8 reasons to question your B2B brand thinking

Expectations, technological changes, a change in the competitive situation. All of these aspects mean that professionalization at brand and marketing level in the B2B environment is becoming increasingly important.

Here are 8 more reasons why you should rethink your status quo:

You don't just have one customer group, but all customers

B2B branding campaigns can no longer afford to focus on just one target group within a department. No matter what type of solution or products you sell, at least three different departments will be involved in the decision-making process. Building broader brand awareness and addressing different levels of understanding of a range of potential influencers can often provide key competitive advantages.

because you need to keep your brand in people's minds for longer

B2B brand marketers not only need to build brand awareness with new audiences; they also need to maintain that brand awareness and engagement for longer. As the buying process becomes longer and more complex, marketers need to find new ways to keep their brand top of mind.

Because context matters more than ever

Whether an audience is willing to engage with your brand increasingly depends on the context in which the brand appears. Research shows a growing divide between personal and professional social networks when it comes to willingness to engage with brand content. LinkedIn members are 27 percent more interested in receiving brand messages than members of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Because brand doesn't have to mean broadcast

Brand-building activities used to be associated with broadcast media. To create broader awareness, you were willing to accept high wastage. But the targeting tools available to modern marketers mean there's no reason to have to accept high wastage.

Because branding has a measurable contribution to make

If B2B marketers have tended to neglect brand building in recent years, it's usually because of the difficulty of linking investment in brand awareness to the leads and conversion by which their performance is measured. But things have changed. Marketing automation products allow you to target potential customers with sequential content that engages them from their earliest signs of engagement through to lead generation and conversion. Not only does this make it easier to measure brand activity contribution, but it also gives you the data you need to optimize your brand building and improve your conversion rate.

Brand is leadership, without brand you are almost leaderless

The term brand is still too often reduced to the topics of logo, claim, etc. But that is of course only the tip of the iceberg. In the B2B environment, brand is much more synonymous with management and leadership. So for a clear understanding of "who you are and who you want to be". Internally - towards employees, in terms of research and development - new energies are released and understanding of the organization is improved. Externally - in the sense of uniform, clear comprehensibility in all media and communication channels - it is only through "brand" that the possibility of a differentiating and activating message mediation arises.

Like your product development process, brand management should be part of an engineering process

Similar to product development, brand fixation is the result of having gathered the right information and asked the right questions. You need to look at your competition - who is it, what makes it special, how does it communicate; you need to scrutinize your own brand - what does it stand for, so what is its current profile; you need to understand your customer groups, etc. Only this information base gives you the opportunity to draw the right conclusions.

And success - clarity, competence, efficiency. But only with synchronization

That's the theory and that can also be the reality. But only if you avoid two mistakes. Mistake one: Your future appearance matches your taste! This can work in individual cases, but usually not. That's why you should always focus on the needs of your customers. Mistake two: You put the brand in the hands of everyone. This is essentially correct. But there must always be a final check by a higher authority. This is the only way to use the power of your brand engineering process properly.

Find out more at brand consulting or would you like to see how we work for large B2B brands? Then take a look at these two references: Kubota - branding I Kubota - digital sales support