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Creating a noteworthy brand means emphasizing these core areas in your brand strategy. In the 2023 B2B space, there’s simply no room for companies to underestimate the importance of creating and maintaining a distinct, well-thought-out brand. To help make sure you stand out, our brand strategy pros put together some essential brand strategy basics (with a few tips sprinkled in along the way). Brand strategies involve continual discovery, research, and strategy. While they can be broken into many steps, each with their own set of often overlapping tasks, a powerful brand strategy revolves around creativity, consistency, and authenticity in developing your brand voice.
Gather with key stakeholders and decision makers to outline the foundation of your brand. You’ll want to define the core of your company by identifying your brand’s vision and purpose, something that’s motivating to you and your audience. This is a great time to prepare your vision statement and supporting mission statement. Consider the following:
Why does your brand exist?
The repeated words, phrases, and ideas that come up through discussion will reveal the qualities of your brand that shape your voice, personality, and overall identity. Understanding the fundamentals of who you are and why you’re here will serve as your guide for future decision making.
In this 2022 article, researchers at McKinsey & Company found that “B2B customers are very clear about what they want from suppliers: more channels, more convenience, and a more personalized experience.” Now that you’ve outlined what your business brings to the table, it’s time to position yourself in the market effectively by sincerely considering your business persona. You need tailored messaging to provide personalized customer experiences, which means you need to identify your target market—and keep it focused.
As you consider your ideal client, factor in company size, geographical location, niche and market, demographics, pain points, and consumer journey. You’ll want to understand your client’s wants, needs, behaviors, and challenges. Doing the research and creative work to define your audience provides necessary information for capturing the right voice and language in your marketing collateral that illustrates your brand’s personality, meets consumer needs, and connects with their emotions.
Since the digital world has changed the face of B2B marketing, more and more of today’s online buyers are looking for B2B companies that are authentic and purpose-driven. Buyers expect your B2B business to provide a solution and carry a set of beliefs or a compelling story. Differentiating your brand is essential for getting people to move beyond having an interest in your product or service, to believing in your brand promise.
Expand on some of your initial brainstorming by thinking more about how you want companies to perceive you. Be sure you know your competitors and their offerings, then consider your brand’s unique advantage. Discuss these questions with your team:
Develop initiatives that align with your company mission and values to connect with consumer emotions and inspire action. Round out your brand’s voice and personality with an effective brand narrative throughout your consumer touchpoints that demonstrates your expertise and drives trust.
Alright! You’ve done the initial discovery and research work to get clear on who you are, why you’re here, who you serve, and how you do it. With all that in mind, now it’s time to invest in content marketing [link to service page] that establishes a unique, unified language that communicates your identity and value proposition at every stage of the consumer journey.
Every interaction with your brand’s messaging is an opportunity to reflect your voice and personality and elevate your brand. Getting intentional on messaging efforts will help you generate awareness and build momentum. Many factors go into what you say and how you say it. We’ve outlined a few tips and what they look like in practice.
Be intentional
Know what you’re offering and why you’re offering it to a given audience.
Be informative
Hone in on specificity and customer-centric language.
Be consistent
Your messaging should be crafted by individuals who know your mission and values and can reflect these elements across all brand assets.
Be memorable
After all, you’re selling to a human with expectations and an emotional response.
Before you take off launching initiatives or a fresh campaign, make sure you’ve made the most of your resources. Don’t rush through a process without the necessary support for every team throughout your organization. As you follow through on new ideas, continue to study your audience and analyze initiative data. Don’t skip on measuring and communicating data so you can refine your strategy. Keep brand awareness metrics in mind, like branded keywords data, social reach and engagement, and customer service surveys.
The time you spend developing your robust brand strategy will make marketing easier for you in the evolving environment. You’ll have a working knowledge of the core discovery, research, and strategy elements you need to tailor your techniques over time for continued relevancy and efficacy. You’ll also reap the tangible benefits of increased sales and greater customer retention.
If all this talk of brand strategy has you inspired to build momentum for your brand, let us know where you’re at in the process. Is your unique advantage fully realized? Do you have your mission statement but can’t see how to reflect that in your messaging?
Tell us about your organization’s meaningful difference and let us know how we can help you get the most value from your brand strategy efforts.
We believe in the power of new ideas, and we’re ready
to share yours with the world.