differently depending on whether users touch one half of the display or the other. The new JavaScript API also improves functionality on non-Document Object Model targets where CSS is not available, such as Canvas2d or WebGL.
Websites would be able to shape themselves around a device’s seam. Mockups from the explainer by Bogdan Brinza, Daniel Libby, and Zouhir Chahoud. (Large preview)
These proposals don’t account for more than two screens or segments, but for now the tech seems to be headed that way. Should these proposals be implemented they would add a new layer to responsive web design. The time may soon come when we can no longer assume sites need only function in single rectangular spaces. New CSS and JavaScript specifications like those proposed by Brinza, Libby, and Chahoud would give developers a way of doing something about it.
“We view dual-screen and foldable devices as another responsive web design target, something web developers have been doing for years with CSS specific to phones, desktops, tablets,and so on.”
If new web primitives stay ahead of the tech, developers will be able to focus on improving the functionality of their sites.
A New Fold And Dual-Screen Experiences
What does that improved functionality involve? One of the main takeaways is that there’s a new fold in town. While ‘above the fold’ has been around for as long as there’s been scrolling (a throwback to newspaper design) developers will soon have to contend with folds in the middle of the page.
At the very least this will likely mean adjusting content so users don’t have to interact with anything on the fold. If touch controls are limited at the fold, or the device is partially folded, it makes sense to reposition certain elements so that they sit on one half of the screen or the other.
Foldables offer new opportunities for dual-screen mobile designs. Mockup from the explainer by Bogdan Brinza, Daniel Libby, and Zouhir Chahoud. (Large preview)
“I think there are a lot of opportunities not only in the increased real estate but also in the ‘defined’ real-estate,” Chahoud says. “The fold (whether the device is seamless or has a seam) splits the screen into two nicely defined display regions and creators can organize specific content per region.”
This is genuinely handy. Switch it to selfie mode, half fold it and it (obviously) sits upright for your call. pic.twitter.com/5reTQlpkXp
On the more ambitious end of the spectrum, foldable devices effectively mean a mini dual-screen setup, in which the two halves of the display can be used for different things. Indeed, when you boil down the foldable web it bears an uncanny resemblance to devices like the Nintendo DS — a single device with two screens working together. Tech has advanced massively since then, to the point where the two displays can be seamlessly connected, but the core experience is very similar.
I have seen the future, and it looks a bit like 2004. (Large preview)
In terms of web design, this allows for content to be presented in a more app-like way. Chahoud says: “I believe designs targeting dual-screen or foldable devices will be a two-column grid at the base, representing the available logical or physical display regions.” Samsung Developer documentation goes even further, suggesting the secondary display can itself be split into two, providing three separate ‘screens’ in all.
On a cooking website, this might mean having the recipe on one screen and the ingredients on the other. On a news website, it might mean having article copy on one screen and related reading on the other. It depends, as ever, on the content. At its most ambitious the foldable web could function like dual mobile screens.
Tidying Up
For many, the rise of foldable devices won’t be a game-changer so much as a modest improvement for user experience. Steve Krug, author of Don’t Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, sees the foldable web as an evolution rather than a revolution. “Unfoldable phones always struck me as the next reasonable step,” he says. Not because of dual-screen capabilities, but because they make tablet experiences more portable, fulfilling the desire for “a tablet I can carry in my pocket.”
Phablet, as well as being a top contender for worst portmanteau of all time (it narrowly lost to ‘guesstimate’ in the 2019 World Championships), may well find a new home. Rather than meaning a phone so large it’s basically a tablet, a phablet will be one or the other depending on whether the device is open, closed, or somewhere inbetween.
“There are classes of apps that would benefit from split-screen or different aspect ratios, but for the most part those devices are not going to bring you anything new if you just want a larger screen to watch videos on.”
— Steve Krug
In many cases, the ‘foldable web’ will simply mean better-optimizing sites for tablet-sized displays. At present tablets only have around 3% market share worldwide (compared to 52% for mobile and 45% for desktop). If foldable devices make a dent in that they will be much harder to ignore.
When the likes of Apple release a foldable device, it’s safe to say it will sell like hotcakes. As more foldable tech enters the market, web design will need to up its responsiveness just to maintain existing functionality. At the very least there’s going to be some tidying up to do.
So what does the foldable web mean? In short, it’s up to you. The trend likely marks the next step in responsive design. With the aid of new CSS and JavaScript features, developers will be able to build multi-screen experiences where before there was the single, uninterrupted rectangles of desktop, mobile, and tablet.
How far those experiences can go remains to be seen. It’s safe to assume the ‘foldable web’ won’t arrive readymade. There is no guarantee that devices will take off like smartphones did, especially while most of them still cost upwards of 2,000 dollars. There will be teething on the hardware side, a period of turbulence after which tech will likely settle into reliable styles.
It is the role of developers and designers to push these platforms as far as they can. The foldable web is an opportunity to give websites fluidity and functionality that wasn’t possible before. It means making websites more responsive than ever.
It also marks a unique opportunity to explore uncharted territory. Though not a seismic change, the foldable web is probably the biggest change to the status quo since the iPhone. What that means as far as syntax goes is very much up for grabs. Web standards aren’t concocted in smoke-filled back rooms. Now is the time for getting involved, offering feedback, making suggestions, and experimenting.
Mobile-first design is about to get more complicated, but also more exciting. The foldable web could be the first time handheld devices feel expansive rather than restrictive. For some websites, it will mean tweaks, while for others, wholesale redesigns. The scope of what’s possible depends on the innovation of developers.
There’s a lot riding on your shoulders as a freelance designer. You have to play the part of salesperson, project manager, web designer, accountant, and more.
That’s why it’s critical to develop more efficient ways to work while maximizing results.
One way that agencies and even small teams of designers do this is through design systems. By taking the time to create a collection of design standards, reusable components, and documentation, everyone can work at a higher level at all times.
But is this something freelancers can take advantage of, or are design systems just a waste of your time?
Today, we want to take a look at what makes design systems so special and some reasons why it makes sense for freelancers to create them.
What Are Design Systems?
The easiest way to show you what a design system is (and why it differs from something like a style guide or UI pattern library) is to show you one of the most popular ones from the past decade.
Google released Material Design in 2014 as a way to bring consistency to all its properties. Its API also enabled designers and developers to utilize the design system with all its guidelines and components.
What makes Material Design — and any well-built design system — so effective is how robust it is. It includes:
A System that clearly explains the purpose and goals of it;
A Foundation that breaks down the key elements of the UI and carefully describes how each should be designed;
A collection of interactive Components that makes adding common UI elements to a website or app much easier;
A set of Resources and tools that help designers correctly apply Material Design styles and standards to their websites and apps.
With such a well-thought-out system and documentation, it becomes much easier to work on massive website projects or with a growing team of designers and other contributors. There’s no guessing when it comes to choosing:
Colors;
Typography;
Sizing and spacing;
Imagery and iconography;
Layout;
Motion;
Interaction;
Data visualization;
And so on.
The design system leaves no room for error as it’s all perfectly spelled out. What’s more, when the system is documented and captured in a tool like Sketch, making updates to it and collaborating with others becomes hassle-free.
But Can Design Systems Work for Freelancers?
This brings us back to our original question. My answer to that is yes… if your freelance business fits one of the following criteria:
You Specialize in Designing Larger Websites
Truth be told, you won’t really benefit from using a design system if you design smaller websites (we’re talking maybe five or six pages total). Instead, you could just use a content management system or website builder to save and reuse global components and call it a day.
For those of you who specialize in designing larger and more complex websites, you’ll certainly need a design system — even if it’s just you working on the project. The more pages you add to a site, the more chances you have to introduce an inconsistency.
Having a design system laid down from the get-go ensures that any additions or updates can be handled with ease. And for websites of this size, you’re likely to have a lot of this revisionary work to do as your clients scale their businesses and, in turn, their websites.
You Provide Monthly Maintenance
For many freelancers, the constant hustle required to find new website clients can be tiring. That’s why many of them offer monthly website maintenance plans to clients. The recurring and predictable revenue creates a safe buffer for designers while also making them an indispensable asset to clients.
For those of you who provide this service, a design system would be very useful — even for smaller websites with just a handful of pages. If you take the time upfront to create a design system, future updates to the site will take much less time and require less effort as you’ll have pre-designed components and rules to guide you.
You Have Plans to Scale Your Business
For some of you, your dream job is to work as a freelancer and have total autonomy and control for as long as possible. For others, the future looks a little different. Instead, you dream of building an agency, hiring a team of creatives to support you, and expanding into other profitable services and niches.
If this sounds like you, then using design systems makes perfect sense. That goes for designing large websites and small. If you can get yourself into the habit of using designing systems that dictate how you design now, scaling up to an agency will be a breeze.
You Have a Design or Marketing Partner
Many solo freelancers partner with other creatives to provide clients with more well-rounded solutions. It’s also good to know people who have skills unlike yours, so you have trustworthy recommendations to make when clients ask for help.
Whether you actively work in conjunction with one of these partners or you simply hand clients off to them when you’re done, design systems would be really useful. This enables you to set the rules for your client’s marketing style and ensures that your partners can maintain consistency with them even if you’re no longer involved.
This might not seem like it would be beneficial to you, but it is if and when those clients come back to you wanting more help (like a redesigned website or help with ongoing maintenance).
Wrap-Up
There are tons of ways to work more efficiently and to produce better quality websites. That said, not every productivity hack, tool, or technique is going to be right for you.
If you’re currently working as a freelancer and are intrigued by these design systems everyone’s talking about, carefully consider whether or not they actually make sense for you at this time.
If they don’t, don’t sweat it. You can still take advantage of the basic principles behind them. Create style guides. Compile a set of standard components you use from site to site. And document all of your processes. These are best practices every designer should have in their back pocket.
As an email marketer, your no. 1 goal is to boost your open rates and get people to click through that awesome content you create. While good copywriting techniques will help, there are other things you can do to get your emails in front of more eyeballs. The great news is that these things are so easy to implement that you’ll want to get to work today.
Let’s dive in!
Remove invalid email addresses
This may sound like a no-brainer, but still, there are marketers out there who continue to email invalid addresses. Although they bounce, some senders believe it’s no big deal, since everyone else is getting their emails. But that’s not how email marketing works.
When you get lots of bounces, your sender reputation starts to decline. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) look at you and see someone who doesn’t care about best practices. As a result, they’ll start delivering your emails in people’s spam folder. Even worse, you may end up on a blacklist and be banned from sending any email at all.
So, what to do? Before sending your next email, prune out all the invalid addresses from your list. It’s fast and easy – use an email list verification service and it’ll do the job within minutes.
Are you getting spam complaints?
You work hard to come up with the most engaging emails for your audience. But at some point, you’re going to get a spam complaint. Either the person forgot they ever subscribed to your emails, or they find your content to be spammy – it’s just going to happen.
What’s important is for you to stay on top of your spam complaints, because they’re a real risk to your sender reputation. As soon as you notice a subscriber labeling your message as spam, remove that person from your list. They clearly don’t want to hear from you, so let them go.
Also, if you want to protect your reputation, you can prevent known complainers from getting on your list in the first place. By installing an email validation API, you’ll keep your database free of abuse emails. The API checks every email address in real time and rejects the bad ones automatically – so you get to maintain good email hygiene at all times.
Let go of role-based email addresses
They’re necessary – especially to larger companies – but they have very little value to your email marketing. You’ll recognize them easily: contact@, office@ or @team@ are email addresses usually monitored by a group of people, not a single person.
Why do they sabotage your open rates?
They get so much email that whoever checks them tends to delete messages en masse. Your chances to sell anything are slim.
Because of the volume of email they receive, they’re prone to soft bounces (as mailboxes get full)
Because your emails are at a risk of getting deleted or archived without being open, role-based accounts affect your overall engagement. That, in turn, will have a negative impact on your sender reputation.
Ideally, you would only communicate with people who want to receive content from you, and role-based accounts are not among them.
Inactive subscribers: should you keep them?
In a nutshell: no. As you’ve seen earlier, your engagement metrics have a significant influence on your sender reputation.
When people open your emails and click through your content, they’re showing ISPs that you’re doing a good job at email marketing. On the other hand, low open and click rates are a clear indication that people don’t care so much about what you send them. So, you’ll land in the junk pile or in Google’s Promotions tab.
Subscribers who never engage with your content aren’t doing you any service. As hard as it may be, say goodbye to them and move on.
When should you do that? The ideal frequency is every six months. If someone hasn’t clicked on anything you’ve sent in more than half a year, chances are they’re a lost cause.
Test your subject lines
They’re crucial to your open rates: 47% of people open emails based on the subject line alone. So how can you make your subject lines more compelling?
Uwe Dreissigacker, founder and CEO of InvoiceBerry, shared one of his team’s rules when it comes to subject lines. “We never write them in title case. Instead, we use sentence case to make our emails look like they’re coming from someone familiar,” Uwe said. It makes sense: when you get an email from a friend, the subject line is never in title case, right?
Apart from that, consider writing down several subject lines before you choose a winner. It will force you to get creative and come up with more ideas – and more ideas are always better than one.
Finally, you can test your subject lines. Split your list and use different subjects for each segment. In a couple of days, check your reports and see which one performed best. Then, use that insight to boost your open rates in the long run.
Let’s wrap up: how to increase your email open rates
Start with a clean email list: use an email verification system periodically to weed out bad contacts.
Break up with people who mark you as spam: you’ll probably never win them back.
Avoid emailing role-based email addresses: they only eat up your email marketing budget without bringing you anything in return.
Let go of subscribers who haven’t engaged with your content in more than six months.
Test your subject lines and use the sentence case as opposed to the title case.
Increasing your open rates can take time, so be patient. Email your list consistently and send out the best content you can produce. In time, your subscribers will become more familiar with your brand and that helps you build trust and steady results.
I was recently working on a modern take of the blogroll. The idea was to offer readers a selection of latest posts from those blogs in a magazine-style layout, instead of just popping a list of our favorite blogs in the sidebar.
The easy part was grabbing a list of posts with excerpts from our favorite RSS feeds. For that, we used a WordPress plugin, Feedzy lite, which can aggregate multiple feeds into a single time-ordered list — perfect for showcasing their latest offerings. The hard part was making it all look awesome.
The plugin’s default list UI is rather bland, so I wanted to style it to look like a newspaper or magazine website with a mixture of smaller and larger “featured content” panels.
This seems like an ideal case for CSS Grid! Create a grid layout for different layouts, say, one five-column layout and one three-column layout, then use media queries to switch between them at different break points. Right? But do we actually need those media queries — and all the hassle of identifying break points — when we can use grid’s auto-fit options to automatically create a fluid responsive grid for us?
The approach sounded tempting, but when I started introducing column-spanning elements, I ran into trouble with the grid overflowing on narrow screens. Media queries appeared to be the only solution. That is, until I found a workaround!
After looking at several tutorials on CSS Grid, I found that they largely fall into two camps:
Tutorials that show you how to create an interesting layout with spanned elements, but for a fixed number of columns.
Tutorials that explain how to make a responsive grid that resizes automatically, but with all of the grid items the same width (i.e. without any spanned columns).
I want to make the grid do both: create a fully responsive fluid layout that includes responsively resizing multi-column elements as well.
The beauty is that once you understand the limitations of responsive grids, and why and when column spans break grid responsiveness, it is possible to define a responsive magazine/news style layout in just a dozen lines of code plus one simple media query (or even with no media queries if you are willing to limit your span options).
Here’s a visual showing the RSS plugin right out of the box and what it’ll look like after we style it up.
This magazine-style grid layout is fully responsive with the colored featured panels adjusting dynamically as the number of columns change. The page displays around 50 posts, but the layout code is agnostic as to the number of items displayed. Ramp up the plugin to show 100 items and the layout stays interesting all the way down.
All of this is achieved using only CSS and with only a single media query to deal with a single column display on the narrowest of screens (i.e. smaller than 460px).
Incredibly, this layout only took 21 lines of CSS (excluding global content styling). However, to achieve such flexibility in such a few lines of code, I had to dig deep into the more obscure parts of some of CSS Grid and learn how to work around some of its inherent limitations.
The essential elements of the code that produce this layout is incredibly short and a testament to the awesomeness of CSS Grid:
The techniques in this article could be used equally well to style any dynamically generated content such as the output from a latest posts widget, archive pages or search results.
Creating a responsive grid
I have set up seventeen items displaying a variety of mock content — headlines, images and excerpts — which are all contained in a wrapper
The code that turns these items into a responsive grid is remarkably compact:
.archive {
/* Define the element as a grid container */
display: grid;
/* Auto-fit as many items on a row as possible without going under 180px */
grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, minmax(180px, 1fr));
/* A little spacing between articles */
grid-gap: 1em;
}
CodePen Embed Fallback
Notice how the heights of the rows automatically adjust to accommodate the tallest content in the row. If you change the width of the Pen, you will see the items grow and shrink fluidly and the number of columns change from one to five, respectively.
The CSS Grid magic at play here is the auto-fit keyword that works hand-in-hand with the minmax() function that’s applied to grid-template-columns.
How it works
We could have achieved the five-column layout alone using this:
However, this would create five columns that grow and shrink with different screen widths, but always stay at five columns, resulting in them becoming ridiculously narrow on small screens. The first thought might be to create a bunch of media queries and redefine the grid with different numbers of columns. That would work fine, but with the auto-fit keyword, it is all done automatically.
For auto-fit to work the way we want, we need to use the minmax() function. This tells the browser how small the columns can be squeezed down to followed by the maximum width they can expand to. Any smaller, and it will automatically reduce the number of columns. Any larger, and the number of columns increases.
In this example, the browser will fit in as many columns as it can 180px wide. If there is space left over the columns will all grow equally by sharing the remaining space between them — that’s what the 1fr value is saying: make the columns equal fractions of the available width.
Drag the window out and as the available space increases the columns all grow equally to use up any additional space. The columns will keep growing until the available space allows for an additional 180px column, at which point a whole new column appears. Decrease the screen width, and the process reverses, perfectly adjusting the grid all the way down to a single column layout. Magic!
And you get all this responsiveness out of just one line of code. How cool is that?
Creating spans with “autoflow: dense”
So far, we have a responsive grid but all items the same width. For a news or magazine layout we need some content to be featured by spanning two or more columns or even, perhaps, to span all the columns.
To create multi-column spans we can add the column-span feature to the grid items we want to take up more space. For example, if we want the third item in our list to be two columns wide we can add:
.article:nth-child(3) {
grid-column: span 2;
}
However, once we start adding spans a number of problems can arise. First, gaps may appear in the grid because a wide item may may not fit on the row, so grid auto-fit pushes it onto the next line, leaving a gap where it would have been:
The easy fix is adding grid-auto-flow: dense to the grid element which tells the browser to fill in any gaps with other items, effectively making the narrower content flow around the wider items like this:
Note that the items are now out of order, with the fourth item coming before the third item, which is double the width. There is no way round this as far as I can tell, and it is one of the limitations you have to accept with CSS Grid.
There are several ways to indicate how many columns an item should span. The easiest is to apply grid-columns: span [n] to one of the items, where n is the number of columns the element will span. The third item in our layout has grid-column: span 2, which explains why it is double the width of other items that only span a single column.
Grid lines can be specified from left-to-right using positive values (e.g. 1, 2, 3) or negative values (e.g. -1, -2, -3) to go from right-to-left. These can be used to place items on the grid using the grid-column property like this:
So, this gives us additional ways to specify a spanned item. This is especially flexible as either the start or end value can be replaced with the span keyword. For example, the three-column blue box in the example above could be created by adding any of the following to the eighth grid item:
grid-column: 3 / 6
grid-column: -4 / -1
grid-column: 3 / span 3
grid-column: -4 / span 3
grid-column: span 3 / -1
Etc.
On a non-responsive (i.e. fixed columns) grid, these all produce the same effect (like the blue box above), however, if the grid is responsive and the number of columns changes, their differences start to become apparent. Certain column spans break the layout with an auto-flowing grid, making the two techniques appear incompatible. Fortunately, there are some solutions which allow us to combine the two successfully.
First, however, we need to understand the problem.
Overflow side-scrolling problems
Here are some featured areas created using the notation above:
It all looks good at full-width (five columns) but when resized to what should be two columns, the layout breaks like this:
As you can see, our grid has lost its responsiveness and, although the container has shrunk, the grid is trying to maintain all five columns. To do so, it has given up trying to keep equal-width columns, and the grid is breaking out of the right-hand side of its container, causing horizontal scrolling.
Why is this? The problem comes about because the browser is trying to honor the explicit grid lines we named. At this width, the auto-fit grid should implicitly be displaying two columns, but our grid line numbering system contradicts this by explicitly referring to the fifth grid line. This contradiction leads to the mess. To display our implicit two-column grid correctly, the only line numbers allowed are 1, 2 and 3 and -3, -2, -1, like this:
But if any of our grid items contains grid-column references that lie outside this, such as grid line number 4, 5 or 6 (or -4, -5 or -6), the browser is getting mixed messages. On the one hand, we have asked it to automatic create flexible columns (which should implicitly give us two columns at this screen width) but we have also explicitly referred to grid lines that don’t appear in a two-column grid. When there is a conflict between implicit (automatic) columns and an implicit number of columns, grid always defers to the explicit grid; hence the unwanted columns and horizontal overflow (which has also been aptly named CSS data loss). Just like using grid line numbers, spans can also create explicit columns. So, grid-column: span 3 (the eighth grid item in the demo) forces the grid to explicitly adopt at least three columns, whereas we want it, implicitly display two.
At this point it might seem like the only way forward is to use media queries to change the grid-column values at the width where our layout breaks — but not so fast! That’s what I assumed at first. But after thinking it though a bit more and playing around with various options, I found there are a limited set of workarounds that work all the way down to two columns, leaving just one media query to cover a single column layout for the narrowest screens.
The solutions
The trick, I realized, is to only specify spans using grid lines that appear in the narrowest grid you intend to display. That is a two-column grid in this case. (We will use a media query to cover the single column scenario for very narrow screens.) That means we can safely use grid lines 1, 2 and 3 (or -3, -2 and -1) without breaking the grid.
I initially thought that meant limiting myself to a maximum span of two columns, using combinations of the following:
grid column: span 2
grid-column: 1 /3
grid-column: -3 / -1
Which remains perfectly responsive right down to two columns:
Although this works, it is rather limiting from a design perspective, and not particularly exciting. I wanted to be able to create spans that would be three, four or even five columns wide on large screens. But how? My first thought was that I would have to resort to media queries (OMG old habits die hard!) but I was trying to get away from that approach and think differently about responsive design.
Taking another look at what we can do with just 1 to 3 and -3 to -1, I gradually realized that I could mix positive and negative line numbers for the grid column’s start and end values ,such as 1/-3 and 2/-2. At first glance, this does not seem very interesting. That changes when you realize where these lines are located as you resize the grid: these spanned elements change width with the screen size. This opened up a whole new set of possibilities for responsive column spans: items that will span different numbers of columns as the screen gets wider, without needing media queries.
The first example I discovered is grid-column: 1/-1.This makes the item act like a full-width banner, spanning from the first to the last column at all column numbers. it even works down to one column wide!
By using grid-column: 1/-2, a left-aligned nearly-full-width span could be created that would always leave a one column item to the right of it. When shrunk to two columns it would shrink responsively to a single column. Surprisingly, it even works when shrunk to a single column layout. (The reason seems to be that grid will not collapse an item to zero width, so it remains one column wide, as does grid-column: 1/1.) I assumed grid-column: 2/-1 would work similarly, but aligned with the right-hand edge, and for the most part it does, except at one column display when it causes overflow.
Next I tried 1/-3 which worked fine on wider screen, showing at least three columns, and smaller screens, showing one column. I thought it would do something weird on a two-column grid as the first grid line is the same as the grid line with -3. To my surprise, it still displays fine as a single-column item.
After a lot of playing around, I came up with eleven possible grid column values using grid line numbers from the two-column grid. Surprisingly, three of these work right down to single-column layouts. Seven more work down to two columns and would only need a single media query to deal with single column display.
Here is the full list:
Responsive grid-column values, showing how they display at different screen sizes in an auto-fit grid. (Demo)
As you can see, although this is a limited subset of every possible responsive span, there are actually a lot of possibilities.
2/-2 is interesting as it creates a centered span which works all the way down to one column!
3/-1 is least useful as it causes overflow even with two-columns.
3/-3 was a surprise.
By using a variety of grid-column values from this list, it is possible to create an interesting and fully responsive layout. Using a single media query for the narrowest single-column display, we have ten different grid-column span patterns to play with.
The single-column media query is generally straightforward as well. The one on this final demo reverts to using flexbox at smaller screens:
Using :nth-child() to repeat variable length displays
The last trick I used to get my code down to two dozen lines was the :nth-child(n) selector which I used to style multiple items in my grid. I wanted my span styling to apply to multiple items in my feed, so that the featured post boxes appeared regularly throughout the page. To start with I used a comma-separated selector list, like this:
But I soon found this cumbersome, especially as I had to repeat this list for each child element I wanted to style within each article — such as the title, links and so on. During prototyping, if I wanted to play around with the position of my spanned elements, I had to manually change the numbers in each of these lists, which was tedious and error prone.
That’s when I realized that I could use a powerful feature :nth-child pseudo-selector instead of a simple integer as I had used in the list above. :nth-child(n) can also take an equation, such as :nth-child(2n+ 2), which will target every second child element.
Here is how I used the :nth-child([formula]) to create the blue full-width panels in my grid which appear at the very top of the page, and is repeated just over half way down:
The bit in the brackets (31n + 1 ) ensures that the 1st, 32nd, 63rd, etc. child is selected. The browser runs a loop starting with n=0 (in which case 31 * 0 + 1 = 1), then n=1 (31 * 1 + 1 = 32), then n=2 (31 * 2 + 1 = 63). In the last case, the browser realizes that there is no 63rd child item so it ignores that, stops looping, and applies the CSS to the 1st and 32nd children.
I do something similar for the purple boxes which alternate down the page from right-to-left:
The first selector is for the right-hand purple boxes. The 16n + 2 makes sure that the styling applies to every 16th grid item, starting with the second item.
The second selector targets the right-hand boxes. It uses the same spacing (16n) but with a different offset (10). As a result, these boxes appear regularly on the right-hand side for grid items 10, 26, 42, etc.
When it comes to the visual styling for these grid items and their contents, I used another trick to reduce repetition. For styles that both boxes share (such as the background-color, for example) a single selector can be used to target both:
This will target items 2, 10, 18, 26, 34, 42, 50, and so forth. In other words, it selects both the left- and right-hand featured boxes.
It works because 8n is exactly half of 16n, and because the offsets used in the two separate selectors have a difference of 8 (i.e. the difference between +10 and +2 is 8)
Final thoughts
Right now, CSS Grid can be used to create flexible responsive grids with minimal code, but this does come with some significant limitations on positioning elements without the retrograde step of using media queries.
It would be great to be able to specify spans that would not force overflow on smaller screens. At the moment, we effectively tell the browser, “Make a responsive grid, please,” which it does beautifully. But when we continue by saying, “Oh, and make this grid item span four columns,” it throws a hissy-fit on narrow screens, prioritizing the four-column span request rather than the responsive grid. It would be great to be able to tell grid to prioritize responsiveness over our span request. Something like this:
.article {
grid-column: span 3, autofit;
}
Another issue with responsive grids is the last row. As the screen width changes the last row will frequently not be filled. I spent a long time looking for a way to make the last grid item span (and hence fill) the remaining columns, but it seems you can’t do it in Grid right now. It would be nice if we could specify the item’s start position with a keyword like auto meaning, “Please leave the left-hand edge wherever it falls.” Like this:
.article {
grid-column: auto, -1;
}
…which would make the left-hand edge span to the end of the row.
No business-to-consumer (B2C) company could survive —never mind thrive— without doing some kind of marketing. B2C marketing, which differs from business-to-business (B2B) marketing in that it focuses on promoting goods and services to individual consumers (rather than other organizations), is the wizardry that makes a company both visible and attractive to their target audience.
It’s how you create interest in your offering, how you bring in new customers (acquisition), how you hold onto existing ones (retention), how you boost sales, and how you turn your hard work into profit. It is, in many ways, the lifeblood of a business.
But “doing” B2C marketing isn’t as simple as shouting from the rooftops about your new clothing line or app. You need to know who you’re talking to. You need to be familiar with the channels available to you. And fortunately, thanks to digital transformation, there are now plenty.
The rise of online media and technologies has laid the foundation for a heap of new ways to engage with customers — alternatives that allow for greater personalization, interactivity, automation, and measurability. Think social media marketing, email marketing, video marketing, etc.
A world of possibilities awaits you. But where do you start? That’s where this guide comes in.
We’ll discuss the B2C model, highlight the differences between B2B and B2C marketing, and review some of the most effective B2C marketing channels. We’ll also explore various tried-and-tested tactics and strategies that business owners and marketing professionals can apply today to achieve results tomorrow. By the end, you should be well positioned to help your company not just survive but thrive.
What is B2C marketing?
Before diving into the ins and outs of B2C marketing, it’s worth exploring what B2C is more generally. After all, you need a clear understanding of this professional operating model in order to target your B2C marketing efforts more effectively.
Broadly speaking, B2C business refers to commercial transactions and exchanges between companies and individual consumers. B2C companies sell products and services directly to the public for personal use, often via an online platform. The everyday consumer as the target market is what ultimately differentiates B2C enterprises from business-to-business (B2B) companies, which, as the name suggests, focus on selling their wares to other companies.
Apple, Tesco, Starbucks, Amazon, YouTube, and Lyft are just a few examples of successful B2C businesses.
The B2C business model: Definitions, considerations, types, and examples
While definitions of the term “business model” vary widely, it’s helpful to think of the concept as a framework that outlines how an enterprise operates, how it makes money, who it caters to, and how it creates and delivers value to customers.
A business operating under a B2C business model earns revenue by catering to the needs and wants of everyday individuals. Over time, many different types of business models have popped up under the B2C umbrella, especially as new digital technologies and platforms have created novel means of making money.
Whatever sort of B2C model your company subscribes to, it’s critical that you have a good grasp of what it entails and what kind of assumptions it makes so that you can design a marketing campaign that will achieve results. Naturally, it would be nearly impossible to develop targeted messaging that appeals to your audience if you don’t fully understand what your customers consider important and how your company is set up to solve key problems.
Developing a sound understanding of your B2C business model
Swiss business theorist and consultant Alexander Osterwalder developed a “business model canvas” that helps founders of both small startups and large enterprises choose the right model for their business, refine hypotheses about their company’s operating structure, and better understand their value proposition.
He recommends asking the following questions (among others) to improve your understanding of what makes your organization tick (and, as a result, your ability to market it effectively):
Who are our most important customers?
Which one of our customers’ problems are we helping to solve?
What are our customers really willing to pay for?
What do they currently pay for?
What key activities do our value propositions require?
What key resources do our value propositions require?
Through which channels do our customer segments want to be reached?
How do other companies reach them now?
5 successful B2C business models for profit seekers
If you’re not sure which B2C business model is the best option for your business, you might find it useful to consider some of the most popular and successful models out there today. Below you’ll find five options: Weigh the pros and cons of each when deciding what works for you, and use this information to design both a sound commercial framework and a winning B2C marketing strategy.
Freemium model
Subscription model
Advertising revenue model
Marketplace/ platform-based/ brokerage / aggregator model
Razor-razor blade model
1. Freemium model. Customers can access the basic product/service for free but must pay for additional (premium) features and functionality.
Pros:
Easy to get a foot in the door: Customers are more open to trying out products/services when there’s no fee attached
Once buyers are hooked on your offering, it’s not too difficult to convert them to paid plans
Fairly easy to obtain word-of-mouth marketing exposure
Cons:
You can fall into the trap of giving away too much for free.
Constant innovation is required to keep increasing the value of premium services.
Costs can outweigh earnings in the early stages of business.
2. Subscription model. Rather than paying a high price once, customers pay a recurring flat fee (every month or year) for consistent access to a service/product.
Pros:
Fairly predictable and reliable income stream
Improved customer retention
Ongoing servicing allows for close study of customer behavior over time
Cons:
Small issues can disrupt an entire product/service delivery cycle.
Most customers are only willing to subscribe to a limited number of services (so the pool of prospects is smaller).
Examples: Netflix, Adobe, Birchbox
3. Advertising revenue model. Customers get the product/service for free. The business earns money from advertisers.
Pros:
Easy to attract and retain customers
Fairly simple strategy to execute
Cons:
Audience/viewership stats must be significant before advertisers will sign up (it can, therefore, take quite some time before you start making money).
The revenue stream can easily dry up during economic downturns.
Examples: Facebook, Google, Instagram
4. Marketplace/ platform-based/ brokerage / aggregator model. The business serves as a platform that brings together buyers and sellers, and takes a small cut of every transaction.
Pros:
No major overhead or need to own/store stock
Potential for rapid growth
Gives platform operators access to user data
Cons:
You need to reach a critical mass of buyers and sellers before others are tempted to join/engage.
Reputation management can be tricky as the business has limited control over the quality of transactions.
Examples: Airbnb, Uber, eBay
5. Razor-razor blade model. The business sells the base unit (a durable good) at below or only slightly above cost price and makes most of their profit from ongoing sales of complementary consumable products sold at a high markup.
Pros:
Easy to attract new customers (as price of base product is low)
Fairly steady and reliable revenue stream (as customers are “forced” to buy replacement consumables on an ongoing basis)
Encourages brand loyalty
Cons:
This model requires lots of capital to start out.
Competitors selling replacement consumables that fit with your business’s base product can easily steal sales away from you.
Customers might feel conned.
Examples: Gillette razors and razor blades, Xbox video game consoles and individual games, Printers and ink/toner cartridges
What is B2C marketing? Everything you need to know in a nutshell
Now that we’ve covered B2C business in general, it’s time to dig a little deeper and answer some more pointed questions: “What is B2C marketing?” and “How do you go about mastering it?”
B2C marketing refers to all the strategies and tactics a B2C business uses to promote and sell their products and/or services directly to individual consumers. More specifically, it covers all practices used to both acquire and retain customers—to bring in new leads (prospects) and nurture them through the decision-making process to convert them into loyal customers that keep coming back for more.
B2C marketing efforts tend to focus on building trust and cultivating desire, and they rely fairly heavily on the power of emotion and shared values to convince and persuade.
All of the following are examples of B2C marketing in practice:
Organizing a promotional event to encourage prospects to try your new product
Publishing blog posts on your company’s website to educate and entertain clientele
Cold emailing prospective customers to promote your business’s new service
Running a contest on Facebook to drive traffic to your website
Installing roadside billboards to build awareness
Sending personalized text message reminders to prompt customers to book their car in for a service
Launching a loyalty app to offer customers mobile-exclusive discounts
A whole new world: How digital transformation is changing B2C marketing
Some of the above examples reflect more traditional forms of B2C marketing; others are newer alternatives that have emerged as the digital world has expanded and evolved. The rise of online platforms, channels, and technologies has completely revolutionized the way companies carry out marketing activities.
Marketers and business owners now have a heap of new benefits and opportunities, and it’s important to understand what these are so that you can leverage them appropriately in your marketing efforts.
We explore a few below:
A slew of new ways to engage. Thanks to digital transformation, the realm of marketing has welcomed a variety of new subdisciplines, including social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, search engine marketing, and even augmented reality marketing. Brands can now engage with customers through blog posts, newsletters, tweets, online videos, podcasts, display ads, and many other powerful mediums.
Access to actionable data. The move to digital has made it possible for marketing professionals to carefully track user behavior and assess what’s working and what’s not. Businesses can now take advantage of the precise data available to them to streamline promotional activities, tweak ineffective strategies, and make more informed decisions about where they put their marketing money.
More control at each stage of the customer journey. Before marketing went online, it was difficult to know where a prospective customer was on the journey between awareness and purchase. Now, companies can use analytics to monitor buyers’ actions and can then intervene at each crucial point in the process to guide them along the sales funnel.
Greater personalization. B2C consumers of today respond best to tailored messaging, and digital software now makes marketing personalization easier than ever. Armed with information about customers’ inclinations, habits, likes, and dislikes, marketing professionals can send out targeted communications that win prospects over by speaking directly to their hearts and minds.
Enhanced interactivity. Once upon a time, B2C marketingwas all abouttalking to prospective customers; today, it’s more about talking with them. Digital mediums give consumers the ability to interact directly with brands, and marketing professionals and business owners need to prioritize two-way engagement, communication, and relationship management.
Automation. Digitization has made it possible to automate many marketing tasks and activities (think triggered emails) to save people time and effort and to improve the customer experience. In an automated online world, businesses can engage with consumers 24-7 and influence buying decisions in real time, even when the lights are out.
A quick how-to: 9 steps to B2C marketing success
Knowing how marketing has changed over the years will help you make the most of the latest trends and opportunities. But how do you actually do B2C marketing? What does putting together and carrying out an effective promotional plan entail?
We dive into specific channels and strategies you should be considering a little later in this guide, but first, on a broad level, here are nine steps you can follow to master the art of marketing.
1. Consider the “7 Ps of marketing.” You want to create value for customers while also making a profit. Giving careful thought to what’s known as the “7 Ps of marketing” will help ensure you achieve this objective and assist with your promotional efforts. Before launching any kind of marketing plan, take time to consider each of the following:
1.Product. The “thing” you’re offering customers
Questions to ask yourself
What is our product/service?
Is our product/service suitable for the market of today?
Does our product/service meet customers’ needs?
2. Price. How you price your product/service
Questions to ask yourself
What is the optimal price for our product/service based on the value it offers customers?
How much are customers willing to pay for our offering?
What are our competitors charging?
3. Promotion. The tactics you use to build awareness, create desire for your offering, and convert prospects into customers
Questions to ask yourself
Which channels should we use to tell customers about our products/services?
How do we want to talk to customers about our offering?
Which features should we emphasize in our communications?
4. Place. Where customers interface with your brand and where your product/service is seen/experienced and sold
Questions to ask yourself
Where do our customers prefer to shop (e.g., online, at a physical store)?
How easily can our clientele access our product/service?
Where else could we sell our offering?
5. People. The individuals who work for/with your business and are responsible for product development, customer service, and sales and marketing activities
Questions to ask yourself
What skills do we need our employees and consultants to have?
Do our employees do a good job of casting our business in a positive light?
How do we retain standout staff members?
6. Process. The process you follow to deliver your service or to get your product into customers’ hands
Questions to ask yourself
Is it easy for customers to do business with us?
Do we repeatedly deliver the same standard of service to our clientele?
How do we make the purchasing process more efficient?
7. Physical evidence. The external appearance of your brand — the environment within which products/services are sold and all visible branding (e.g., your website, product packaging, store layout, employee dress code)
Questions to ask yourself
What do our customers see along the journey from awareness to purchase?
Do the visual elements of our business inspire confidence in our offering?
How do we improve our branding?
2. Identify and study your target audience. Before you can design B2C marketing tactics that appeal to customers, you have to understand what makes your prospects tick, what drives them to buy, and what their needs and wants are. Conduct in-depth market research to learn more about the demographics, preferences, browsing habits, and pain points of your target audience.
3. Segment your audience and develop buyer personas. Depending on your business, you might target various groups of people with slightly different needs and expectations. Take the time to segment your audience into categories and then create a detailed buyer persona (a fictional but research-based representation of a customer type) for each. This information will help you tailor and focus your marketing efforts so you drive conversions by saying the right things to the right people on the right platforms.
4. Conduct a competitive analysis. Who are your competitors? What differentiates your product/service from theirs? How are they currently marketing their offering? Do research to get answers to these questions so you can pinpoint what makes your business special (your unique selling proposition) and what you should be calling attention to in your marketing material.
5. Refine your understanding of the customer journey. What happens between the time your customers first become aware of your brand and the point of purchase? What happens beyond this? Map out the journey that buyers are likely to take when interacting with your company so you can deliver precisely what they need, at precisely the right time, each step of the way.
6. Choose appropriate B2C marketing channels. Use the information you have about your target audience and their habits to select marketing channels that’ll help you reach customers most effectively. Will you use Facebook? YouTube? Emails? Direct mail? Blog posts? Messaging apps? Flyers? Paid search? Display advertisements? Choose wisely and consider using multiple avenues to engage prospects.
7. Develop appropriate marketing strategies. Identify and employ tactics that a) excite and delight customers (focus on experience), b) build trust and loyalty, c) keep your brand top of mind, d) speak to customers’ emotional needs, e) maintain ongoing relationships with prospects, and f) help you connect with customers on a human level.
8. Define your goals and allocate marketing budget. What results do you want to achieve from your B2C marketing efforts? Do you want to increase web traffic by 20 percent over the next six months? Increase conversions by 15 percent by the end of a campaign? You need to set goals that are specific and measurable so you can ensure you’re on track to success. You’ll also need to assign a budget to each component of your marketing plan.
9. Track performance and tweak accordingly. Analytics allow you to closely monitor the performance of all your digital marketing activities. Track what’s working — and what’s not — so you can turn up the dial on effective strategies, abandon futile tactics, and generally respond with agility to move closer to your goals.
What’s the difference between B2C and B2B marketing?
As mentioned previously, the aim of B2C marketing is to convince individual consumers to buy products and services for personal use, usually based on the benefits they expect to enjoy from their purchase or because of some sense of connection they feel to the brand and what it represents.
In contrast, B2B marketing focuses on decision makers at businesses and other organizations who make their purchasing decisions based on what’s best for the growth and sustainability of the for-profit and nonprofit organizations they represent.
Because purchasing aims and motivations for businesses differ from those of individual consumers, B2B marketing, as compared to B2C, tends to involve
A longer decision-making process
Multiple decision makers, often from more than one department
Multiple sources of marketing content, each with its own aim and focus
A focus on value in the form of money, time, or resources saved, or increased sales for the customer
An emphasis on logical appeals
Individualized pricing structures
Distinguishing B2C business from B2B business
B2C selling
B2B selling
The buyer is an individual consumer purchasing a product or service for their own use/for their house old/friends/family members.
The buyer is a business/representative of an organization purchasing on behalf of senior management.
Generally just one or two people make the buying decision.
Multiple stakeholders make the buying decision collectively.
The sales cycle is typically short, and buying decisions are made fairly quickly (sometimes within minutes).
The sales cycle is typically quite long, and customers are often slow to make purchasing decisions.
The pool of potential buyers is usually large.
The pool of prospects is fairly limited.
The customer pool is constantly evolving — relationships with buyer are often short-lived, and one-off transactions are common.
Companies build long-term relationships with customers.
Purchase volume is usually low.
Purchase volume can be very high.
Customer spend is often quite low.
Customer spend can be in the billions.
Apart from the differing motivations of the key audiences, another important difference between B2B and B2C marketing is that B2B purchasing decisions tend to be more complex.
More specifically, the B2B prospects you’re trying to turn into customers often need to build a business case for other stakeholders in their organization that what you’re selling will give them the most return on investment (ROI).
As a general rule, the larger the B2B purchase, the more people within the organization you’ll need to convince of your product’s value. Even if the purchase is small and can be authorized by a single contact within the organization, they will likely need to justify its value to the company’s bottom line.
This means that it typically takes a business much longer to make a purchasing decision than it takes the typical consumer. You’ll likely need to make multiple appeals over time.
In fact, most B2B decision makers report reading between three and five sources of content before even talking to a sales representative. For this reason, you should be prepared to produce more content for your B2B marketing program than for a B2C marketing strategy. These might include
A brochure or flyer (most likely provided as PDFs)
Case studies
Webinars
White papers
Blog posts
Sample pricing materials
You’ll need to have patience and develop a relationship over time as you provide more and more information to your potential clients. Along the way, you’ll be able to get a better sense of your potential partner’s internal needs.
What’s more, you need to focus your B2B marketing strategy on addressing how your product or service can benefit your customer’s bottom line in the form of resources saved or increased revenue. Because the focus is on the value your product adds to the purchasing organization’s bottom line rather than on the individual benefit to the consumer, B2B marketing content tends to be more technical, more focused on costs, and more individualized for each potential customer you approach.
All of this makes the B2B marketing process, as compared to B2C marketing, more robust, more time-consuming, and more expensive.
On the plus side, B2B entails far fewer potential buyers and a much narrower and specific audience. But it requires time, patience, and attention to detail to engage that audience.
Each approach — B2B and B2C — requires its own tailored tone and strategy. The following table outlines some of the basic differences between the most effective types of appeals:
B2B versus B2C marketing: Key differences in messaging
B2B
B2C
Uses complex, technical information
Favors simple messaging
Logical appeals
Emotional appeals
Solution-focused
Benefits-focused
Content-rich
Concise
Micro-targeting to a small audience
Macro-targeting to a larger audience
B2B vs B2C: Key differences in pricing
As briefly mentioned in our outline of the 7 P’s of marketing, pricing is an integral part of your brand’s story. A high price point can communicate to your potential customer that your brand provides luxury, high levels of service, and exemplary quality. A mid-range price might be seen as a sign of dependability and a good value-for-cost ratio. A low price point can communicate a bargain, efficiency, and innovation, or low quality and desperation.
These pricing perceptions are as true for B2C marketing as they are for B2B. However, because the nature and scale of B2B differs from B2C, your pricing model will likely be different as well. In many cases, you’ll customize your product for each large B2B purchaser, so a static pricing model isn’t always feasible. Here are some other areas of divergence.
1. B2B pricing is more negotiable
A B2B supplier might negotiate a different price for each of their business partners, whereas in a B2C environment this approach can be much riskier. If a B2C customer learns that someone else has gotten a better deal, they’re likely to feel cheated and look elsewhere for the product or service you provide.
You should also carefully consider how and when to offer discounts. Introductory discounts, for example, may lower your profit margin over production costs, but this might be worth it if you’re able to attract new, dedicated customers.
In a B2B environment, pricing is far more likely to be customized to account for volume discounts, length of contract, and degree of customization and customer support.
2. B2C pricing is more transparent
In the B2C world, maintaining clear, transparent pricing structures is the norm, and it can encourage repeat business, which can create marketing and sales efficiencies and increase your profit level over time.
On the flip side, in most professional environments, purchasing agreements between businesses are confidential. Getting insight into competitors’ pricing is often tedious and largely inferred from asking customers about their relationships with other organizations. This makes it more difficult to quantify the value of your product/service in comparison to your competitors. It also requires interaction with a B2B sales team, which can result in a more pointed conversation about value and the opportunity to begin a relationship with a prospect.
3. B2B innovators can charge more
If your product is unique or highly innovative, you can likely charge more for it, especially if you target equally innovative companies for B2B sales. Market leaders and outliers tend to be less cost-sensitive than more established companies, and industries with fewer competitors are more willing to absorb higher vendor costs than highly crowded sectors that have multiple options for suppliers.
4. Discounting is not an effective lure in the B2B sphere
In B2C, introductory or periodic discounting is a common way to lure customers away from competitors or encourage new customers to try your brand. In B2B marketing, however, the longer durations to make a sale tend to rule out discounting as a strategy. This means that prices tend to remain more stable.
When discounting is employed, it’s often in ways that benefit the supplier. For example, offering a client a discount for signing a longer contract benefits your bottom line by freeing you from the expense of renegotiating the sale for a longer period of time.
5. Sales typically has price-setting power in the B2B world
Because B2B pricing tends to be confidential, and because both the B2B supplier and buyer expect to negotiate an individualized price for each transaction, sales representatives tend to have more power over pricing in a B2B environment than they would if they were selling B2C.
If your sales force incentives aren’t designed to optimize pricing by encouraging representatives to ask for the highest possible price without losing the sale, you might find that your sales team is over-discounting. The best way to combat this is to clearly articulate your pricing strategy to all employees, while empowering your sales team to make reasonable adjustments to make sales.
B2B vs B2C: Key differences in social media and companion apps
Just as you need a website to launch a business in today’s market, it’s becoming increasingly important to have a companion mobile app so that you can engage customers where they are — on their mobile devices — with product updates and new features.
In the B2C space, companion apps can help drive sales by allowing your customers to complete automated orders. Your B2B customers are unlikely to use a companion app in a similar way because B2B decision making is simply too complex.
So why do you even need to develop a B2B companion app?
Becausemobile technology drives sales. According to new research, 80 percent of B2B buyers use mobile technology for work, and 60 percent report that mobile played a part in a recent purchase.
Because it’s expected. The decision makers you’re trying to convince to buy your product are accustomed to using mobile apps to engage with their favorite consumer products. They’ll appreciate having a similar environment to explore your services.
Because it keeps you on their minds. A mobile app will allow your B2B contacts to access information about your product at any time, even when they’re away from their desks, giving them more time to familiarize themselves with your product’s strengths.
Because you’ll learn more about your buyers. Many mobile B2B (and B2C) apps are designed to encourage users to share their purchasing needs and desires with the supplier, information you can leverage to make a sale.
A good B2C app needs to provide a seamless user experience that mirrors the qualities of the brand it’s designed to sell. This can mean compelling or fun content, games, contests, virtual punch cards and other customer rewards, product information, news and celebrity endorsements, and remote sales capability.
An effective B2B app has a different function. Though robust product information and a high-quality user experience are important, B2B apps also should include
Plenty of information so buyers can read up on your features whenever and wherever they want
Customer relationship management (CRM) — for example, you may want to employ a “chatbot” to simulate an IM interaction
Multiple payment methods, because while the purchasing decision will likely take place offline, younger employees increasingly prefer tomake purchases in a mobile environment
Cloud-based information, which will cut down on storage costs and provide a more seamless user experience while allowing potential customers to gather more information on your product more quickly
Effective B2B marketing tips
Some organizations, including startups, may need to employ a mix of B2B and B2C marketing to grow their businesses. If your focus is B2C, and the amount of time and resources you have to devote to B2B marketing is limited, the following tips should allow you to develop an effective small-scale B2B marketing strategy:
Focus on building long-term relationships.
Plan for longer lead times between initial marketing interactions and purchasing decisions.
Focus on logical appeals that communicate the value of your product.
Be prepared to provide multiple forms of content with detailed information.
Opt for information and authority over entertainment.
Consider including some emotional appeals, especially when it comes to shared values like quality and integrity.
It may sound like a lot of work, but it’s worth it. B2B sales tend to come in higher volume, and, once organizations commit to a B2B relationship, that decision typically lasts longer than a direct-to-customer purchasing decision.
Top B2C marketing strategies
By now, you should have a solid understanding of your B2C business model and how it differs from any B2B activities that you may be responsible for. The next step in effectively promoting your products and services to consumers is building your formal B2C marketing strategy.
Whether you’re starting a new business or trying to take an existing one to the next level, a sound and well thought-out B2C marketing strategy is essential to growing your revenue and guiding your decision-making process.
Not to be confused with a marketing plan, which is more of an operational structure that lays out the timing and specifics around execution, a B2C marketing strategy is built on careful analysis and is a high-level approach to mapping out target markets, a value proposition, goals, how you’ll differentiate yourself from competitors, and what you’ll need from a resource perspective to accomplish key objectives.
In the fast-moving and ever-evolving world of business, it can be easy to get stuck in the nitty gritty of do, do, do: rolling out campaigns, tweaking pricing, and engaging third-party vendors to carry the workload when you don’t have the resources to shoulder it yourself.
But forging ahead without the overriding directional concept of a marketing strategy is a bit like putting the cart before the horse. While you may be able to accomplish a lot, without taking time to stop, back up, and do the work necessary to build a careful and research-backed marketing strategy, you may find yourself going down the wrong road — or worse, hitting a dead end.
In business terms, this means you could waste hundreds of thousands of dollars on engaging the wrong audience with the wrong messaging through the wrong channels — not to mention the countless hours employees would have devoted to failed initiatives.
What’s more, while you were “chasing the shiny objects,” implementing poor marketing tactic after poor marketing tactic, or trying to capitalize on every new hot marketing trend, you might have missed out on massive opportunities and lost valuable ground to the competition.
How to create a B2C marketing strategy
A marketing strategy should not only be based on solid research (rather than intuition or experience), but it should also be built through a collaborative process that involves key stakeholders across the business.
Once you’ve committed to engaging the right people and conducting the right kind of investigation, follow these five critical steps to build an effective and flexible B2C marketing strategy.
1. Identify your goals
Setting concrete objectives is the first point on the agenda of a good marketing strategy, and as any college-level marketing student can tell you, targets should always be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound).
Your marketing goals shouldn’t exist in a vacuum; they should be linked to the business’s overall objectives. This is fundamental to getting the support of the higher-ups and to measuring success against the company overall.
For example, if one of your organization’s goals is to increase revenue from existing customers by 30 percent, then the following would be good and bad examples of marketing goals:
Bad marketing goal: Generate 500 new sales-qualified leads through content marketing campaigns and organic acquisition efforts over the course of the year.
Why is this a bad example? Because generating new leads isn’t aligned to the business objective of increasing revenue from existing customers.
Good marketing goal: Launch six new content marketing campaigns and 12 new email campaigns to provide more value to customers, make them aware of supplementary product offers, and increase overall lifetime value by 12 percent.
2. Get to know the competition
Studying the competition is one of the most crucial activities that you can do as a marketer building a successful strategy.
Investigating other businesses’ weaknesses and strengths, and defining and better understanding the industry overall, is known as competitive analysis. As the U.S. Small Business Administration puts it, “[It’s] key to defining a competitive edge that creates sustainable revenue.”
While there are a number of approaches to conducting a competitive analysis, like Porter’s Five Forces or the Competitor Array, all of these models have one thing in common: They’ve been proven to help businesses perform better.
Understanding others’ behaviors and actions can not only better protect the health of your organization, it can also help you identify potential opportunities that can translate directly to more revenue and a stronger market position.
3. Understand your target audience
Knowing your customers is as important as knowing yourself — your products and services, that is. And this requires some serious market research.
The more you understand who your customers are, the products they buy, and why they buy those products, the more you’ll be able to fine-tune your marketing efforts and create personalized campaigns for them.
For starters, look at existing demographic, income, and trade info from government organizations to begin gathering data. Then work with research professionals to build surveys or conduct interviews and focus groups to get into the nitty gritty.
You should come away with not just a high-level profile of your customers but insight into their motivations for making purchases as well as their expectations for products and services.
4. Lock in your marketing tactics, programs, and campaigns
Once you’ve set your objectives, drawn up a picture of your competition and the state of the industry, and dug into your target audience, it’s time to outline the tactics, programs, and campaigns that will allow you to execute on all the work you’ve done up until this point.
In a nutshell, marketing tactics are the actual actions you’ll take to achieve your objectives. They may include rolling out a membership program, setting in motion a retargeting campaign, or even organizing a few big events.
The tactics that you choose to move forward with should align with your goals, and they should be based on the customer and competitor data you’ve collected. For instance, perhaps you’ve found that your target audience primarily uses a particular social media channel — or maybe it’s come to light that the your number-one competitor has generated lots of positive press and subsequent sales from a big conference they organized.
By drawing on existing information, you can outline the marketing tactics you think will work best, keeping in mind that these are flexible and should be regularly evaluated and adjusted according to the results of your efforts.
5. Pinpoint your resource needs
Good marketers know that you have to spend money to make money, but the best in the business understand how to build budgets rooted in real numbers and operational costs.
Outlining your resource needs from a financial perspective — but also from a personnel and technology stack perspective — is key to successfully creating and implementing your marketing strategy.
To do this, work backward from your marketing goals and tactics, identifying how much you’ll need to invest in each channel, both from a monetary and manpower point of view, to hit your objectives.
Factor in any additional operational costs, like software critical to your sales funnel, third-party vendors essential to shouldering the workload, and even travel expenses.
Keep in mind that plenty of technology options can automate many of your workflows and scale your marketing efforts without having to add staff (see the chart below for some great options):
Buffer. Coordinates and times the release of marketing announcements across multiple platforms
Price: Range: $15, $99, $199, $300 per month depending on the size of your business
Hootsuite. Provides a dashboard to map social media and track engagement statistics across platforms
Price: $120 per user per month, or $599 per month for up to 5 users
Facebook Pages. Allows you to upload images and update your FB business page remotely
Price: Free
Canva. Famous for providing an affordable way to create quick, professional looking graphics; also allows you to easily upload graphics and prototypes to multiple social media platforms
Price: Basic package for free; Canva Pro for $12.95 per user per month, $9.95 per user per year; the deluxe Canva Enterprise offers custom pricing
Clover. Supports hands-free payment, tipping, and customer loyalty programs
Price: Fees begin at $9.95 per month, usually bundled with rental or purchase of hardware
Mention. Monitors the web for “mentions” of your business and products, so that you address issues and counter negative information as needed
Price: Starts at $29 per month
Top marketing tactics and techniques
Today’s top marketing tactics and techniques are largely influenced by digital transformation and the way businesses reimagine their use of technology.
The massive expansion of the internet, with its multitude of channels and platforms, and the advent of mobile technology and wearables that allow consumers to access the internet from anywhere at any time should be front and center for every B2C marketer, no matter your vertical or your product or service.
Here are a few best practices to keep in mind as you define your marketing tactics and allocate an appropriate budget:
1. Think mobile first
Americans are now even more glued to their mobile devices than they are to television, with individuals spending an average of just under four hours on their phone or tablet every day. One in five people living in this country have “smartphone-only” internet access, which means their phone is their only method of accessing the web, and 37 percent say they mainly access the web with their smartphone.
If you’re not tailoring your marketing efforts to include mobile initiatives, you’re making a grave mistake, especially since the largest demographic segment of consumers (Millennials) is particularly reliant on their phones.
For one, that means making sure your website and all other forms of digital communication are mobile friendly, meaning the mobile experience is seamless and easy.
We live in an era of instant gratification, and that means that as a marketer, your messaging needs to be relevant and engaging. Enter marketing personalization, which involves communicating with customers in the ways they prefer and offering them things they actually want by aligning your efforts with their behavior.
As noted by McKinsey, marketing personalization can cut acquisition costs in half, increase revenue by up to 15 percent, and make overall marketing spend 10 to 30 percent more efficient.
To appropriately implement personalization efforts, you need to first have the tools and technology to gather data about certain customer signals, like how they browse online or scan social media. Then, it’s a matter of creating individual messages that map to those customer signals.
Certain marketing automation technology can help make these kinds of efforts more scalable for larger companies.
3. Reap the benefits of retargeting
Retargeting, the act of redisplaying online advertisements to anyone who has visited your website, is one broad example of personalization.
According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), over 90 percent of marketers reported that retargeting ads performed as well as or better than similar search, email, and display ads.
4. Engage your customers with events and conferences
Event marketing is a prime way to captivate your current and potential customers and engage them in a real-world, interactive setting all while building your brand and teaching them about your amazing product and service offering.
When done right, this kind of experiential marketing tactic can have long-lasting effects that both make attendees more loyal and leverage their networks if they share with their friends via social media or even word of mouth (fuelling new customer acquisition).
Of course, to effectively pull off a memorable and effective event or conference, you need a detailed and extensive marketing plan to not only draw attendees and generate buzz, but also to generate leads and get a return on your investment. JotForm makes this last task particularly quick and easy, giving you the power to build custom online forms and capture all the information you need to better market to your customers.
5. Boost loyalty with a membership program
A membership program, also known as a loyalty program, is the ideal marketing tactic for any business committed to improving customer retention and boosting lifetime value (the profit a company can expect from the entire lifetime of a customer).
These kinds of initiatives generally work by rewarding customers with perks based on the number of purchases they make. There are all kinds of opportunities to get creative with how you roll out a membership program. For example, you may want to partner with another business to give customers added benefits, or perhaps you could gamify your system or create a community that adds another kind of value for loyal members.
However you decide to implement this program, keep in mind that the main goal is to increase customer spend, which is more of a sure thing as existing customers are 67 percent more likely to spend more than new customers.
6. Activate an ambassador program
In a world where consumers are more and more discerning about the content and messaging they consume, leveraging the power of committed customers who can promote your brand can be an effective way to drive acquisition and build brand awareness.
An ambassador program helps organize and guide these advocates, giving them information about your goals and the high-level subject matter you’d like them to focus on.
Most brand ambassadors’ main medium is social media, where they can help you establish credibility with their audience of followers.
7 outstanding B2C marketing examples and campaigns from major companies
Even the most well thought-out marketing strategy and carefully considered marketing tactics can fail if they’re not executed effectively or implemented in a creative way. Today, organizations have to stand out and differentiate themselves. It can be difficult to come up with good campaign ideas and assets — especially if you don’t have the world’s largest marketing budget or an entire team dedicated solely to this area of the business.
In this case, it’s a good idea to look for inspiration from some big brands that are best in class in their industry. It’s entirely possible to borrow big ideas to fit your marketing needs or just use their approaches to get the creative juices flowing.
Take a look at these outstanding B2C marketing examples to get started building your own brilliant effort.
1. REI’s “Expert Advice” section for a great example of B2C SEO marketing
Everyone knows that content is king when it comes to SEO and B2C marketing, but when you’ve got a lot of competitors in your category, like REI does, it’s even more challenging to stand out and rank highly in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
To drive traffic for the very competitive keyword category of camping and outdoor activities, REI added an Expert Advice section on their website, which features over 500 keyword-rich targeted articles aimed at ranking for mid-tail and long-tail terms.
These terms are specific search queries that tend to have a lower search volume (i.e., “how to waterproof a tent” and “what kind of bike should I get”). They also tend to be easier to rank for because they don’t have as much competition. In addition, they help to build category context for Google, which makes it easier to rank for more competitive, higher volume short-tail terms, like “camping” and “fitness.”
REI’s SEO approach brings 600,000 visitors to this section of their site on a monthly basis, all of which they can then convert from interested readers to buyers.
2. Airbnb for tip-top B2C marketing personalization
An increasingly important aspect of B2C marketing is personalization, which allows companies to target their audience more accurately and create custom messaging that leads to greater engagement as a reward for relevance.
Effective personalization relies on data, so the more information you can get about your customers and their interests and previous behavior, the better able you’ll be to create campaigns and assets that will resonate with them and motivate them to make a purchase.
Airbnb uses a pretty simple form of personalization in their marketing emails by leveraging user contact details, home location, and behavior on the main website. The end product is an email that addresses users by name and suggests they take a trip to the most popular getaway destinations from the city where they live.
Readers who receive this kind of communication will be more likely to engage because they feel like it directly applies to them.
3. Fashion Nova for a five-star example of a B2C ambassador program
Fashion Nova is one of the fastest growing apparel companies in the world. They’ve never had a fashion show or run an ad in a single magazine, yet they’re as widely searched for online as Louis Vuitton and Chanel.
The company’s marketing has mainly been on Instagram, where brand ambassadors and social media starlets, like Katerina Themis and @XTYDime, have created buzz through digital word of mouth using the hashtags #NovaSquad and #NovaBabe.
The organization has a formal program that calls on customers and ambassadors alike to post photos of themselves wearing their Fashion Nova items and tag the brand with the appropriate hashtag. This creates excitement for new inventory and embodies the inclusivity that’s part of the company’s brand message. Fashion Nova then reposts these posts, giving their advocates an opportunity to gain more exposure and validation for their own accounts.
Gen Z and Millennial audiences, which the teen clothing brand targets, are less likely to trust traditional advertising and more likely to look for “real” endorsements from their peers and trusted influencers. Accordingly, Fashion Nova was able to reach potential customers where and how they want to be reached, and today, they have over 16 million followers on Instagram.
4. Waze for awesome B2C content marketing
Compelling content doesn’t have to live on your website or leverage SEO best practices to acquire new customers. Another form of content marketing enables B2C professionals to create engaging assets and then partner with a trusted source that can spread the word to their audience and increase your reach while building brand awareness.
Waze did exactly this when they worked with the New York Times to create a piece of sponsored content about interesting driving trends. The piece was also interactive; it included quiz questions where people could test their knowledge on current trends.
You don’t have to partner with a major outlet to accomplish this goal — consider local organizations that align with your mission, and think about where you could reach the right audience using the data you have on your industry.
5. Ikea for B2C social media
Everyone knows about Ikea at this point, but not many can say that they have the entire catalog memorized by heart. When Ikea found a woman who had done exactly that, they partnered with her to create a Facebook Live event, which ended up attracting thousands of views from people who wanted to test her knowledge.
Ikea got to re-introduce their entire catalog to their social audience, and by taking advantage of user-generated content, they got social proof that their product was universally beloved.
6. Sephora for a super B2C marketing strategy that leveraged a loyalty program
A good loyalty program can help break barriers to entry for customers if, say, the cost is too high or the product isn’t considered essential. It can also motivate additional purchases.
Makeup company Sephora, which has around 17 million members in their Beauty Insider rewards program, keeps customers coming back for their high-priced makeup because their loyalty points system makes it accessible.
Like a traditional model, buyers earn points for each purchase, but they can use them in a number of different ways, whether it’s redeeming points for limited edition products and exclusive events like in-store tutorials, or using points additional seasonal discounts and free shipping. The Sephora loyalty program is also tiered, granting more and better freebies to those who spend more, which further incentivizes customers to keep shopping.
Having different ways to use points gives customers access to good deals without devaluing the Sephora products, which is a real win-win!
7. Best Buy for an excellent B2C marketing retargeting strategy
When it comes to online shopping, the checkout cart is probably the worst place for marketers because that’s where most conversions die. About 88 percent of purchases are abandoned at the final stage of the purchasing process, so this might actually be the most important for remarketing.
Best Buy does this quite simply by retargeting shoppers who have abandoned carts with a gentle nudge in the form of ads asking them if they’re ready to check out. Consider whether email, social media, or your website are the right platform for this end-of-funnel remarketing, and use your organization’s unique voice and character to give that nudge.
The most effective B2C marketing channels
Once you have a solid understanding of what you’re going to say and to whom you’re going to say it, the next critical piece in the B2C marketing puzzle is identifying where you’re going to distribute your promotional material. In essence, you need to know which marketing avenues — or channels — will help you execute on your overall roadmap.
Choosing the most effective marketing channels for your business depends on your goals, your audience, and your budget, but the four listed below have proven time and again to be the areas that can give you the most bang for your buck.
Paid search: Leverage PPC, or SEM, and display ad marketing
Paid search, often referred to as pay-per-click (PPC) or search engine marketing (SEM), involves paying for advertisements on search engines like Google and Bing.
This form of B2C marketing is measurable and, if optimized correctly, can be especially lucrative and effective.
In paid search, marketers bid on keywords relevant to their business to win the opportunity to display their text-based advertisements on the associated search engine results pages (SERPs). The cost of each keyword depends on a handful of variables, including your bidding strategy, Google’s Quality Score, and competition for that particular keyword.
A search engine results page is just what it sounds like — the page a search engine shows in response to a particular keyword query. The main components of a search engine results page are paid listing results, organic search query results, rich media results, and a knowledge graph, though not all search engine results pages contain all of these components.
To maximize your investment in paid search, it’s important to conduct keyword research to find the keywords most relevant to your business, investigate the cost per click that top performers are paying for each keyword and see how that compares to your budget, create brilliant and clickable ads and effective landing pages, and track all of the metrics carefully to make sure your ad spend drives the return on investment you want.
Another form of paid search is display advertising, which gives marketers the opportunity to place banner advertisements on websites that aren’t their own. Unlike advertisements on SERPs, these promotions are visual and even dynamic. Again, to get the most bang for your buck, you should make each ad as engaging as possible and carefully monitor analytics to get an idea of which ads are performing best and where you may need to experiment further.
SEO: Overview of content marketing and organic acquisition
The counterpart to paid search marketing is search engine optimization (SEO), which is the art of creating content pages on your website that rank as high as possible in the SERPs for a given keyword.
The best part of this particular channel is that it’s absolutely free, gratis, no cost!
However, to implement this effectively, you need to understand the many ins and outs of Google’s ranking algorithm, which dictates where your web pages appear in the SERPs for a given keyword.
Those who take the time to understand how to create quality content that aligns with both on-page and off-page ranking factors will enjoy huge ROI and great success in new customer acquisition.
This effort forms one part of content marketing, which is the process of building and distributing content to strategically promote a brand, drive acquisition, encourage conversion, and increase loyalty among potential and existing customers.
B2C email marketing: What it is and the one way you should always use it
True to its name, email marketing is the act of using email as a channel to promote your services, build relationships with customers, and create better brand awareness.
Like SEO, email marketing can be especially useful for small businesses with slim budgets because it can be absolutely free. On the flip side, if you do have money to put behind it, there are ways to leverage this outlet (e.g., purchasing email lists) to get greater returns.
Regardless of what you have to spend, email is a channel that all businesses should use to keep their customers informed, from simply providing fundamental transactional information to alerting potential and committed customers to new product or service developments.
Social media marketing: A strategy that works
As you may have guessed, social media marketing involves using social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, to further your promotional efforts.
And like email, there are opportunities to leverage this channel both for free and with a paid strategy. No matter what, it’s an essential element of a complete marketing plan. Case in point: Nearly 3.5 billion people use some form of social media every day, with digital consumers spending roughly 2.5 hours scrolling through posts and engaging in messaging.
At the very least, your social media marketing strategy should include a basic digital presence. You should have profiles on the platforms that are most relevant to your audience and that can provide the best opportunities for customer engagement.
You can maximize the value you get from social media by implementing a well thought-out strategy with these steps:
Map out your social media marketing goals and align them with your overall marketing objectives.
Identify which social media platforms best align with your target audience.
Pinpoint the key social media metrics that will illustrate success, including measuring paid campaigns if relevant.
Create compelling and engaging content.
Track results and optimize your efforts accordingly.
Advocate for your brand with affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing — the process of creating partnerships, both paid and unpaid, with other publications, brands, and influencers on the web who agree to promote your products or services — is another nontraditional digital method that B2C businesses can explore to boost brand awareness and drive acquisition.
Most of the time, these partnerships are paid and based on performance. That means you only pay your affiliates a commission when their audience members take an agreed-upon action, like clicking a link, making a purchase, or signing up for an email newsletter (read more about how JotForm makes lead generation quick and easy).
This method of marketing places much of the responsibility of promotion on the affiliates, giving them more carte blanche to promote your products to their audience in the ways that they know will be most successful.
On the flip side, as an effective B2C marketer, it’s essential that you do three things to ensure your efforts in this arena give you the maximum amount of exposure and return on investment:
Carefully research affiliates and identify the ones most relevant to your target audience.
Constantly track success metrics to ensure affiliates are performing and generating the quality of business you want.
Protect your brand identity by monitoring the messaging that affiliates and influencers use to engage audiences.
Apart from paid affiliate marketing, there are also unpaid affiliate relationships.
This may take the form of social media influencers who agree to mention or promote your product in exchange for some sort of cross-promotion or perk. Alternatively, it may take the form of a content exchange, where you provide the affiliate with some sort of valuable content that they can use to boost their audience engagement and traffic while more discreetly educating users about your product or service — even encouraging them to visit your website or make a purchase.
There’s nothing quite like it. It’s easy on the eyes to look at and it’s so satisfying to see so many shades of the same color that work perfectly together.
And the more unique color you choose the better. People expect to see black and white, but hit them with a beautiful blue or royal purple and watch your clients be in awe of your work.
Your customers have an active social media presence. This is really a fundamental reason to make social media an integrated part of your marketing strategy.
Leading a good social media marketing helps you to increase your brand awareness and loyalty, drive traffic to your website, build strong business-customer relationships as well, engage your customers.
Posting contents, updating images and videos, using social ads, creating polls: all these actions are included in any SMM strategy. However, each marketer anddigital marketing agencyhas its own creative approach and marketing plan, which makes them different from competitors.
Having a strong social media presence demands knowledge of some essentials. Let us look at some important steps which can help you in building your SMM campaign.
1. Analyze your Competitors
The information you get about your competitors helps you better survive and reach your business goals. Due to a number of the tools the process becomes easier. For SMM, you need to find out:
The main competitors on Social Media
Their positioning and customer journey
Customer Reviews
Marketing tactics
Your Results in comparison with them.
2. Optimize your Profiles
Social media profile optimization is another important step that you need to conduct. The main things that you need to do are:
Millions of people around the world follow business pages. However, how many of them are loyal customers?
These matters, sincefake followers will never turn into customers.Use different tools (like IG Audit for Instagram) to find out the percentage of your real followers. Besides, checking and blocking your unwanted or suspicious followers will be your next step. Step number three includes active engagement with your active audience for better targeting them.
4. Publish Relevant and Informative Content
Quality content matters for both SEO and UX. Relevant content gains more shares on Social Media, no matter it is video content, a text or interactive content. There are many metrics that you need to take into consideration while building your strategy. Before it, following these steps will help you:
Scheduling your posting time can bring a number of benefits(for getting a platform). These benefits (strategic thinking, consistency, etc.) can better help to build your marketing campaign.
Here is a step to step guide to schedule your Facebook posts to save money and get better results.
6. Include Call To Action
No matter in social media platforms or in your website, having Call to Action button is critically important. Including it in social media improves your brand recognition and increases the conversion rate. Making use of actionable language is your first step. Of course, it should grab attention, but it should be simple and focus the attention of your audience.
7. Connect your Website to your Social Media Profiles
There are two main benefits of connecting your website to Social Media.
Promoting your social media platforms on your website increases the number of your real followers. Promoting your website in social media increases website traffic.
Both are effective for your sales and conversions. The connecting process can be done in simple steps:
Step One: Link your social media profiles through WordPress Plugins Step Two: Share your most engaging social content on the website Step Three: Make everything interesting and shareable.
8. Engage with your Followers
Social media is the greatest marketing platform for engagement. Factors that have an influence on Social Media Engagement Include the number of likes, comments, shares, reviews, etc. For engaging more social media traffic, you need to:
Create promotional content with visuals
Share it the time your audience is active
Create Polls, Surveys, as well be active in Question/Answer session
Add interesting activities ( i.e. contests, giveaways, etc.).
Social media platforms have over 2.96 billion users. Trying to reach all of them is impossible and useless, so you need to clearly define your target market.
There are some important things that you need to research and find out for effectively planning your strategies. They include:
Which are the best platforms for your business?
Which are the working tactics of your competitors?
Who are your potential customers?
Which strategies will better suit your business needs?
Social media can also improve your SEO ranking. Driving more traffic to your search-optimized website, it improves both visibility and conversion rates.
We are living in a digitalized world where the majority f the population is using cell phones and try to find the easiest way to fulfil their day to day needs.
We are in an era where technology has changed the lives of people and made it simpler. Businesses these days are relying on online platforms for increased sales and wider reach.
The latest addition to the online business is on-demand applications. On-demand applications work as a link between consumers and different businesses. These apps are covering different industries, such as taxi services, groceries, laundry, food delivery, car rentals, or personal health services.
Most of the online businesses today are leveraging the services of on-demand apps to build their business’s reputation.
Benefits of On-Demand apps
As the demand for on-demand apps is increasing, it sure has a lot of benefits. Some of these benefits from the business’ point of view are-
1.Employee satisfaction and efficiency
It is important to hire the right on-demand mobile app development company to get the maximum ROI for your business. The ease of project management, user-friendliness, and custom-built features are all who matter for choosing the right mobile app development company. Employee satisfaction doesn’t come easy. A company should be able to increase productivity, all the while decreasing the issues faced by employees.
2.Security and scalability
It is not possible to sure whether the specific app is secure or not. All the businesses want to keep their data safe and secure and maintain confidentiality. When you go for custom mobile solutions, you can be sure that your data will remain safe. Compared with other mobile platforms, on-demand mobile apps are more scalable and secured.
3.Unlimited business opportunities
You will have a database that brings detail about the users’ right from their addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, preferences, and whatever you wish to know. With on-demand apps, a larger number of varied data can let you do many things such as-
Use the data for analysis to improve business practices
Invite the customers for upcoming sales and offers
Some of the benefits of on-demand apps for customers
1.Makes their lives easier
These on-demand apps simplify the lives of customers as they can fulfill their demand with a few clicks on their cell phones. Many industries are fulfilling the demand of customers by delivering the products at their home and providing quality services such as taxi bookings, food delivery, grocery delivery, etc.
2.Tracking facility
On-demand apps allow users to track their order/service. With the help of this app, the user will have a tracking facility that will track the order from the service provider’s side. These apps also come with maps that will help the customers to track the real-time location as well as get notification of the location. The map feature will make the tracking easy for both customers and service providers.
3.Cashless payment
These on-demand mobile applications come up with multiple payment methods, which makes the cashless payment possible for the customers. The online payment or cashless payment will make the payment secure and help the customers to pay for the product/service in a fast and secure manner.
4.Rating and reviewing option
Customers can easily add their reviews and ratings in on-demand mobile apps. These ratings and reviews will help the new customers, and the service providers can manage to get an image of them in the market based on the positive reviews and high ratings. These reviews and ratings will help the business to build their customer base by reaching a wider audience.
We talked about the benefits of on-demand apps for both businesses and customers. We will now talk about the features of on-demand apps.
Features of On-Demand Apps
1.Timely notifications
The best part about an on-demand app is that you get timely notifications about your products/service. Notifications let the customers know where their product is and how long it will take to reach them. It also works as a marketing tool to drive more traffic. Notification is one of the most important features of any app.
2.GPS tracking
GPS tracking feature is one of the key features of any on-demand app. GPS integration plays a key role in tacking any order. GPS tracking easily lets the customers know about the location and progress of their placed orders.
3.Wishlist
An on-demand having this feature is quite important. When a customer likes a product, he can add it to a wishlist if he doesn’t want to buy the product right away or when the size is not in stock. Wishlisting the products will encourage the customers to make the purchase when they are ready or when the product is back in stock.
4.Multiple payment gateways
In this era of eCommerce, every app is focusing on providing multiple payment methods at their site or app. providing multiple payment options is important and makes it easy for the customers to choose the option they want to.
5.Booking cancellation
There may come situations when the customer has to cancel the booking due to some reasons. So every on-demand application should have this feature where the customers can cancel the order or booking as per their comfort.
6.Multiple order booking
It is always good to offer the customers the flexibility of placing multiple orders at once at the store. The app needs to collect the basic information of the customer, which can help with a smooth checkout process for the orders placed.
Popular on-demand Apps
There are many popular on-demand apps that we use today. Over the last few years, on-demand apps have become quite popular and have done well to achieve customer satisfaction. Some of the popular on-demand apps that we use in our daily lives or at least have heard about are-
Uber
OlaCabs
Lyft
Grab
Instacart
Zomato
DoorDash
Swiggy
UberEats
Taxify
Postmates
Wrapping up
On-demand businesses have benefitted many by meeting their demands. On-demand apps are focused on offering effective and efficient services to customers to meet their demand. On-demand apps are quite easy to use as you can order a thing with a few clicks on your cell phone. The demand for on-demand apps is increasing, and looking at the current market. We can say that this service is going to change the face of eCommerce in the near future. It is going to benefit many industries in the future.
As the name suggests, the mobile point of sale enables independent merchants and business owners to collect payments on-the-fly without any worry of collecting cash in bulk.
Cashless and mobile payment and transactions can be done from anywhere, which also proves to be convenient for the customers. mPOS devices can come in different forms like standalone solutions, smartphones, wireless terminals, mobile card readers and so on. Check out the Infographic to glean interesting insights about the current trends and future market of mPOS industry.
