5 steps for making branding an essential part of your B2B go-to-market
Branding has traditionally taken a backseat in B2B go-to-market.
But, in today's evermore competitive landscape, making branding an essential part of your go-to-market strategy can be the key to differentiation and long-term success.
So, how do you create powerful branding in your B2B go-to-market?
Gwen Lafage, VP Brand and Content at Sinch, joined a conversation with Dreamdata’s Laura Erdem to discuss 5 steps for integrating branding as an important part of your B2B go-to-market.
In this post, we’re digging deeper into these 5 steps:
But before diving in, let’s deal with the definitions.
What’s the difference between Branding and Brand?
While it’s common practice to use the terms Branding and Brand interchangeably, Gwen makes it a point to emphasise their difference.
According to Gwen, Branding is “putting a logo on it, thinking about your colors, your visual identity.”
Brand on the other hand is “how people perceive you. The brand is your reputation”. You can’t control your brand because it’s in the mind of your customers and prospects, but you can influence how they see your brand by creating powerful branding.
5 key points for making branding an important part of your B2B go-to-market
It's not a secret that starting and establishing your brand in the hyper-competitive digital market we find ourselves in can be a pretty difficult task.
However, the rewards are equally remarkable.
Developing a powerful brand will help to distinguish your company from competitors and create meaningful relationships with your target audience.
Not to mention that a strong brand, once established, becomes a truly cost-effective channel. As Andrew Davies, CMO at Paddle said, having a brand builds trust, simplifies sales efforts, and accelerates the sales cycle.
So, without further ado, let’s move on to the 5 steps for making branding an indispensable component of your B2B go-to-market.
1. Establish a clear brand identity
The first step is to establish your brand identity as this serves as the foundation for all subsequent brand decisions. Your brand identity comprises your business's values, mission, vision, personality, voice, and aesthetic, driving product decisions, marketing initiatives, and customer interaction.
Defining your brand starts by understanding what sets your company apart from competitors and how you want to be perceived in the market. Which entails understanding your target audience and identifying their pain points, challenges, and motivations.
From this, you can develop your brand persona, a character that represents your brand and informs your brand voice – the tone and style you use in communication. The visual elements of your brand identity – colours, typography, logo – should also be designed in alignment with your brand persona and values (more on this in point 3 below).
Involve clients to close the feedback loop
The success of brand positioning lies in talking and listening to the clients and prospects inputs at the beginning of the process because “you need to create the foundation of a brand that resonates with the people.”
Gwen explains that clients and prospects “will give you what pain point they have and that's really important in defining your positioning.
2. Develop a consistent brand narrative
Once you’ve established what your brand identity is going to look like, you can move on to consistently applying your brand narrative. Gwen considers consistency one of the most important things in making a brand a valuable asset in your go-to-market.
A consistent brand narrative enables you to position your brand more easily and quickly in the market.
Doing so really only requires discipline in consistently portraying your brand's purpose and values, across all your messaging.
With that said, it can’t be overly rigid either. Your brand will naturally evolve over the years, so it's essential to provide freedom to designers and marketers to make adjustments based on local specificities and culture. So long as when they do so, it’s applied consistently throughout.
Make branding part of the customer experience - Sales and CS are part of your brand play!
It’s worth reminding ourselves that brand is part of every interaction a customer has with your company - this includes everything that takes place with Sales and CS. It’s not just a marketing thing.
This means that to achieve truly a unified, consistent brand narrative, it's crucial to integrate branding into every aspect of the customer experience.
Note, if your B2B go-to-market grows, you will probably need a brand manager that can work consistently in delivering a positive experience that reinforces your brand reputation through brand awareness activities.
What if there’s not a lot of excitement from the rest of the commercial team to embrace this all-round branding approach?
Gwen gives us two methods for sparking interest in branding:
2 ways of sparking interest and passion for branding
Show your employees the results of having a brand because “people respond to number and success right like so I think if you show them that creating something more visible and more like appealing from a brand perspective then it worked”
Create lovely merch for your employees because “just like a t-shirt and a branded bottle right in a way I think like they will kind of embrace it if they feel like they're belonging to it.”
3. Produce a strong visual identity
Of course, brand narrative isn’t driven only by words - important though they are. Gwen considers that “look and feel” are the first things that people think of when they see a brand.
That’s why you need to create a visually appealing and cohesive brand identity that reflects your brand's personality.
This includes elements such as logo design, colour palette, typography, and visual assets, which will help you stand out and establish recognisability.
4. Get the right budget for the branding initiative
Once you establish what Gwen called “the foundations” of your branding (the three points we’ve just covered above) you can move on to getting the necessary budget to bring it all to being.
Brand has a bad rep at the investment stageso there’s almost always reluctance from the C-suite on dishing out the budget. Brand is considered less tangible and slow-impact than other strategies.
Yet as my earlier quote from Andrew Davies suggests, Brand is/ can be a very cost-effective go-to-market function.
And, you don’t even need much initial investment. Gwen references Gartner when presenting a ballpark: “it should be 3- 4% of your budget into brand activities.”
But even still, it’s hard to get buy-in from the org and the necessary budget.
To help sway opinion, Gwen offers the following hack.
A new branding term: BrandGen
Gwen created the term BrandGen which she defines as “doing a campaign that both builds your brand but also delivers demand right. So you kind of do dimension and brand together”.
The result is that you don’t need to create a budget for specific branding activities. Brand activities are subsumed into campaigns already included in social, content, podcasts, events, budgets.
Which makes it a much a better term to use when convincing your C-suite to invest in brand.
5. Measure, analyse and optimise the impact of your branding efforts
Determining how clients hear about a brand and attributing its impact accurately is no easy feat. Indeed, as I already mentioned, this is one of main the reasons causing hesitation among C-suite executives when it comes to investing in brand initiatives.
However, this doesn’t mean that you have to go in totally blind.
Here are some example methods for tracking and measuring brand recognition and association:
On the analytics front you can look at:
Organic performance of branded URLs to gauge whether people are searching for your brand by name.
Performance of branded search ad campaigns, for the same reason as above.
Direct traffic levels to your website, which might be a sign of people typing URLs directly - although there’s the big caveat that direct traffic consists of many other unknown sources.
You can also use qualitative measures such as recognition of your brand in cold calls, interviews, or on self-reported feedback.
Finally, you can use proxy metrics such as impressions, engagement, and number of followers on social media.
Although she did acknowledged that these metrics may be considered "vanity metrics," they can still serve as valuable indicators of people starting to know who you are and making connections with your brand.
When should you re-evaluate your branding?
Any decision to re-evaluate and potentially rebrand your business shouldn’t be taken hastily. After all, rebrands can be expensive and time consuming.
Gwen offers three scenarios when rebranding should be considered: :
Your current brand story and visual identity are not resonating with your audience. Effective branding should connect with your target market, conveying your values and unique selling points. If you feel that your brand is not effectively differentiating itself from competitors, a rebrand can help you stand out, especially in B2B industries where products can be similar.
There are changes in your B2B go-to-market or positioning. This is an opportunity to evolve your brand visually."If your brand visuals feel outdated, it might be time for an update. You don't want to give the impression that your business is stuck in the past," Gwen advised.
Your B2B go-to-market enters new markets, changes segments, or expands your target audience."As your business grows, you may outgrow your current brand image. It's important to have a brand that accurately represents where you want to be," Gwen highlighted.