How to Craft a Successful B2B Brand Strategy

Creating a B2B brand strategy isn’t easy. With so many products and customers, you may find it difficult to ensure that your product messaging is aligned with your other marketing efforts. It’s hard to get organized when there is so much to define and figure out!

What Goes Into a B2B Branding Strategy?

As a digital marketing agency, we know that this can be a cumbersome task. That’s why we have helped many companies organize their B2B brand strategy and align their marketing strategy across their organization. Here’s a look into what goes into making a successful B2B brand strategy.

Define Your Customer’s Wants and Needs

First, ask yourself, “What do my customers want?” and “What do they really want?”  This helps you understand their basic or surface-level needs, and then the “why” behind that.

Take someone purchasing a book online vs. someone buying the same book from a local bookstore as an example. Let’s look at these customers' surface level and inner desires.  

Ask, “What does the customer want?” Both customers in this example want to purchase a book and have a desire to read a book. But, what does the customer really want in this example?

What the customer purchasing a book online really wants convenience. They don’t have time to go into a bookstore and browse. They know what they want and want it as quickly as possible.  

Now, take the customer who purchases a book from their local bookstore. They want to browse around the store, find other books to buy, and visit and connect with others in the store about books.  

Both customers are getting the same product in the end, but their “whys” are very different. One customer wants a quick, non-personal buying experience, while the other wants more of a personal, slow-paced one.

After defining your customer’s needs and wants, it’s time to determine any similarities between them. This leads to grouping these needs and wants into broader categories. With these categories, you can now begin defining value propositions.

A value proposition is the value a company promises to deliver to customers should they choose to purchase a product or service. Essentially, it’s why a consumer should buy a product or service from your company. This is at the heart of a well-done B2B brand strategy.  Without knowing why a customer purchases from your company, you are only spinning your wheels and won’t meet the customers where they are at from a marketing perspective.

Read More – Which B2B Marketing Services Do I Need For My Business?

Understand Who’s Buying

Once you’ve defined your customer’s needs, wants, and why they should purchase from your company, it’s time to define your company’s buyer personas.

Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your company’s ideal customers based on data and research. Buyer personas help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better. This makes it easier for you to tailor your content, messaging, product development, and services to meet the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of the members of your target audience for your B2B brand strategy.

Some questions you can ask yourself once you’ve identified your customers and prospects include:

• What do we know about this persona?
• What position does your product or service hold in the persona’s mind?
• What problem is this persona facing?

Once you’ve defined your personas and better understand them, you can now think about how your product or service can help them.

Understand How You help Your Personas

Now you can begin to consider how you meet your customers' needs. Taking each of your solutions and your personas into consideration, you can examine:

• What needs or wants does my solution satisfy for this persona?
• What relief does my solution provide for them?  How does it make their life better?
• How is our solution an extension of our company’s core values?

Once you have examined your solutions for your personas from several angles, it’s time to craft value propositions and positioning statements! Now you can better communicate to your personas know why they should purchase from you!

Getting Help with B2B Brand Marketing

In order to help you stay organized with planning your B2B brand strategy, we have a free downloadable workbook that will walk you through the process outlined above! Once you have defined your B2B brand strategy, it’s time to get ready to implement it.

Prefer to get more direct help with branding your B2B company? Open Path hosts personalized branding and positioning workshops to help you get the most out of your marketing. Learn more about our professional services here.