B2B Branding Explained

No matter your industry, a well-developed brand strategy is the backbone of any successful B2B marketing or sales department. As leading business publication Forbes explains, “consistent brand presentation across all platforms increases revenue by up to 23%.” While these numbers are hard to ignore, brand strategy is about more than just revenue. Cohesive B2B branding establishes trust and resonates with both employees and customers. In other words, your brand is a unique identity that sets your business apart.

Once your brand strategy is developed, essential elements like brand attributes and tone of voice are baked into every subsequent piece of marketing material your company produces – from email campaigns to whitepapers. Moreover, since brand strategy defines your company’s values and business objectives, it also informs your sales strategies and recruiting functions – as well as your ability to raise capital when needed.

Due to such wide-ranging applications, strategic B2B branding is one of the first steps for companies to be industry leaders.

What is Brand Strategy?

Brand strategy is a highly detailed plan that establishes a unique identity, vision, and positioning to differentiate a brand in the market. As Hubspot explains, “The goal of a brand strategy is to become memorable in the eyes of the consumer so that they decide to patronize your business over the competition.” B2B branding also educates employees and stakeholders on intangible elements like business values.

Generally, brand strategy work is conducted by creative marketing teams during the startup phase of a new business, or if an established company is undergoing rebranding. In either case, creatives get together to develop important elements like company name, logo, tagline, mission statement, and more. As such, B2B branding work is generally handled by a diverse team of talented individuals such as strategists, copywriters, and graphic designers.

Consistency in B2B Branding

Brand strategy isn’t just about a catchy logo or tagline – it’s about how you present your company across every customer touchpoint. Consistency in brand messaging not only reinforces brand identity but also builds credibility and trust in the market. When handled correctly, every email, social media post, or product brochure becomes a piece of a larger story that your audience recognizes.

Brand Guidelines

Brand guidelines are an indispensable tool for marketing teams. No matter if you have in-house marketers or work with an agency, brand guidelines are a set of rules that define how a brand should be represented visually and verbally across different platforms. Guidelines include standards for logo usage, color schemes, typography, and tone of voice, ensuring a consistent brand identity. Brand guidelines are perhaps the most powerful tool for keeping everyone on the same page in your marketing team.

What are the Elements of Effective B2B Branding?

The key elements of effective B2B branding result from the combined efforts of skilled business strategists and creative marketers. Due to the diverse skills needed to create a full brand strategy package, they can be quite costly to develop from the ground up. Generally speaking, brand strategy plans include the following deliverables:

- Business & Product Names: Creating names that resonate with your audience.
- Competitive Analysis: Understanding the market landscape to define your unique space.
- Market Entry Strategies: Positioning your brand effectively from day one.
- Company Story: Highlighting the qualities that set your company apart.
- Brand Attributes: Defining key traits that distinguish your brand.
- Mission Statements: Developing a purpose-driven foundation for all brand communications.
- Taglines: Crafting messaging that speaks directly to your audience.
- Logos: Providing instant brand recognition through a memorable design.
- Tone of Voice: Reflecting your brand’s personality with consistent messaging across all communications.
- Colors & Aesthetics: Enhancing brand recognition and evoking specific emotions with a cohesive color palette.
- Font: Ensuring consistency across all marketing avenues.

Why B2B Companies Need a Strong Brand Strategy

Whether Apple or Microsoft, a brand is simply a collection of people’s perceptions developed over time. In turn, these perceptions influence purchasing decisions for both B2B and B2C audiences. The key difference is that B2B brands often navigate a lengthy sales cycle involving multiple decision-makers and long-term partnerships, where transactions easily reach millions of dollars.

Since B2B relationships are predicated on more than simple, one-time transactions as often seen with B2C businesses, B2B branding is a carefully curated approach that engenders long-term business relationships. As such, your B2B brand strategy must establish trust with your target audience, while also showing a unique value proposition.

The Role of B2B Branding in Marketing

Since B2B marketing is tied directly to lengthy sales cycles, a strong brand strategy is essential for ensuring that every customer touchpoint is uniform and optimized for maximum impact. Even the smallest details like LinkedIn posts should be a natural outgrowth and expression of your established brand strategy.

Regarding copywriting, your brand strategy serves as a blueprint that is recreated in other important marketing channels like eBooks and web content. In fact, simply rephrasing key elements of your brand strategy like brand attributes and company story in other marketing assets is a great way to ensure you stay “on brand.”

If you drift away from your brand strategy, it can confuse customers about your offerings and company values. In other instances, your brand can appear unprofessional to potential customers – which doesn’t instill the trust needed to establish the long-term partnerships that come with B2B dealings.

The Role of B2B Branding in Sales

Salespeople are often seen as your first customers since they must be fully convinced of the value of the products or services they are going to sell. If your sales team truly believes in what they’re offering, their confidence and enthusiasm are conveyed naturally to customers. Conversely, when salespeople are not fully convinced of a product’s worth or understand its unique benefits, it’s hard for them to communicate its value.

You might not realize it at first, but each of these roads leads back to brand strategy. By clearly explaining your company values and market differentiators, your B2B branding gets “buy-in” from important members of your team. This internal buy-in fuels compelling pitches that help sales teams connect with new customers.

If you have a professional and uniform market presence, it’s also much easier for your sales team to convince customers of your brand’s legitimacy.

Brand Strategy Across an Organization

While it’s hard to overestimate the importance of a solid brand strategy for marketing and sales efforts, these comprehensive plans play other critical roles in organizations – from fundraising to recruiting.

Companies often use brand strategy as a tool to help secure funding, as these documents clearly define the business’s identity and outline high-level, long-term strategic goals. Additionally, brand strategy can help align stakeholders within your organization, uniting them behind a common purpose that reflects the company’s core values.

Brand strategy resonates deeply within an organization because it reflects core brand values and addresses sensitive topics like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). What a brand stands for significantly influences the type of talent it attracts, especially as many young candidates today are deeply aware of brand values. For this reason, aligning brand values with broader organizational goals has become essential for modern recruitment efforts.

Brand Strategy = Brand Equity

Perhaps the most important role of brand strategy in the modern business world has to do with brand equity. While it might be hard to see during the startup phase, brand equity has the potential to become your most valuable asset.

Due to effective branding, companies like Nike and Apple have become institutions unto themselves. In each case, brand equity is worth more than the actual products being sold. According to Forbes, “Products have life cycles. Brands outlive products. Brands convey a uniform quality, credibility, and experience. Brands are valuable. Many companies put the value of their brand on their balance sheet.”

Starting with brand strategy, it’s possible for your business to achieve the same level of brand equity as experienced by B2B leaders:

IBM Brand value: $98.4B

Salesforce Brand value: $17.1B

Microsoft Brand value: $712.9B

All of these incredibly important brands started with a simple idea on a page before becoming the industry icons we know today!

Get Started with KCG Content Today!

B2B branding is not just a marketing tool, it’s an investment in the future of your company. At KCG Content, we’re well-versed in working with creative teams and developing marketing strategies from the ground up.

Following your brand guidelines, KCG Content can build out important marketing assets like websites, blogs, ebooks, and case studies. With a uniform and polished message in-hand, your sales team can get out in the field to develop leads, convert customers, and drive new business.

The Power of Effective B2B Branding