The lines between B2B and B2C communications are increasingly blurring. As much as you might have a ‘key audience’ in mind, it’s hard to ignore the significant overlap in those stakeholders’ use of professional and personal comms channels.
Even with the blurring lines of hybrid work, everyone effectively has a work and personal persona and routine – not least when it comes to media consumption. For example, you might engage with LinkedIn, Insurance Week and the FT at work, but browse The Times and Pinterest in your own time. While it may be easier to profile your audience’s professional persona and target those spaces and channels, you’d be foolish to overlook either.
Consequently, B2B comms teams are taking a leaf out of their B2C counterparts’ books, and vice versa. Whether your organisation provides industry-specific services or is a group with a vast consumer brand portfolio, having a robust communications strategy that resonates with both industry and the end-consumer has become the gold standard.
A misstep for any of your target audiences, however, could result in watered down messaging that only adds to the noise or worse, conflicts with your core values or brand perception.
Communicating in a way that feels professionally relevant, personally motivating, and timely to a target audience is a challenge that our corporate communications specialists come across time and time again, so here are four key considerations for building fresh, effective corporate communications strategies for 2025.
Have an overarching strategy
When building a strategy that requires corporates to adapt key messages for seemingly disparate audiences, there is a risk of getting lost in the weeds. Everyone needs to focus on interrogating the ‘what’, ‘why’ and then ‘who’ behind a comms brief and feed that into their plans.
While strategic brand pillars and broader brand messaging should permeate every communications effort, successfully rolling out a campaign from strategy and planning to execution hinges on distinct objectives, leveraging specific audience insights and having a clear view of the external market opportunity. From there, a tailored strategy can be developed, one that factors in which elements of your offering should be highlighted to intended audiences, what messaging can be dialed up or down to better communicate knowledge and expertise, risk management and how to connect various tactics and channels under unified goals.
A PR partner with relevant expertise in melding together your organisation’s key sectors and its audience demographics can support with not just delivering a comms strategy, but also interrogating the brief and adding value to how a campaign comes to life.
Understand every audience, in depth
A deep understanding of the pressure points and motivators for different audiences can inform how best to communicate with and engage them. Such insights can help with adapting campaign messaging to strike the right tone.
Furthermore, strategic PR partners will have a mind for your key audiences’ audiences, to better understand the attitudinal and behavioural triggers that could affect how they respond. This element is becoming more important than ever, regardless of the sector your company operates in.
For example, a recruitment firm could need to share insights into job market trends with hiring managers, while simultaneously speaking directly to prospective talent. A business services group may need to adapt their tried-and-true consultancy to new industries as well as their existing clients. A law firm may require careful, technical messaging when delivering analysis of landmark legislative changes to industry, but then also filter that through to educating clients. A sports or music business could be looking to speak to clubs, venues and grassroots communities.
Balancing the bigger picture umbrella strategy with specific audience insight is key to identifying exactly how to reach your audiences to drive awareness, certain behaviours or perception change.
Apply nuance across channels
It’s worth noting that while ‘B2B’ and ‘B2C’ are useful catch-all terms, when it comes to audience engagement through earned, social and owned channels there should always be tailored audience groups in mind. Not only does this support the efficacy of your messaging, but it also helps to focus campaign resources – right down to identifying the comms channels and different times of day/year that will best reach them.
This nuance should filter through each marcomms channel. Using PR as an example, reporters across different national titles and industry vertical publications will have slight variances in their approach to editorial agendas and preferences. A good PR team may have a pre-existing network of contacts to introduce your brand to and help drive your efforts to build a strong pipeline of news and content that can help those relationships flourish.
Similarly, social media planning needs tailored consideration when mapping out which content to serve, when and in which formats, what information to communicate through community management, and so on. The right social media strategists can draw this altogether with recommendations on audience testing and learning.
Also, the more specific that audience targeting is, the more effective SEO and PPC activity can activate on a company’s website and search engines. By prioritising audiences against their specific search and online behaviours, marcomms teams can be detailed in their user journey mapping, owned content development, and Google ads targeting, as well as complementing concurrent PR and Social activity.
Don’t stretch yourself too thin
It’s a common assumption that a multi-channel or multi-audience communications strategy is a call to do everything, everywhere, all at once…
Rather, strategic communications benefit most when plotting out key calendar moments and internal milestones for respective audiences, then shaping priority activity around them. Ultimately, B2B and B2C are just one way of labelling your target audiences. Knowing your audiences inside-out, and using an insights-led, human touch to communicate with them, can enable your business to apply best practice from both disciplines for optimal success.
Get in touch with our corporate communications experts today.