The gist of branding has always been simple: have your brand be a mainstay in the mind of your target audience, and when the right time comes, entice them to make a purchase. Branding is the single most powerful tool in your box to build lasting relationships with your customers.
But how does that philosophy translate into a stellar, actionable B2B brand strategy? We’ve asked our expert marketers to help us uncover what makes a B2B brand really stand out.
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What Is a B2B Brand Strategy?
Your branding truly defines who you are, who you serve, what you do, and what you value. It brings your company’s mission, vision, and business goals together, along with the strategies to reach them. Your brand is your visual and philosophical representation of your company, which can make or break your success on the market.
Brand strategies are critical for B2C (business-to-consumer) and B2B (business-to-business) organizations, but each comes with unique considerations. B2B marketing needs to adapt to the longer sales cycles, often follows different trends, and retains tactics around pricing and selling, as B2B purchases can become hectic compared to the much simpler B2C process.
Branding Strategy for B2B Businesses: What Makes It Different?
Why does a B2B grinding strategy require you to have a different approach? What makes the branding process different? Below are some of the core differences you need to keep in mind.
Longer and More Involved Buying Cycles
Buyers in the B2B scene have a rigid, analytical, logical, and process-driven buying process, with the entire buying cycle averaging between 344 to 350 days. This means that your brand needs more time to create and nurture a relationship with your prospects and that several stakeholders might need to be satisfied before making a final decision.
Another obvious difference is motivation. B2C buyers are often, or more likely to be, driven by desire or other emotions. This means they are often less detail-oriented and need much less reassurance during purchasing. In B2B, decision-makers are less concerned with emotions and focus more on how the service or product improves their business efficiency. This means that they will be keen on the details and educating them about the benefits of your services or products may also become a part of the buying cycle.
Longer Contracts
B2B purchases will often impact an entire business. Finding other vendors if the company is dissatisfied with the services or products is time-consuming and expensive, so purchase contracts in B2B typically last months or even years.
In B2C, things are more fast-paced, and depending on the nature of the service or product (and cost), B2C buyers are often more apt to try other brands if they are unhappy with their last purchase.
More Jargon
B2B brands must establish themselves as industry leaders. In this sense, using jargon may be expected and even acceptable. However, jargon should be treated carefully, as it may also backfire.
Remember that not all buyers and stakeholders are experts. While being technical may help instill a sense of expertise and trust, straightforward and clear language is still crucial for effective marketing and client relationships.
Developing a B2B Brand Strategy
Nurturing long purchase cycles and keeping long-term clients satisfied can be challenging without a clear strategy. Let’s delve into a handful of tips that can help you set your brand up for success in the long haul.
- Identify your purpose and goals
- Define your audience
- Position yourself in the market
- Brand differentiation
- Create a unique, consistent brand character
Identify Your Purpose and Goals
Your strategy should start with the goals you want to achieve. These objectives can be qualitative, like establishing yourself as an eco-conscious organization, or quantitative, like reaching a specific revenue goal within a given timeframe.
The purpose should be to answer higher-level questions. Why does the brand exist? What kind of positive impact are you looking to drive in the world? How do you want to drive advancement and change in your industry and the world? What are your values?
Answering these questions is essential as they will most likely serve as guidance in your future decisions.
Define Your Audience
The ideal customer persona in your case would be a specific stakeholder your brand wants to attract. These personas contain all the relevant information about the ideal stakeholder — from their goals, through their role in the buying journey to their needs, frustrations, and fears.
As mentioned earlier, it’s also important to understand that there will often be several stakeholders at a potential client company, which means that you need to understand and cater to each decision-maker and board member’s preferences and needs with your brand’s messaging.
Lastly, real-life stakeholders will ultimately never fit into your ideal personas, no matter how many or few of them sit on the board. However, using personas is still a great strategy as it helps you define your ideal customer, enabling you to refine your branding approach to appeal to those ideal customers.
Position Yourself in the Market
Ever heard about positioning statements? These one-liners help brands clearly explain their values and offerings. But good positioning is much more than a single statement — it’s about finding the best place in the market where your organization has a strategic advantage over your competition.
Here’s Apple's positioning statement, for example:
“Apple emphasizes technological research and advancement and takes an innovative approach to business best practices — it considers the impact our products and processes have on its customers and the planet.”
The tech giant highlights how it focuses on technological advancements to be one of the best brands in the market, both from the standpoint of features, quality, and its overall impact on the planet.
In an ideal world, brands would carve out a new business category in the market and enter it first. However, defining a new category isn’t always possible. That’s why you need to be clearer and more consistent with your brand values and offerings — to establish yourself as the only company clients should do business with.
Brand Differentiation
Positioning and differentiation are closely tied together. These are the unique reasons clients should choose you over others. In addition to unique services, price points, and service or product quality, today, consumers also take other differentiators into account too.
For starters, around 64% of consumers look for brands that take a stance on cultural, societal, and environmental issues. Furthermore, 74% of consumers highlight transparency as a key differentiator when considering brands.
Simply put, the more your brand’s core values and purpose align with the beliefs of your customers, the better.
According to Preston Lewis, Founder of DesignX, brands should focus on incorporating social responsibility and sustainability into their brand strategy from the start, with a holistic approach.
"Incorporating sustainability and social responsibility into B2B brand strategy is not just about doing good — it's about creating long-term value and differentiation in an increasingly conscious business landscape. Sustainability and social responsibility should be authentic extensions of your brand's core values. We work with founders and leadership teams to articulate how these principles align with and enhance the company's mission. This ensures that sustainability isn't just a marketing ploy, but a fundamental part of your brand identity.”
Lewis also points out that brands should conduct a comprehensive stakeholder analysis to understand how to address sustainability concerns, in a way that matters both to their target audience and to the world. Sustainability and transparency should also be the driving force behind product manufacturing and communication strategies.
Lastly, he also offers the perspective of engaging employees to become sustainability ambassadors and brand advocates.
Diksha Sharma, Co-founder of RubyOwl, seconds the sustainability approach:
“Brands should integrate sustainability into their core values and operations. They should be transparent about initiatives and their impacts, educating clients on sustainability's importance.”
She also mentions that B2B brands can use immersive technologies and approaches to make their brand even more memorable.
“B2B brands can use immersive experiences effectively by personalizing them to customer motivations. Creating memorable events that showcase products uniquely, like virtual factory tours or AR product demos, is a great idea. The key is balancing the core brand identity with innovative approaches that resonate with your audience's needs and interests.”
Create a Unique, Consistent Brand Character
Brand character also includes your brand voice, which you can use in all your communications and your personality, or your brand’s human qualities. Both are pivotal in creating the right connections with your audience.
Regarding character, some marketing experts talk about the death of the traditional B2B and B2C marketing models and consider the human-to-human (H2H) model the best option that will enable you to create a unique connection in an increasingly digital and isolated world.
From the perspective of H2H marketing, your brand character can have several “humane” qualities that should show on your marketing materials, visual brand identity, design, and copy.
Consistency is another key element in creating meaningful relationships with your clientele. It is among the most important elements of driving trust and recognition. From your values through logo design and overall branded communications, your brand’s tone of voice, design language, and philosophies should remain the same.
According to both Preston and Sharma, being consistent with your values and branding guidelines can help you remain credible when you are trying to adapt to new market trends or looking for new technologies to reach your audiences. They also believe that by being consistent with your core values, you can even successfully rebrand your organization if necessary.
B2B Brand Strategy: The Foundation of Your Marketing
Advertising experts know that effective branding is critical for marketing success. Your branding strategy forms your brand’s visual identity, your entire website, marketing collateral, and ultimately, the experience your customers have with your company.
Without a sound strategy, you put the cart before the horse, risking inconsistency, missing audience connections, and delivering mixed messages and inaccurate marketing positioning. Working with an experienced agency can help you start off the right way. These professionals can help you build an attractive brand around your core values, ensuring your message will always be consistent and attention-grabbing.
B2B Brand Strategy FAQs
Is branding just as important for B2B businesses as it is for B2C?
Of course. Branding is the essence of all business communications and marketing efforts, regardless of the model. The world of B2B encompasses longer buying cycles and potentially longer partnerships, which means that brands in the market require effective branding to keep prospects interested in their offerings and retain them once they become clients.
Is consistency a key element of B2B branding?
Yes. The longer partnerships and buying cycles also mean that B2B brands should focus on being consistent across the board to instill a sense of trust for prospects, as well as reliability and accountability for clients.
Does sustainability play an increasingly important role in B2B branding?
Sustainability is becoming an increasingly important factor for every business, regardless of its model or position in the market. Consumers are becoming more and more eco-conscious and thus looking for brands that share the same values.
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