When people talk about branding, they’re usually referring to consumer-facing companies. After all, these firms tend to be in the forefront of most people’s minds.
However, B2B branding is also becoming more important. Firms in the supply chain need to send out signals to other stakeholders that let them know that they are the best in the business.
The reasons for this are actually quite simple: no matter where a company operates in the production stack, it must still interact with people. B2B businesses aren’t just agglomerations of mindless robots. Human beings still make all the important purchasing decisions.
But, you might ask: what can I do personally to improve my B2B brand? Well, it turns out that there are many things you could try. Read on to learn more.
Be Distinct
The first thing to do is to make yourself distinct. Don’t just choose a company name and branding strategy that mirrors your generic rivals, thinking that it is unimportant. Instead, strive to become a little different. For instance, companies like Big Yellow Storage do a fantastic job at attracting business customers, just because they are so bright and obvious.
Keep Your Reputation Healthy
Thanks to social media, online reputation management profile defenders have become indispensable. There’s a growing need for firms to pay individuals agents to protect their brands online and prevent damage.
Keeping your reputation healthy requires a multi-faceted approach. These days, it is not enough to rely on your brand capital alone. Instead, you need to nip issues in the bud quickly before they develop into full-scale Twitter carnage.
Find A Purpose
Communicating value to other businesses also requires finding your purpose. You need to present yourself in a way that aligns with your clients’ objectives and missions.
For example, suppose that you’re a packaging supplier. Your values could be to reduce waste and use recycled materials where possible. This would then encourage other businesses with similar objectives to use you instead of your rivals. Ultimately, this approach will enable your business to grow more than if you didn’t communicate purpose through your branding.
Create Delightful Visuals
Even in the B2B space, visuals matter. Stakeholders need quality branded content that allows them to quickly assess whether you are the right partner for them. B2B design is often highly functional. The goal is to make people’s jobs easier by providing information on the cost-benefits of your services, ROI and speaking in plain English, not unintelligible jargon.
Make It Pithy
As with B2C branding, you want to convey your entire message in a single sentence - preferably eight words or less. In your pithy statement, you want to convey a story - something that other companies can latch onto. When you create a story, you give stakeholders in other firms something to talk about with other managers. You’re providing the backbone of conversations which could then motivate sales.
So, as we’ve seen, great B2B brands don’t ignore marketing. Instead, they use branding to their advantage, recognizing that other firms are just collections of people who are also consumers.
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