B2B brand building is crucial if you want your brand to become the go-to source for your prospects and clients.
It’s no small task, though. It requires a consistent effort from everyone on your team, including marketing and sales.
In this post, we’re covering how to build a B2B brand strategy that positions your brand as a leader in your industry.
Plus, we’re sharing insights from Alice de Courcy, the Chief Marketing Officer here at Cognism, on why you need a strategy and how to create it.
Let’s dive in! 👇
Imagine a future buyer sitting at their desk, frustrated by a pain point. As soon as they begin brainstorming solutions, your brand comes to mind.
That’s what a good B2B brand identity does for your company.
It positions your brand as a trustworthy and credible solution. It also creates lasting connections with your target customers, so when they think about fixes to their problems, they think of your brand.
But what is an effective B2B brand strategy?
In essence, it’s a comprehensive marketing plan with many moving parts. A good strategy includes elements like:
So, while it includes actual branding elements, like your logo, it also focuses on creating a memorable experience for your audience.
Alice de Courcy, Group Chief Marketing Officer at Cognism, strongly believes in creating a solid B2B brand strategy that positions a company as the client’s go-to source.
Alice set out to shape Cognism’s brand identity with content marketing, including working with SEO writers and B2B influencers, to build a media machine clients could look to for actionable insights.
Alice said, in her Diary of a First-Time CMO:
“This dual strategy increased engagement and positive feedback, distinguishing Cognism from competitors. Content became more valuable and relatable, moving from a rigid B2B tone to a human, personable voice.”
While valuable content helped feed the search engine, it also established Cognism as a trusted sales and marketing source, focusing more on brand-building than short-term lead generation.
That’s not to say short-term wins aren’t necessary. They’re a crucial part of any good strategy.
As Alice put it:
“I think it’s really easy to get lost in the easy short-term wins, but if you want to have any chance of scaling, you need long-term compounding plans. You need to do both.”
Now that we know why B2B branding is critical to a brand’s success, let’s discuss how it differs from B2C branding.
B2B and B2C companies are vastly different.
B2C branding focuses directly on individual customers; it attempts to make an emotional appeal to make a sale, usually an impulse buy.
B2B sales typically aren’t impulse buys but involve multiple decision-makers at various levels within a company. This means B2B sales cycles are typically much longer compared to B2C.
However, a long sales cycle creates plenty of opportunities to supply potential customers with helpful content that informs their purchases.
This is why thought leadership, content marketing, and sales enablement are critical factors in B2B. These three strategies complement one another, building authority and fostering trust while educating the target audience.
For B2B branding to work well, you must understand where your audience hangs out online. For many companies, it’s LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is the perfect platform for sharing helpful content with your target audience. Creating an effective marketing strategy for LinkedIn will propel your brand forward. You can interact directly with decision-makers while establishing your brand as an authority in your industry.
When Alice examined Cognism’s previous LinkedIn strategy, she realised that most posts did not provide value to the audience.
So, to ensure Cognism positioned itself as a brand authority and a thought leader, she and the Cognism team created a set of guidelines to follow before posting content.
Here’s what she said about LinkedIn branding:
“Anything that doesn’t provide direct value in the post doesn’t get on the page. Because before, when someone would ask if we could just pop this on LinkedIn, we’d just do it. We didn’t have a reason to say no.”
“But now, we have clear guidelines. We can say: ‘This wouldn’t benefit the overall strategy of our company page, nor would it impact any of the KPIs set, so no, we won’t post this.’”
In other words, Cognism is very specific about what content we push out to our audience. It doesn’t get posted if it doesn’t benefit our audience or set us apart from the competition.
Creating a strong B2B brand is more than curating your content to speak to your customers.
Instead, there are many benefits of strong B2B branding. Let’s explore a few of those benefits.
Increasing customer loyalty and creating trust should be a high priority for any brand, and that’s why creating a brand strategy is essential.
An older Harvard Business Review study found that acquiring a new customer is 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining existing customers.
Make no mistake: you need new customers in your pipeline. However, you must also focus on strengthening your relationships with your existing customers.
A solid B2B brand strategy helps you stay connected to the current roster of clients already plugged into your brand.
As Alice said:
“It’s about continuing to educate, excite, and nurture the people who have invested in your business, so they want to stick around - and hopefully expand and renew.”
Creating a B2B brand strategy that focuses on your prospects can drastically shorten your sales cycle.
Long sales cycles can be irritating. Depending on your industry, a typical sales cycle lasts anywhere from two months up to 18 months. And the longer your sales cycle lasts, the more opportunities your prospects have to consider a competitor.
As you and your team work together to create authoritative content that positions your brand as a leader, you must also create content that reduces friction and solves pain points, making it easier for decision-makers to say yes to partnering with your brand.
There’s no denying it: your brand needs to generate revenue. If you’re bringing in low-value customers, you’ll have to work twice as hard to create the revenue your brand needs to stay afloat.
With excellent B2B branding, you can position your brand as an industry leader and command premium pricing. More high-quality sales can lead to higher revenue.
Don’t get us wrong: cold outbound lead generation is effective.
But on the flip side, it can uncover low-quality leads.
Instead of targeting leads who aren’t ready to purchase, work on your B2B brand.
Over half of all leads engage with six to seven pieces of content before contacting a sales rep. If they’re searching for a solution, they’re likely in a position to make a purchase.
When your branding strategy is effective, prospects already understand how your product can benefit them. Your sales team doesn’t have to work nearly as hard to convince them to take a chance with your brand.
Now, let’s discuss how to create a strategy that works wonders for your brand.
Follow these five easy steps to build a compelling B2B brand strategy 👇
Creating any marketing strategy always starts with gaining a keen understanding of your ideal customer profile.
When you’re unsure of your customers’ needs and pain points, there’s realistically no way you can position your brand as the solution to their woes.
While you’re identifying your audience, compile a list of core values that make your company stand out from the competition. You might know these traits off the top of your head, but it’s okay if you don’t.
Take a few moments to examine your competition. Find out how they’re providing value to their clients, and then brainstorm ways that you could do the same thing but better.
This might mean you need to run a couple of experiments. For example, at Cognism, Alice had an idea to ungate content and offer it for free through a paid social media campaign.
While this idea was unusual, it helped us uncover high-quality leads and discover how to stand out from our rivals.
It started with a change to provide immediate value. Alice told us:
“I think one important thing to remember when you’re a CMO is you have to be open to change. I would never have made the move to what’s become a really successful mindset shift if I weren’t open to the idea of change.”
The bottom line is:
Don’t be afraid to experiment; it can help you define your positioning and messaging. Experimentation is necessary!
Once you’ve defined your brand’s positioning and messaging, it’s time to create a content marketing strategy.
However, it’s essential to understand that throwing any content at your ideal customers is not the way to create a content-led brand.
Instead, you should focus on creating valuable content backed by thought leaders and subject matter experts.
At Cognism, we’ve spent time figuring out the best way to engage with B2B influencers who help to inform our content strategy.
Alice said:
“We have 2 writers who are our ‘story finders’. They spend time hanging out where our buyers hang out, in communities, in Slack groups, talking and listening to subject matter experts. They’re tasked with finding what’s trending and writing about it in the most actionable, helpful way.”
In other words: those writers listen to experts, share their concerns, and craft a story to position our brand as the solution to their concerns.
Our content strategy focuses on creating valuable:
However, an effective content marketing strategy doesn’t focus on creating a “one-and-done” piece of content. Instead, it focuses on repurposing content to scale your strategy and maximise your efforts.
Back to Alice:
“By repurposing content and building clear processes, we scaled efficiently. Our team now includes SEO experts, journalists, and demand generation content executives, each playing a vital role in our growth strategy.”
We’ve already mentioned LinkedIn’s power, but it’s worth repeating that it’s one of the most effective platforms for reaching B2B decision-makers. You can use it to expand your organic reach and interact with decision-makers at all stages of the buying decision process.
Creating an effective LinkedIn content calendar is the way to go.
Alice shared this in her CMO Diary:
“Abandoning the traditional content calendar, the Cognism marketing team adopted a reactive, journalistic approach to creating timely and relevant content. Building a B2B marketing media machine resulted in producing standout content and supporting the overall demand generation strategy.”
Remember how Alice also experimented with paid advertising? Paid advertising promotes brand awareness and demand generation, making it an integral part of a multi-channel strategy.
That small change boosted brand awareness and drove higher-quality leads to our brand.
Content formats are also important. Alice recognised that Cognism prospects engaged with other types of content, including video:
“They want the option to engage with content in multiple formats, like written, audio and video - so we make sure our content covers these three content types.”
When creating a brand strategy, consider your messaging and tone of voice.
Do you want your brand to be recognised as helpful? What about friendly? Or funny?
The choice is entirely up to you and your team. Just make sure your tone of voice matches your customers and industry.
Once you’ve decided on your brand’s personality, create a brand voice document. This will ensure your team stays on the same page.
Your visual brand identity is also crucial. Ideally, your B2B brand design should link up with your brand messaging - for instance, Cognism’s motif of connecting shapes correlates with our brand’s mission of connecting B2B companies with their clients.
You need to consider the visual content you plan to share, too. In the past, Cognism shared funny memes we thought would resonate with our audience. But we found that this left too much for interpretation.
Alice said:
“We found that memes left too much to the imagination. Memes that we felt were funny and innocent were interpreted differently by other people so we decided it was best to avoid them in most cases so we didn’t inadvertently negatively impact our brand.”
Instead of sharing memes that didn’t pass the vibe check, we focused on creating valuable content that was aligned with our brand’s voice and personality.
One of the quickest ways to gain trust with a new audience is to leverage customer advocacy. Your current customers are your biggest cheerleaders; they already know how great it is to work with your brand.
Social proof, like case studies and testimonials, kicks the trust meter up a notch. According to Gartner, peer influence and reputation are the top two influential factors when purchasing from a vendor.
Prospective customers are more likely to consider your brand if someone they know has already benefited from it and given it a high rating.
Favourable customer reviews and testimonials are product branding gold! Always show them off on your websites and social media channels.
Creating a strong B2B brand is one of the best things you can do for your company. It’s not without challenges, though. It’s important to talk about potential challenges and give you appropriate solutions.
Watch out for these common B2B branding pitfalls.
If you’re just starting to build your B2B brand strategy, it can be frustrating to realise you’re working with low brand awareness.
Don’t worry. It happens to every brand at some point in their journey.
To increase brand awareness, prioritise switching to a content-led approach, especially on LinkedIn. Be sure to include insights from industry experts.
When you focus on providing value, the right audience will find you and stick around.
It can be challenging to stand out when you’re up against so much competition. However, it’s entirely possible to shine like a diamond in the rough.
The solution:
Own a unique perspective and focus on creating genuine, valuable thought leadership. Cognism does this through its blog and podcast content.
The bottom line is:
Your audience wants to hear diverse perspectives. Find your angle and own it. Your audience will appreciate you for it.
KPIs...we get it!
It’s challenging to track which parts of your strategy move the needle to increase brand ROI.
Instead of tracking everything that produces a number, track the key metrics that matter.
For example:
Track the feedback you receive from clients and the metrics that speak directly to demand and lead generation.
You’ll want to track these things to ensure you’re getting the most bang for your buck with your brand strategy.
Although your marketing and sales teams are part of the same company, many brands find they work separately. This can lead to a significant disconnect, resulting in a loss of quality leads and a decrease in revenue.
According to Gartner, customers are 2.8 times more likely to complete a high-quality deal when they feel the information from their sales representative matches what they’ve read online.
Instead of battling friction, align your sales and marketing departments. Work as a team to identify shared KPIs and develop branded sales documents that pitch your products in a unified way.
⚠️ Want more advice? Read Alice’s guide to cross-functional collaboration between sales and marketing.
B2B branding is a massive undertaking, but it’s often necessary.
Consider a rebrand if:
Alice said:
“When thinking about doing a rebrand, you have to fully scope the project.”
And that can mean re-inventing the wheel. You might need to:
Although rebranding is a lot of work, it’s worth the effort as it can take your company to new heights. When prospects know and trust your brand, you can maintain a dedicated client base while bringing new, high-value customers into your pipeline.
A strong B2B brand isn’t built overnight. Instead, it requires a strategic approach, a commitment to execution, and a deep understanding of your audience.
When executed correctly, branding positions your company as a trusted and credible solution that attracts high-value customers.
Alice’s top tips are:
For more expert insights on all things B2B, open Alice’s Diary of a First-Time CMO! Click 👇