How To Create an ROI-Focused B2C Marketing Strategy for 2026

Hello and welcome to the dojo, a search marketing podcast by Exposure Ninja. My name is Dale Davies. I'm the head of marketing exposure ninja. I'm joined by Charlie Martin, our CEO. This week we're going to talk about how to create an ROI focused BTOC marketing strategy. Charlie, I'm kind of curious where do we start with creating that strategy? I think we have to start with the challenges that we have for the business and how we want to scale the business so that then you can think about right where are we actually focusing our marketing what's already bringing us an ROI and what looks like a channel or an area of our marketing that could be progressing towards bringing us an ROI like what's an upcoming new kind of channel for us as well and that's particularly important when we're thinking ahead to 2026 but Whenever we think ahead for the next year of strategy is okay, we can do a percentage of what we've already done this year that we know works. But times times they are are changing. Times are always changing. So we also need to be thinking what are we doing with say 20% of our marketing budget so that we're experimenting with channels that could drive extra growth for us. So, you wouldn't necessarily do what a lot of people may do, myself included, which is launch into like a whole new channel, like new year, new me, new channel. I'm going to like throw everything into that. You're actually suggesting that you just kind of take stock. Yeah. I mean, new year, new me. We know that for the majority of people that doesn't tend to work. So, there's no reason that that would work for marketing either. There's a case to be made for doing something different, but not doing everything different. For me, the only reason to do everything different is if what you've done this past year hasn't worked for you at all. If the business has slowed or declined, then you know that kind of marketing isn't work. You need to look at something different. If you are seeing steady growth, then that indicates to you something that you're doing is working really well. And I mean marketers would love to see explosive growth, right? That that's our that's the dream. So there's always going to be a bit of every marketer that wants to do something different to see if it could explode. But also, you wouldn't put all of your marketing investment into something that you hope might be explosive growth and then you've gambled, you've suddenly put everything on red and nothing at all works. So if you've got something that's working, if you've got a machine that's actually bringing in leads or it's bringing in sales, if you're e-commerce focused, great. You don't want to sacrifice and throw that all away for the sake of doing something new and shiny. That's magpie syndrome. What we actually want to do is maintain a certain percentage of that that's working and then look at experimenting with a smaller percentage of our budget. So, we're going to start off with assessment and determine what is working. But are we looking at the channel mix or the type of content that we're doing? Or we even taking a step further back and looking at the market first? Ideally, we'd be looking at the market, but also our customers and who the customers we're really targeting are. Whether that's the same customers that we've always targeted, whether there's a new group, a new demographic that we're adding to target customers, that's going to shift our strategy a bit. And I think we're also looking at measurement because I can imagine what a lot of businesses are thinking listening to this is I don't know. I don't know that I have the data that's going to show all of that. And one of the most important areas when it comes to an ROI focused profitable marketing strategy in B2C is having clear tracking in place to understand what are the touch points this customer has with our business and where are they converting from? How did they hear about us? Where did they convert? What channels did they touch on that journey? And are we putting all of our trust into attribution software into analytics and things like that or do you think we actually need to go about it a different way? Analytics is a great place to start and having Google Analytics tracking or if you're using a different type of tracking like Adobe Analytics, having that set up so that you have a clear idea of some of the attribution is great because what you'll be able to see is pretty much the last click attribution, the last channel that a customer touched before they converted on your website. That's great. The harder thing to decipher from that is where they first heard about you and all of the touch points they have along the way. And the best way to look at how you then attribute and decide, okay, what is important can be really simple and effective. Having a really good CRM platform, something like HubSpot if you're particularly if you're in a service or lead generation focused business where you've got a sales team also having to interact before you close a customer because that allows you to see so much more. And also very simple things like if you have a form on your website because you're generating leads just asking where did you first hear about us so that you're getting a bit more data to understand what's mainly influencing someone to finally come into contact with your business and actually send an inquiry request a demo whatever your actual CTA is. I was looking at a tool earlier called dream data which allows you to track all this kind of stuff and there were lots of options out there that will kind of make sense of where people are interacting with your content or whether that's out of house and elsewhere. And one example was saying how one lead that they captured this service based business had first interacted with an ad 200 plus days ago. Um do you think the B2C has to think as long term as that or do you think that actually they need to work in smaller uh periods of time like just 30 days just 60 just 90 days because I'm thinking of okay some businesses are service based when it comes to B toc but some are product based where it's on a whim I might just spot something and go do you know I'll spend 25 quid on that and I think you've kind of answered the question already. It depends, right, what the business actually does and how long the customer journey usually is. And that can be really difficult to figure out. But I know even if we're talking about something you might buy on a whim, say you're going on holiday, you're going to buy a bikini, you're like, I need that in the next couple of weeks, might be a quick purchase. But on the other hand, people might be thinking ahead for way longer. They might not even be thinking about making that original purchase, but they've seen so many ads, they've ended up in the email funnel. they've seen some UGC say on social media or they saw it come up on a Pinterest board, whatever it may be that eventually they're saturated enough that they decide to go ahead and make a purchase. So, I think there's both the short-term and the long-term consideration. If you already have an idea of how long it takes someone to actually make a purchase from your business, if you know the buying cycle is longer, then that means you have the ability to think longer term. But I think pretty much for all businesses now in B2C, it's so competitive and it is so saturated in the majority of markets that businesses do find they need to be putting out a lot more content, a lot more video, a lot more ads, a lot more emails to keep people within that journey. Because as you've said before, Dale, it's very easy. Someone thinks about your brand maybe for a millisecond, it's not on their mind all the time. So you have to keep reminding them. You have to keep pushing your brand, your product, your service. Do you think that the volume of content you put out there or just how many touch points that you can create between your brand and your ideal customer is the right channel to go down or the right pathway or do you think is actually having a really strong message that resonates more or is it a combination of the two? The quality is so important, but if you create high quality stuff and it never gets seen, you're not going to achieve your objectives. If you create high volumes of lowquality stuff and it gets seen all the time, you're also never going to achieve your objectives. So, there's definitely a middle ground that B2C businesses have to be thinking about, and that's having a quality of content, of video, of whatever it is that your focus channels are. and putting out enough that people who you are targeting will see it regularly, but not just churning and churning and churning. Because if you put out really generic content, it's not going to be any different or any better to competitors, which is the other big area that all businesses have to think about when they're in their BTOC marketing strategy planning phase is, is this going to look different from a competitor? Is there a clear reason someone would buy from me? Are they attached to our brand in some kind of way? Or do our ads make it clear that we differentiate? Or are we working with influencers whether they're macro or micro ones that really resonate that our target customers are going to see? That's a really good point about the competitors and again most markets are fairly saturated. How can B2C businesses service based or maybe in retail, how can they stand out today? I think it depends so much on the market that they're in. Firstly, I think it's by understanding who your customer really is and how they're different from other customers. Not trying to be the everything to everyone business. Understanding that actually some people will value things like products being made in the UK or products being made on a small on a small scale. services, having customer service that is UK or based in your country, for example, all of these types of things. Or having, you know, if it's financial advice, someone that they could actually go and see in person, having location based, having a mortgage company, for example, someone that they might trust that they recognize the brand, that they've heard good things about online, but then going specifically to your part of the market. So, for example, someone who takes out a bank account with Monzo is probably not the same person that opens a bank account with Barclays because they actually have different target demographics. They market differently. The brands are known differently to two different people and they have different kinds of appeal. So, we know for example, like my mom's older generation, she's known Barclays. It's always been a bank that she's heard of. She has no desire to bank online. She wants to be able to go into a branch. I have no desire to ever go into a branch for my banking. I want to do everything online and I want it to be quick and I want the UX to be great. It's the kind of differentiator that you can make in your marketing. Even if you're in a saturated market, whether that's something like banking, doesn't really matter what it is. It's actually thinking right, how are my customers going to interact with my business? What are they going to care about in my marketing? What are the USPS? because it's actually very different from other competitors within the same market. And I suppose so one point you've made in uh some of our recent episodes in this marketing strategies 2026 series is that sometimes knowing how your market your audience can be segmented may lead you to do brand creation. I think I referenced previously, Zing, which I went back and double checked, is a fintech app created by HSBC because they very specifically spotted there's a group of customers who want to have multicurrency access. So you might get via Wise or Revolute, for example. I have a Revolute account and I have a GB a pound account and a euros account for when I'm in uh when I'm abroad. Things like that. They've gone ahead and taken that audience research and turned it into a brand new brand. Yeah. Perfect. And there that's probably because they know that that audience their target customers travel more than other types of customers might do and that they therefore want to have that multicurrency functionality is is a perfect use case of understanding your customer and how they're using your product or your service. I suppose not everybody who's listening operates or markets a BC business is in the position where they can create a new brand for themselves. So I suppose we need to look about you know what's kind of working today? What have you seen from the campaigns that we manage or seen that you've observed um you out there in the world that you you see is effective question ROI? Yeah. And we don't have to be creating subbrands or all these different kinds of products or services. Most of the time, businesses that have a very simple and clear offering with a clear target customer are going to be the most effective. They're going to have the most effective marketing strategies and they're going to pull people into their funnel very effectively. The things that I've seen working, personalization has been massive and I think it will continue to be massive, which all plays back to understanding your target customer. again doesn't mean that you have to create new products, new services or fancy shiny offerings for for them. That can actually just be how well you personalize your emails, how well you understand their needs and pain points, but also it can be around content campaigns as well. So, one of my favorite examples was from a uh let's they're a bathroom installer, but they predominantly work with elderly people, but also the children of elderly people as well as disabled people who need certain kinds of bathrooms installed to have independence. And running a content campaign specifically at those kinds of target markets was a really important area for them because what they were able to do was actually create petitions around use cases here in the UK around accessibility around independence in the home and how bathrooms contributed to that. But they were also able to take more mainstream political stories, bills going through parliament, all of that kind of thing, all of that kind of content that actually affects their target customers. And some people say, well, that's straying a bit into politics. And yes, it is in this case, but it's something that is actually very close to the heart of that business that they've incorporated in their marketing strategy, but also it's because it's something they care about, but it's also something that comes from conversations with their own customers. They know that their customers care about these types of things and so they want to be leading a leading voice in that area and putting petitions out there lobbying to the government. Those types of things are pretty unique content strategies that are personalized towards that audience that experience their actual lived experiences. So I think that's a great example of something that you can do a bit differently when it comes to B2C marketing. Do you think it's applicable to all kinds of B2C businesses? I'm just thinking if I'm in the product space and I have maybe one main product or a range of products. Do you think I could do the same kind of thing? I think creativity is for every business. I think there's some kind of creativity that works in marketing for every business, but what it is is different. So there will be plenty of BTOC businesses that do not like the idea of being political at all and would much prefer to be apolitical. particularly if you have a much wider demographic and they may not actually have political leanings. There's no no reason for you as a business to do that. But I think you can do fun stuff depending on who your customer is. And that can even be things like some businesses particularly in in product side are going to find UGC is really effective. different kind of personalization actually personalizing by showing video experiences of someone using their product. So user generated content and that can be used in ads. It can be used in social media. You can put those shorts on YouTube. Sometimes you actually see them on websites quite often as well. Even it can even be for things like skincare products. It can be for clothing. All sorts of different types of products. I've seen it gyms, health, fitness apps. all of that type of stuff. I think that's a great way to personalize your marketing and do something a bit different and you can get really creative with it without having to go down the route of doing political content. Yeah, I really love seeing UGC when I'm doing my own product uh decision making. You I'm going through like an ecom store or you potentially like you if I'm on one of the main retailers like a John Lewis or especially Amazon. Like this past week, I was having to make some decisions around birthday presents for my daughters coming up next week. And I'm like, great, let's make a decision on these couple of products that we, my partner and I know that she might like. Looking at the product photos, I'm like, "Yeah, this looks really good." But I know that that product owner has spent the time to finesse these images over time. It's the reviews further down that really convince me whether this is for me or not. So, I look through and I go, "Right, this bit doesn't look as bright as it could be, or this doesn't look as durable as it can be." And it's great that not only are we seeing these reviews utilized on these big retailer sites, but if I'm shopping for, you know, trying to think of something else I bought recently, I can't think of anything. It's all been kids toys and things. But, um, I do love when, uh, e-commerce stores, they do include those, you know, customer reviews within their own product pages, too. It's an underutilized resource. John Lewis is a great example of that as well. They were the one who immediately sprang to my mind as a market leader of what a really compelling product page would look like in BTOC as well. Because if you go on to John Lewis, I recently bought from John Lewis. I bought both a jumper and a new pillow, new pillows for bedding. And when you go on to look at the jumper page, you'll see UGC of people who have actually bought it and they're wearing it, which is great because you can then see how it fits, different types of bodies, different frames. Then you've also got all of the description, the detail, what materials it's made out of, how to wash it, and like you say, Dale, reviews, which is incredibly important. Oh, this jumper is really itchy. Or, oh, this jumper feels really super soft. It's amazing. Pillows exactly the same. You'd think, okay, who needs to see what pillows it like? I actually care about how plump that pillow looks. I care about it being reclaimed feather and down. I don't want any new feather and down in my pillows. And I do actually want to see product photos of it so that I can get a bit of an understanding of how plump it is and reviews because one of the worst things is you buy a pillow and then it's just as bad as your old pillow that you paid a tenner for years ago and you wish you hadn't spent on it. So, I think we can often think, okay, well, clothing, yeah, people want to see it. But actually, people want to see visuals of all sorts of products and being able to embed UGC and reviews on your product page is such a compelling thing to do. I suppose this is why B2C is probably more well known for influencer marketing where these brands or businesses are working with people who are doing these kind of reviews on a daily weekly basis. So, if I'm in the the tech space, I might I'm more than likely going to be working with some influencers that are doing you 10, 15, 20 minutes, hourong videos explaining how these products work, how how they work 6 months down the line. So, for example, in the phone space is often common where somebody says, "Here are my opinions on this phone 6 months down the line." Yeah, I imagine with B2C, you often have to have this, especially retail, you have to have this omni channel um strategy of bringing every team together. Like there's one cosmetics brand that we worked with where I'll allow you to explain um where we've kind of we understand how the c the customer thinks what different types of content they're looking for in different parts of the internet and bringing it all together including the company's website. Yeah. And this global skincare brand that you're referencing here, it's really interesting because people come into a buying journey for skincare in different ways. Now, we know that many people, for example, will take a photo of their own skin, put it into Chachi Beauty and be like, "Help me. I don't know what's wrong. I just have this problem I need to solve. You know, I've got dry skin or my the skin on my face is quite red or my skin feels really blotchy. I don't look very glowy." Whatever it is that they're facing as a challenge. So, first you've got that AI side of how people search. Then you're also going to have for this kind of brand plenty of people who just Google it still and plenty of people who watch UGC for skininc care advice from influencers who they trust from people whose skin that they love and adore and wish their skin looked like. And there's a whole that's a whole wormhole there of various types of beauty and skincare influences that that go on. And in this example, we were working on a a hero product for that client. Originally, it was actually an SEO campaign, improving organic traffic, regaining it because there had been aggressive competitors also going after this hero product as well that lost some of their market share for it. And when we were actually doing work on those product pages, it wasn't just okay, how do we update this content, which is an extremely large and important part of giving the right detail to be picked up on Google, to be picked up in AI overviews, and to be picked up in AI search like chatbt. This was also about how people interact with the page and what they need to see in order to make purchasing decisions off the back of it and how they navigate. looking at user generated content. We added that to some of those product pages. Looking at the whole layout to make sure that everyone was seeing everything they needed to see, the detail in the product description, the UGC, the reviews, and not only are people seeing that, but AI also started picking that up and we were seeing that come through. They improved their AI traffic visibility and conversions at the same time as improving the the Google conversions as well. It seems to me that often when we're talking about these strategies for different types of businesses, whether it's, you know, mid-market, enterprise, or B2B or B2C, we often make the recommendation that businesses focus on one or two or two or three channels. But with the way that the search journey and discovery is changing, do you think that B2C in particular needs to actually expand to develop and utilize more than two or three channels and you know have a much much wider mix? I expect B2C marketers feel quite overwhelmed by the numbers of channels and touch points that they have. And again, I feel like this depends on the customer. What you don't want to do is start investing heavily in marketing strategies on channels where your customers don't go. If you don't sell to Gen Z, for example, you're probably not going to invest that heavily on Tik Tok. Whereas, if you do sell to Gen Z, you're probably going to start investing on Tik Tok. you're going to start investing in AI search, chatbt, because that's the platforms that they use. So, I don't think you can approach it and hope to do everything because what you'll end up doing is spreading so thin that you're doing nothing effectively. I think you need to hone in on the channels that you know your customers tend to use, the ones that they tend to convert from. Whether you have two or three, I would say you always want to have two leading channels. And that might be a combination like SEO and Google Ads or it might be a combination like AI search and SEO. And then you're always going to have for the majority of B2C an email marketing automation sequence setup and newsletters running in the background as another channel as well. how broad you want to go, how many touch points you need to have, it varies. It's going to vary a bit depending on different types of businesses. I think two to three is safe. Some businesses will find that they're going to need more than that. You mentioned there about AI search and I did want to bring us onto the topic of you what things may be changing in 2026. I expect AI search is probably a leading one. Do you think that is the case for B2C as well? Yeah, absolutely. I think many businesses have found themselves in a situation where they feel like they're losing some of their organic traffic and that's quite common since AI overviews on Google have increasingly rolled out. But also since we've seen people now searching in chatbt and other types of AI search channels that we know are continuing to grow and that sometimes both are used. Sometimes people use both chatbt and Google. That's not unusual either, which we can expect that trend to continue. We absolutely know that the number of people using chatbt is going to continue to rise people using AI searches. We also know that Google isn't going to be pulling back on the types of AI search that they have integrated. So AI overviews, which is currently the summaries you get on the top of the main Google search results. They also have AI mode which is their version of something like chat GBT integrated at the top of the search results where you see images, news, you can also click through to the AI mode tab. And the big big change that we're going to see more of in 2026, which is hugely going to affect BTOC marketing is we're going to see more agentic stuff rolling out. And when I'm talking about agentic, I think we're actually going to see more of things like chatbt's agent mode where it can actually check out for you. The customer doesn't have to do as much manual searching as they have done. I think that's going to be become more and more normal and we'll probably look back at the way we search now and think it's actually quite antiquated. It's actually quite manual. We do loads and loads of research already. People have moved to ChachiBT doing some of that research for them. The next evolution of that if you're BTOC particularly if your e-commerce or online sales product salesbased B2C will will be checkouts happening because agents have started to do some of that process for people and the same for things like ticket booking, restaurant reservations, anything that takes lots of time to research and could be done quicker by AI. Okay. I imagine there going to be a bunch of listeners and watchers who are kind of unaware of what agentic really means for search. Yeah. I know you you've really played around with this a lot. I wonder if you could give us an example. Yeah, sure. I absolutely can. So, my favorite example that I like to use is if I'm buying coffee. I buy coffee all the time. I buy it monthly. I buy freshly roasted coffee and I care about where it's sourced, where it's come from. Agentic AI is essentially me typing into Chachi BT something like buy me a kilogram of coffee. I want it locally roasted near where I am. I want it fresh and I want it ground for my domestic espresso machine. A sage bambino. Can be very specific. And I want it delivered within 3 days cuz I'm running out of coffee or I want it on subscription. Whatever it is, you can type that instruction into ChatBT's agent mode. This is probably one of the dominant types of agent mode at the moment. So, it's well worth going out having a look and testing it just so that you can see what happens. And then it will go away. It will do all of the research for me. It opens a virtual browser in chatbt. So, I'm not controlling it. It's doing it for me. And it's essentially searching on Google, on Bing, reading different articles, understanding product pages, and it's doing that across at least tens of, if not hundreds of different pages to decide where to actually buy my coffee from. And what it will do is navigate all the way through a website. It will select options on a product page. So, it's going to select a kilogram. It's going to select the coffee grind. And it's going to add it to basket for me. And then it's going to offer me the option to take back over the screen to put in my own card details and address and check out. And that's the stage we're at at the moment with Agentic. Essentially, it does all of the task for you and takes you right to the last step of that buying journey. And this we're going to see more and more happening. I'm just thinking that there has been another release on top of this in just the last couple of days with chat GBT releasing uh something new to do with shopping. Yes, ChatgBT has also released uh a new kind of agentic over the last couple of days where it's partnered with Etsy and I think it's only on Etsy at the moment where it can actually take you through all the way to check out and they're saying that they're going to be doing it with Shopify in a couple of weeks time. I think you read Dale. Yeah, it's expected in the next couple of weeks they think. Yeah. And I mean these partnerships, these kinds of integrations where that's happening for you is going to continue as well. We know chatb for example also has a partnership with Open Table. I expect we're going to see lots of restaurant bookings happening through Open Table more and more as they start to test these kind of products. So it's definitely a revolution that B2C marketers need to be paying a huge amount of attention to for next year. Yeah. like um Tim, our founder who you often may see on our YouTube channel, youtube.com/exposioninja, often talks about this as a land grab opportunity. This very much seems to be the case with what I'm seeing with this uh instant checkout of whoever provides the most information to chatb is going to be the winner when it comes to product research and and sales on on the platform. So initially it is Etsy and Shopify and you don't have to do anything extra if you're already using those two platforms. You will just be brought in automatically. There's very little for you to do. However, if you're on a different e-commerce platform, let's say you are an ecom or retailer, you're going to have to do some additional work to do something called the aentic commerce platform, which is a bunch of AI stuff and API stuff I don't understand. I'm not going to get into. Part of that is that you have to provide it with a product feed, which is like a list of all of your products. It's a bit different from Google Shopping in that you can't pull out the Google Shopping one and just import that into um OpenAI's version. You're going to have to create a new one from scratch. And again, that's the land grab opportunity. If you're the one who's doing the work to fill out the product feed and give it every piece of information it's looking for, you're going to get that that appearance first. So, they're not saying that people or businesses that provide this information are ready for instant checkout are going to get higher product visibility for certain types of searches. However, contradictory, they also say those products with instant checkout are going to appear higher. They're going to be more likely to appear. So, it's not a ranking factor, but it certainly sounds like it's a ranking factor. And one of the key parts that um Josh Blissll who works at Profound Partners pointed out was in the description field of that feed where you list like your availability and price and things. There's a description there's like a thousand characters or something. So if you just write loads of stuff in there, you're going to very quickly just educate the the platform about everything you could possibly want it to know about your core product USPS or you know whatever it is that kind of makes your product stand out whether that's you know the afterare or the guarantees and things like that. And it kind of makes sense to me though that this is the direction we're going in. If you think about it on a very personal level, if you were just going to look for a cafe for example, you're like, I just want to have a nice flat white somewhere near where I am. I'm not usually here. You search it on Google Maps and if someone's got their Google business profile filled out correctly, you can see a nice profile. You know the opening times of the cafe, the address is correct, you can see the phone number if you wanted it, you can get the directions, you can read the reviews, and you can see some images. Usually the business themselves have taken some nice promotional images and then you'll also get user generated content. Reviewers will have added it. If by comparison you see a cafe that doesn't have any opening times, you're not quite sure actually where it is and there's only one or two reviews and not many photos, you're naturally going to make the decision to go to the cafe that has way more information about it because you're more likely to actually get what you want from it and you can be sure that you're going to. To me, this type of move on AI search is very similar. The more information you give AI, the better information it has to give to the user and the better the information to the end user, the more likely it is they're actually going to want to make that purchase. So whilst we're saying like this is revolutionary and it is in terms of how AI actually operates and works, when you actually boil it down to the concept of giving information to the user, it should be what we expect as marketers to have to do in order to get customers in my opinion. Do you feel there's much else that we can expect to see change in 2026 apart from like obviously this is a humongous thing with AI surge and the emerging kind of um possibilities there but there other channels or stuff you think it's going to maybe create a challenge for uh for marketing leaders I think AI search is going to be the biggest change that we see next year I also think personalized creatives will continue to be very competitive things like UGC that we've discussed already but also video shorts are very very popular and I do think customers searching on different platforms is going to create a big challenge for marketers so Google is of course dominant it's massive the majority of people search on Google but people also search on YouTube they also search on Tik Tok they search on Instagram they search on different platforms they even search these days on on like Spotify on podcast platforms if they prefer to listen to content, for example. Understanding actually what kinds of content your customer consumes and where they're going to be searching is probably the biggest challenge, but also the biggest opportunity that marketers in B2C actually have to decide where to put their resource and what to actually work on. And I suppose it comes back to your earlier point of, you know, tracking everything that you can within reason is going to help you make better decisions when it comes to picking out the channels or even mediums that give you the best ROI. Yeah, 100%. Actually, having good tracking in place to understand where those conversions, if you're a lead generation based business, if you're a service based business, are coming from or where your sales are coming from if you sell directly at checkout online. Is there anything you think that we should be doing less of in the B2C space in 2026? You think we need to pull back on any channels or types of content, for example? Less of only if we're doing really generic types of content and putting out loads and loads of content that isn't useful to our customers doesn't get referenced by AI. And I mean both AI overviews and chatbt when I say that. I think if we're putting out things that aren't interesting to customers, then absolutely we should let go of them. If we're running ads on channels that aren't getting good interaction, that aren't making a good return on ad spend for us, let go of them and invest in different areas. And probably one of the most effective areas for B2C marketers is thinking about which funnels, which buyer journeys actually are working. Some of our most successful campaigns have been ads focused where we've done great work on the website. We've made sure it converts, but we're also setting up specific customer journeys and moving someone specifically through them. So, for example, um a mortgage company we worked with who are fantastic. They marketed to lots of different types of people, people refinancing, new home buyers, first-time home buyers, veterans, all different types. and they actually built out we built out with them journeys that those people are going on through the website and that would be okay people searching for certain types of loans or mortgages on Google. Then we've got optimized pages on the website built for them. We've got Google ads that go specifically through to landing pages addressing the keywords or the phrases that they would have been googling. We've got CTAs specific to those people for the types of loans, the types of mortgages, the types of reviews being tailored to those types of people on that page. So, they're not seeing generic content. They're seeing content that's really relevant to them. And if you are doing landing pages from ads, you don't have to have all of those listed online. You don't have to have them all indexable. You can have them specifically non-indexed, literally just for use with ads if you wanted to do it that way. CTAs relevant to them. That might be credit score checking in this case. That might be speaking directly to a loan officer and being able to use forms that give you all of the information you need completely tailored to the type of person on the pages. They're having a great experience following that journey through because everything is so targeted and relevant and personalized to them. And off the back end of it, you can also have emails personalized to that segment of your market. If you're not doing that and you are putting out lots of generic content, lots of generic ads, whatever it may be that you're doing in your marketing, that I think is one of the biggest opportunities for B2C to be more effective next year. So, just a bit of a recap on May, it sounds like you're looking for channel excellence with performance on top and personalization. So, it kind of all comes together as part of like a life cycle that doesn't just kind of end with traffic traffic generation and initial lead capture. It's also the back end, too. Yeah. Correct. 100%. 100%. And it also doesn't end at the sale. A lot of the time for the majority of B2C businesses, they're either going to be thinking about the whole lifetime value if you sell something that's subscription or you're going to be thinking about how you get a repeat purchase from a customer. And that might be yes products. If they, you know, buy a certain kind of makeup every month, if you buy a certain kind of product, you have toilet roll delivered, if you have veg boxes delivered, all of those types of things that are subscription or repeat purchases. But it will also be the same for if you have an accountant and you need your tax return doing every year. You want to make sure that they are coming back to you every year. That's a huge opportunity when we're thinking about the ROI from our B2C marketing strategy. It's not just the new customer segment. It's our returning customers or the loyalty of our current customers. And there's lots of different ways that businesses can manage that. Email marketing is probably one of the most effective. Sometimes it might be calls, particularly if you're a service-based business, something like an accountant, then calls can be a very effective way of managing it. Um, but we also see things like gamified loyalty programs, you know, loyalty cards. If you buy a certain amount of things or we might see promotional offers coming through, email, oh, you you know, is it time for your monthly coffee order and that you they're actually 5 days later than you expect them to be. 10% discount code comes through or whatever it is to try and increase that average order value but also keep those customers with you for the long term. I can definitely say like the few subscriptions I have those companies are very good like getting me back in if I'm not subscribed already or like their initial offering is just enough to kind of lock me in for the long term. So for example like you I often talk about my Vit Coco subscription. it's a little bit cheaper um if you subscribe. And I was like, great, I'm going to save some money. So, just being really clear with your messaging up front and just making sure that's really clear, not like you don't wait until the checkout process to say, "Oh, by the way, if you switch this to, you know, a monthly subscription instead of a one-off purchase, you're more likely to make a sale." Um, that messaging is really key. Like I really love what you said and I've seen from some our campaigns about even those who make it through the sales process and become closed lost, they're not with you. They're not they've chosen not to come with you for your services or your products or whatever. It's not the end of the story. There's the whole they're going to come back into market thing and a yearong or two long nurturing process might be enough for them to come back and work with you or buy from you in the future. Yeah, absolutely. And if you have, particularly if you're focused on leads and you have closed lost in your pipeline, a lot of those people will still be on your mailing list. So you have the opportunity to market to them in your emails at the right time. And that doesn't have to be creating an individual email to go at a specific time, right? We can automate that. You can personalize it to the segment if you've got them well categorized. And it can go at just the right time. This is exactly what businesses do. They predict when that next purchase of their item is likely to be needed, roughly when that person will be coming back into market based on the timelines that they have in mind. So things like, yes, you run out of coffee monthly. So they can predict that. You might have seasonal products. You might know that someone actually needs to buy something at a certain time of year. It might be Christmas. It might be Black Friday offers. It might be the tax year's ending and suddenly we're panicking about our tax returns. all sorts of times that are the ultimate moment to go to try and get that closed loss customer this time round. We're just about to get into like you a bit of a recap on how to create that ROI focused B2C marketing strategy. Before we do go on to it, there is a story that you shared the other day that I absolutely loved about how the SEO campaign was seasonal too where they were building out a campaign throughout the year, but they also knew exactly which types of content to publish at the right time. And I wonder if you wouldn't mind resharing that again for those who haven't heard it before. Yeah, sure. So, we have a fantastic client and campaign um for a US-based business who work in lawn care lawn care called Golf Course Lawn Store. And if you are working on having a fantastic lawn, which you ideally want year round, you're actually extremely impacted by seasonality because of weather changes, but also because certain kinds of sorry to say it, weeds will be growing on your lawn at certain times of year as well. You've got to have different products for those different seasons to be managing your lawn care. Perfect. So, what our SEO team did on this campaign was break down all of the tracking of keywords into the seasons into summer, winter, fall or autumn and spring to know which kinds of products, which kinds of searches are going to happen. And that's both top offunnel searches. So, like you know, how do I take care of my lawn in spring? being very top level and right down to like how do I kill crab grass without killing my actual good grass? How do I get rid of those certain types of weeds that are going to come at a specific time of year as well? And by sectioning it that way, what we could do was know in advance, okay, this is the next season that's about to start. We can start refreshing content ready for that season to try and improve our rankings ahead of time. And that is what we successfully did. We got a lot of top positions on Google, but also a lot of AI search results as well for those certain types of searches for the upcoming season. This client as well has a fantastic YouTube channel that they run on their own Steam and they're able to make content off the back of those seasonal keywords and blog content that we're putting out there at the same time. So, there's a whole lovely funnel going on of content that's seasonally targeted to make sure they're making the absolute most of every season for that business. Even though there's high and low seasons within that, we're still making the most we absolutely can out of all the traffic that we're getting to the website all year round. Just one final point like I started listening to a podcast today which is for gardeners and it what I love about this is that they've picked another format another um you know channel for them to go into that's perfectly timebased as well. So they can put out a podcast exactly the right week or month of the year and say if you're in the garden this week this is what you should be prioritizing. You should be planting these bulbs or harvesting this thing. I think it applies to far more B2C businesses than maybe many of those B2C owners or marketing leaders probably appreciate. Like in our space, now is the perfect time for us to be doing a marketing strategy uh series of episodes because this is the planning part of many people's year or by the time this series ends, it'll be ready to watch all the way through or listen all the way through in Q1 of next year. So this is like again time based. You might not think that this is uh the right format for everyone. Maybe you don't think a podcast is for you. I'd certainly consider it because the utilization of it is great for other channels. You can snip it for social, you can use it in your blog post. There's so many different applications, but again, it comes down to your audience and if they're actually going to listen to it or not. Yeah. And this is all goes back to understanding when your customers roughly going to be in the market and what they're going to be looking for at a certain time of year. And it's great. You can use keyword data. You can use your analytics to understand some of that information. And then some of it is going to be more qualitative stuff. It's going to be your experience in the sector. It's going to be talking to your customers and understanding what they actually need and what trends are likely to be coming in the next 12 months. We're coming to the end of this episode and I want to summarize for everyone. How can they create an ROI focused B2C marketing strategy for 2026? Okay, if I was going to break it down into a couple of points. First, your challenges. Know what your challenges are. what you're trying to achieve, the goals that you want to get to. Then you're tracking your analytics, understanding which channels are important to you, when people make purchases, what kinds of purchases they make, at what kinds of year, at what kinds of year, what kinds of time of year they're making those purchases. Decide your channel mix. My advice is always 80% in what's working already, 20% in what you think is a growth area or a growth channel, growth marketing strategy for the business, and then putting out personalized content across those channels, very much targeted towards the customers that you're going to work with. And off the back of that, thinking about how you're going to keep your current customers within the buying cycle for repeat custom, for subscriptions, for that customer loyalty so that you're not losing revenue out of the back end even though you're loading it into the front. So those those are my five key points. And if you had a bonus recommendation, like a key takeaway that you could give to people as they go into 2026 for all, you know, for all their marketing, one thing to keep in mind, what would that be? The bonus recommendation is having a look at AI search and understanding how it's going to affect the buying journeys for your customers. It's already happening now. It will already be happening to your business if you are in BTOC. The only question is what exactly is happening and how it's happening. So what is happening in Google Analytics? Which AI platforms are customers coming from? And how are people interacting with AI? Are they using it top of funnel for research and coming to you later? Are they actually doing all of their research in AI in chatbt and then coming to you off the back of it? Or could Agentic actually be affecting you because you make sales online, you take reservations or bookings online, or you sell something like tickets online, in which case understanding how Agentic is going to work and preparing for it. That's the biggest bonus tip. I'm going to add one as well. If you're kind of unsure about how to navigate AI search in 2026 or search marketing in general, head over to exposioninja.com. you'll be able to find lots of guidance on how to navigate all these different channels and different trends that are appearing. And if you want some specific advice for your business, just head over to a contacts page where you'll be able to send us a message and we'll get in touch to organize a consultation call where we can take you through all of that. I suppose an extra tip would be to go to exposure.ninja/strategies2026 where you can watch this entire series of developing episodes about strategy for B2B, B TOC, but also for SEO, paid search. That's all coming soon. So, thank you so much for joining us for this week's episode and we'll see you all next week. Take care. Bye bye. [Music]