It’s a common misconception that your B2B brand strategy simply comprises of developing a logo and picking a colour scheme. A successful brand takes more than just an eye-catching logo which, although great for identification, doesn’t cover other key factors that influence and create a positive memorable overall brand.
Your brand includes every interaction a customer, stakeholder, or partner has with your business and contributes to how your company is perceived. In this blog, we look at the factors which can build or break a brand including the tone of voice, customer and product service, employees, communication tools and visual identities. Our handy branding checklist can help you identify the collateral and channels missing from your brand.
The Key Elements to Consider in a Successful B2B Brand Strategy
The Tone of Voice
Your company’s personality and values should be clear in the tone of voice used when writing content. This is particularly important if your customers’ first interaction with your company is online where they will learn about you and your values from your written content on a website or social media.
Develop a company’s tone of voice that will resonate best with your target market. A concise set of guidelines created as part of a B2B brand strategy can help companies maintain a consistent tone of voice, especially when they have multiple content creators. Although each person has their own individual writing style, content used for business purposes should be recognisable to the company’s tone of voice, with everyone adhering to the same rules outlined in the brand guidelines.
Customer & Product Service
How do your team answer the phone? Is it unaccommodating and impassive, or polite and cheerful? All businesses, clearly, should aim for the latter as often this is the first offline interaction a customer has with your business. A negative response can have a lasting effect on how they perceive your company.
There are many other customer and product service factors to consider when developing a successful brand; from working hard to meet customer deadlines and deliver on promises to how you package your product and how your service team dress and behave on customer sites.
Employees
A great team of hard-working and motivated people are often the driving force behind a company’s success. If your employees are enthusiastic about your products and services, and willing to go the extra mile to exceed expectations, then your customers are likely to be happy with their experience, trusting your company more and possibly, becoming brand advocates by recommending you to others.
Communication Tools
Your brand is the quality of what you are showcasing to the world. Turning up to an event with a poorly thought-out stand or out-of-date collateral will make your customers question whether the same level of detail is applied to the product or service you are selling. Don’t downgrade the value of your products with an inferior brand.
Competitive Edge
When a business is at the start of their venture, it might be tempting to simply design a quick logo for use on business cards and other collateral. However, further down the line when business growth is at the forefront of your mind, having the foundations in place for a solid, well-thought-out B2B brand strategy can make growing your company much smoother, giving you that important competitive edge. Investing in your brand early cannot just save you money later on, but also earn you more money sooner.
Logos and Visual Identity
A strong, powerful logo is crucial for identification, and teamed with good graphic design to complement and enhance it, can help make all the difference when a customer is choosing between two great brands. The logo and visual identity is often the first place to start when rebranding, it will help to inform and influence the rest of the brand elements.
A logo on its own is like a plain, dry burger without any sauce or fries; you can eat the burger but the delivered results will be far less satisfactory. Defining items that complement your logo, such as patterns, iconography, fonts, layout concepts or photography will deliver more depth and opportunity for consistency to your visual identity. Read more reasons to invest in your marketing and brand here.
Motion Marketing is a B2B marketing agency that focuses on the technology, engineering and manufacturing industries. We are not a consumer marketing agency, we focus on business to business marketing with a growing number of long-term relationships. If you would like to discuss your B2B brand strategy with an external, skilled marketing agency, please reach out to the Motion team.
