Stephanie Chavez, CTSM is the President at Zen Media and a Cynopsis Top Women in Media honoree for 2019.
Branding gets plenty of lip service in the B2B space, but how many CFOs and CEOs truly value the power of branding campaigns? In my experience as a CMO, as well as what I’ve heard from my peers in several CMO forums and organizations, the answer is not many.
But I don’t think it’s a lost cause. Instead, I think the problem is that so many in the C-suite think of branding as mainly design and voice choices — their logo, colors, the tone they use on the website and in social posts. But branding is much more than that, and it’s actually even more critical in B2B businesses than in B2C.
Let’s dig into what branding really is and why it matters.
What ‘Branding’ Means for B2B
Branding is the full scope of how your company presents itself to the world. This includes:
• Your design choices, like logo, colors, fonts, etc.
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• Your voice (tone and style).
• Your values and mission statement.
• Your corporate social responsibility (CSR) and giving-back initiatives.
• How you treat your customers.
• How you treat your employees.
• How your company is perceived in your industry.
• How your executives are perceived in your industry (are they thought leaders?).
• The emotional connections your customers have with your company.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Your brand is truly everything that makes your company what it is — everything that makes it unique. What’s more, all of this should be cohesive. If your company’s stated mission is to support small businesses and entrepreneurs but you don’t comment or engage with issues that matter to them, your brand won’t feel authentic. The same would be true if your brand is presumably about centering around your customers but you don’t reply to half the engagements you receive on social.
Your brand is nothing less than the full experience that customers, vendors and employees have when they interact with you. And that includes emotional experiences. Do they feel valued? Do they feel that their concerns are heard? Are they confident that you’ll work with them to find solutions to their problems?
Why Brand-Building and Branding Campaigns Matter for B2Bs
Consider the importance of reputation in B2B sales. Customers aren’t making impulse buys with you — they’re purchasing what you provide only after researching multiple options, weighing the pros and cons of each, coming to a consensus with a purchasing committee and having the purchase approved by a department head, supervisor or the CFO.
There’s a lot resting on that purchase. Buyers need to avoid blame. If the company they’re purchasing with has a longstanding reputation for excellence, trustworthiness and the like, then they’re going to feel a lot more confident completing that buyer journey. As the saying goes, “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.”
Reputation is inextricably linked to branding and brand-building. This is why we advise so many of our clients to invest more in brand-building campaigns than they do on lead gen campaigns, at least for a while. Branding is a long game — you have to build it over time and give people a chance to see that you’re consistent.
3 Elements Critical to Any Brand-Building Endeavor
Whether your company is just starting out and building a brand from scratch, rebranding or embarking on a new branding campaign, there are three elements that you have to consider:
• Your branding blueprint.
• Your messaging and identity.
• Your brand marketing.
The blueprint is your first step. Here, you lay out what you want to convey to your customers and the world. Begin by defining some of the basic components of your brand, like your voice, values and mission. By the time you’re done, you want to have a solid feel for your brand’s personality.
If your brand is already established and you’re working on a more targeted branding campaign, then you’ll apply this to a single element of your brand that the campaign is highlighting. Perhaps it’s a customer appreciation campaign — what do you want customers to understand about you after seeing the campaign? How do you want them to see you?
Then we come to messaging and brand identity. The identity element is where design comes into play — your logo, colors, fonts, social post layout, imagery and so on. Messaging is, simply put, the message you’re conveying to users. Continuing the customer appreciation campaign example, your message could be something like, “We’re grateful for our customers, and we’re doing XYZ to show it this month.”
Then you’d reinforce that with whatever actions you’re taking to show appreciation (i.e., giving services away pro bono, making personalized videos, etc.) and share that across social channels, through PR outreach and on your website.
Brand messaging in a larger sense begins with your value proposition. What do you have to offer and how is it different from everyone else? But it also goes further, including:
• Your Brand Story: How did your company begin and why did the founders create it?
• Your Purpose: What’s your company’s purpose? This is slightly different from a mission. Purpose can be understood as what gets you out of bed in the morning, while a mission is more about what you want to accomplish.
• Who Your Customers Are: Who are your target customers and, more importantly, can they tell you’re talking to them? You want them to know that you understand who they are, their pain points, and what they want and need from your company.
Finally, brand marketing is simply how you get all this information out to the world. Social media, influencer marketing, content marketing, SEO, SEM, PR — these are all tools you can use for your brand marketing on either an ongoing or one-off basis.
Branding is so much more than many have come to believe. It’s time for executives across the C-suite to understand what it is, its value and how it works.
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Author: Stephanie Chavez, Forbes Councils Member