YOU MIGHT BE SABOTAGING YOUR BRAND AND NOT KNOW IT
A lot of your challenges or problems in your business can be tied back to your brand or the failure to establish one. That's because you're an expert in your business - the operations, systems, and market - but you're not an expert in branding yet you're likely sabotaging your brand by not having a strategy.
Small Business Brand Score Quiz
Think about your top 3 competitors. Who do potential customers have more awareness of: your business or your competitors?
90-Day Blueprint: Restructure your entire marketing strategy in 90 days or less!
This is for you if:
Your marketing is underperforming, at a standstill, or non-existent
You have little to no brand awareness or your brand is stale and needs a refreshing
You have no lead generation strategy and need to build an organic pipeline of leads
Your content strategy sucks
Your business needs to scale and grow to its next level
COVID-19 has forced your business to restructure
You don't want to keep making the same branding mistakes in 2021
The average B2B brand looks a little something like this:
The business feels good about the imagery (e.g. logo, color palette, tagline). You understand who your audience is and have segmented them well enough (hopefully). You have an overall strategy for pursuing your audience, which may include sales, direct outreach, general communications (i.e. newsletter, email marketing). And you have an ad hoc approach to your social media and your digital strategy. Lastly, you probably experiment with Facebook ads, and you burn through your budget with, perhaps, some leads, but nothing significant enough.
Perhaps, this process works for your business, but this is certainly not a strategic approach to building brand and scaling awareness so that it ultimately drives business impact. This is a big fail!
5 Strategies to Building a Brand:
1. Create thought leadership.
Building thought leadership allows a business to tap into in-house talent, passion, innovation and community participation to position as a source of authority in your respective industry or for your target customer. In other words, thought leadership humanizes your brand and drives organic lead generation.
2. Focus less on the business and more on the customer.
A lot of B2B marketing is self serving and treats the branding process like job interviews. The business sells itself by talking about its qualifications and track record and really only just pushing its own agenda. Successful relationships are bi-directional. Otherwise, you fail in placing the focus on the customer.
3. Become a content factory.
Content is sorely undervalued especially in the B2B space. The moment that a company truly understands the role that content plays in building brand will be a game changing pivot from that point on. That’s because everything you’ll do moving forward will be about creating value for your customers through content.
4. Add value to your customers without expecting anything in return.
Rethink what your brand means to your customer. Instead, become an educational brand or act like a media company. The former builds trust by wanting nothing more than to enhance your customer’s understanding of the entire universe of your product/service from front to back, top to bottom. The latter creates authority by being the voice in your respective industry. Either way, both drive brand value back to business impact and creates an organic selling machine.
5. Brand your CEO.
Involving the CEO in building brand adds a human face to the company. Customers usually do not trust faceless companies. So by having CEOs share their expertise and actively engage with the buying community, the company stands to gain more credibility. What’s more, the CEO needs to craft a sharp expert voice to provide thought provoking insight that will enhance the company’s authority in its respective market.
Most B2B brands suck! Here's Your Daily Brand Snack
Your B2B brand could be stale and boring. For 30 days, we'll deliver a Daily Brand Snack to your inbox with 1 brand strategy to implement ASAP.
90-Day Drip: Restructure Your Entire Marketing Strategy
We've created a practical system to help B2B companies restructure their marketing infrastructure so that it ultimately results in a funnel that generates, nurtures and converts new business into revenue.
How to Build Brand
B2B businesses typically fail to think about branding in the larger context of how it builds thought leadership, establishes credibility, raises awareness, and organically drives sales and new business growth.
Here's 12 ways to transform your B2B marketing into a lead generation machine. The beauty is that you can create an organic sales engine without having to churn leads and smile and dial.
Your business may be innovative, but your content doesn’t scream it. Content is undervalued because it’s underutilized in the sense of it being the driver to building brand, accelerating your pipeline, etc.
