When you're a small business, startup, or otherwise a non-leader B2B brand, branding
and brand building are often viewed as luxury items, something you embrace after you become
a leader and get rich.
Like running a Super Bowl ad or putting your name on a stadium, brand-level stuff is often
considered B2B marketing bling. But this is utterly wrong, and tragically ironic, because B2B
non-leaders have more to gain if they do brand investment right, and more to lose if they keep
languishing in anonymity.
But before we get into that, let's clear something up.
Branding and Brand Building Are Different
Branding is the crafting of a distinctive identity for your business and conveying it through
elements like your brand positioning, appearance, personality, and
copywriting. In short, your brand is
who you are, what you do, why you do it, and who you do it for. Brand building, on the other
hand, promotes, advances, or elevates your brand in some way, explicitly or implicitly.
And these two aren't entirely either/or, there's some overlap. Branding generally tries to
make your brand identity more distinctive and appealing (at least to your target customers).
Brand building tries to make your brand more famous, salient, trusted, respected, and perhaps
more premium and/or authoritative (all of which could also be considered appealing in at least
some circumstances).
Confusing, I know. It's easier to explain which is which with an example. When you design a
nice t-shirt with your brand colors and logo for your employees to wear, that's branding.
When you give those t-shirts away, that's brand building. When you see people on the street
wearing those free t-shirts because they like them, that's good brand building. And when
people start buying those t-shirts and wearing them on the street, that's great brand
building, and great branding as well.
Branding and Brand Building Have a Common Purpose
Good branding and brand building strengthen your brand, but in B2B we tend to neglect the
latter. Which is another way of saying that B2B has been marketing with one hand tied behind
its back. Which is too bad, because strong branding can be powerful, and not just for large
brands, but for smaller ones as well (i.e.,
Liquid Death).
Why B2B Leader Brands Do Branding and Brand Building
B2B brand-level efforts are often viewed as a defensive measure. Something kings do to
insulate themselves from threats after reaching the top. But this is wrong. Because the best
defense is a strong offense. And brand investment is offensive, because business isn't
static, it's kinetic. It's a constant race that's always happening.
Leaders might look like they're standing still (since a top-three leaderboard looks a lot like
a podium), but they're not. They're still racing. And B2B leaders invest in their brands to
maintain their lead in that race.
Because B2B brand investment isn't just about putting your logo on event swag, it's about
controlling the discourse. Writing
bylines,
whitepapers, and other content. Influencing analysts.
Coining and popularizing industry terms. Getting a good spot on the
Gartner Magic Quadrant.
Creating technical certifications with your name on them.
And that's largely just the marketing stuff. Don't forget another big non-marketing reason why
leaders invest in their brand, which is recruiting and talent development. Leader brands want
more talent to recruit from, and they want to attract the talent they prefer, and they want to
keep them, and they want that talent making noise on
social media attracting more talent.
These brand efforts I've just mentioned aren't about merely staying ahead of the game, they're
about controlling it. And controlling any game is inherently proactive (i.e., offensive). And
this might make brand efforts intimidating if you're a smaller brand, but don't worry. It's
not impossible for a smaller B2B brand to stand out in its market. And stand out you must.
Why B2B Non-Leaders Need Branding and Brand Building
Brands are all starting to commit crimes against marketing by
blurring together, but B2B
is a career criminal in this area. Buyers can't tell vendors
apart (a trend that'll get
worse as
AI increasingly creates our brand and marketing assets). And guess what happens when B2B
buyers can't tell vendors apart?
Ninety percent of the time they pick a vendor
whose name they already knew before the buyer's journey began.
In other words, they pick one of the leaders. This means that if you're a
startup or
non-leader and
you're not making your brand stand out before and during the vetting process, you're fucked.
You are truly fucked.
And I'm not done discussing just how fucked you are. It turns out, prior familiarity with
your brand is much more important at the start of the buyer's journey than what B2B
marketing orthodoxy has been telling us. It turns out, when prospects are ready to start
shopping, they visit the
names they know. They don't just ask search engines a question.
But the good news is, there's hope. And I've already told you why. Since familiar brands
dominate the start of the buyer's journey, and buyers are still having trouble distinguishing
vendors anyway, this means even B2B leaders are not doing as great a job at being memorable with
their brand as it might seem.
Want proof? Think about Cisco. They're B2B royalty. A strong company with a powerful brand. But
can you visualize their logo in your mind? What it looks like? What its colors are? I'm guessing
you can't. Even though they have one of the best and most creative logos in the B2B heavyweight
division. It's really quite brilliant. It hasn't changed much since 2006 and yet many still don't know
it.
Do I look at this as a Cisco failure? No, for two reasons.
One, B2B brands are inherently at a disadvantage in terms of familiarity compared to B2C
because of the simple fact that we're not surrounded by them every minute of every day starting
from birth like we are with B2C brands, especially those that sell largely to enterprises (B2B
brands that sell to small businesses like Salesforce have an inherent advantage here).
And two, Cisco is a big corporation, and big corporations inherently blur together to the casual
observer, especially in B2B.
Don't Fake It Because You Won't Make It
If you're a smaller B2B brand, a good way to stand out is to be different from the big ones,
on purpose. And yet many do the opposite, even when they're tiny. They deliberately sound like
big corporations, or at least they try to, because they want to make big corporate money, with
some wanting to attract the talent big corporates attract.
In technical terms, this could be viewed as trading one form of brand strength for another
(i.e., trading branding for brand building). But what these copycats are really doing is
sacrificing branding for nothing. Because you can't fake it till you make it in B2B.
People can fake it, but not brands. Because your brand isn't just what you say about it, what
others say matters more. And small brands can't fool anyone into thinking they're big. That's
not how it works in B2B. There are too many other things that give away that you're small.
So, in effect, small B2B firms are sacrificing their brand differentiation for nothing. And
that is a tragedy, because non-leaders have so much more to gain from brand-level investment
than leaders. Let's face it, once you're a leader, you're made. You've got plump margins.
You're staying in nice hotels and flying business class. And you're very hard to kill.
You can do a lame-ass brand revamp and it won't hurt much. You can have a PR disaster or two
and survive. You can even fall behind in the market, or on hard times, and your brand still
can't really be unmade, or at least it's very hard to. A king can lose their crown, but the
halo lingers.
But when you're not a leader, you're barely grinding out a living on razor-thin margins.
You're flying red-eye economy flights. You're sweating every little expense, and giving
employees paltry year-end bonuses that make them hate you. You're not made, and you may only
be an unexpected disaster or two away from death.
But what if you could be different? What if you could be comfortable? What if you could
have nice things? What if you could attract people who want to be part of you for you, not
because it's better than starving?
It takes a strong brand to do that. And a strong brand is easier to build when it's
distinctive. And you'd better start on that part now because it's harder to later. It's far
easier to be distinctive when you're small.
How Small B2B Brands Can Get Started
If you look at it on a ledger, much of the branding and brand building done by leaders
equates to "spending the largesse," which can make both seem out of reach if you're a smaller
brand. But there are relatively inexpensive things your organization can do.
Decide Who You Are As a Brand
Brand positioning is where it all begins. It's the most important step on the journey,
but also the cheapest. You don't have to give your brand a 30-page psychological profile.
All you really need to do is decide what your role is in the competitive landscape. Pioneer,
challenger, innovator, artisan, etc. Everybody wants to be a leader, but leaders rarely start
out as leaders, or as copycats of leaders.
Apple started out as a challenger brand.
Dell was an innovator.
Amazon a pioneer. But they've
all become leaders now. And if your brand has been around for a while and you're worried that
you can't find, rise above, or reinvent yourself, look at
Crocs. They started out as makers
of utilitarian waterproof shoes that float (hence the name). But they've since become a
challenger lifestyle brand thanks to their "anti-fashion" sensibilities and extreme comfort.
Another brand that's far away from where it started is
Land Rover. Their first model was a
no-frills farm vehicle, and it was easily mistaken for a Jeep because it actually used a
Jeep chassis. Now it's widely viewed as a
luxury brand.
Talk to People, Not at Them
You know the thing about pioneers and challengers? They're human. They have souls. They have
thoughts and feelings. So lean into that. When you're a small brand, humanity is not weakness,
it's character. So be an expert. Be a professional. Be an artisan if it works. Just don't be
corporate. No one has the patience to endure the pretentiousness of a corporation of one.
But there's one thing you must do to really reach your audience, you must know who you're
talking to. Which means you must decide who you're selling to. Many B2B marketers don't make
this decision. They just deem the target audience to be "SOHOs, SMEs, and enterprises." And
whenever I see this, I want to pull my hair out.
When the target customer is every type of business, B2B audiences interpret this as you not
doing your homework. Picking a target audience doesn't exclude customers. It tells certain
customers that you understand their problems, enough to be willing to commit to them. And
this is something most B2B brands need to get better at.
In terms of subjective effects on the target customer, it's like a real-live human speaking
directly to you over a loudspeaker, instead of hearing pre-recorded announcements addressed
to no one in particular.
And you don't have to be that specific in picking a target audience, or explicit in stating it.
Sometimes it just means putting the word "fuck" in one of your blog articles and seeing who
keeps reading.
Make Your Brand's Voice Heard
It's not enough for your brand to merely have a distinctive voice, monetization only happens
when that voice gets heard. And if you're a smaller brand, your best bet for getting heard is
a savvy mix of inbound tactics, email outreach,
branded content assets, and your leadership
pressing the flesh in the real world.
And yes, you probably need all of them. If you're wondering why, think about it this way.
When your leadership speaks and participates at trade shows and gives TED talks and whatnot,
it has three spillover benefits.
The first is
third-party coverage, by peers and by the media, which can give your website
some of its first real backlinks, and provide other benefits that will make your inbound
marketing more effective. And effective inbound (i.e., website content and SEO) raises
your brand's long-term prospects considerably, especially when you're small.
The second benefit is that real-world efforts send prospects to social, where they look up your
brand's LinkedIn account and check out the content there.
It'll help your cause if they see there branded video assets (with sharp editing and branded
intros and outros) and slick social media visual assets done in your brand's colors with the
logo prominently displayed, not shapeless talking-head footage shot on a webcam, or dorky
text-heavy posts with an amateurish AI-generated visual.
And while a brand can certainly make money without search engine domain authority or bunches
of
content, and many brands do, without it that money often depends on the personal
connections and skills of one or a few people, and people leave, so it's best to build some
brand equity and presence.
And remember that I said "effective" inbound and content assets, because good content builds
your brand, while lame content just sits there doing nothing, like a turd no one wants to
clean up.
The third benefit of real-world flesh-pressing is the paper trail and word of mouth it creates,
verifying your brand's legitimacy to prospects when you do email or DM outreach.
Without it, when you send a LinkedIn DM to a prospect, and they've never heard of you, all
they really have to vet you with are your LinkedIn feed and website and that stuff, even
when done well, can be unconvincing when you're small, and perhaps lacking in evidence of
business-related bona fides.
And if you're wondering why I didn't include digital advertising in the recommendations I
made a few paragraphs earlier. Well, three reasons.
One, it's full of
fraud. Two,
digital advertising works better when you're
already famous (since you don't have to waste
limited ad space explaining who you are). And three, digital ad formats are hard to do well.
Even B2C brands with near unlimited resources struggle with them.
I'm not saying digital advertising doesn't have uses. You might need to buy followers in
certain territories to later organically target
them. And it can help get your homerun
content pieces and other greatest hits in front of more people.
If you've got a wad of cash burning a hole in your pocket, sure, go ahead. Do some digital
ad spend for your brand messaging. It couldn't hurt. But if you're small and have limited
resources, I don't consider digital advertising as reliable a branding or brand building
tactic as the others I've mentioned.
Make Your Brand's Voices Heard
Trust is so important in
B2B, which is why good B2B brands don't only have corroborative
evidence their leaders exist and do leadership-type things, they also have it for their
employees. Any slick hustler can put up a website, hand out business cards, and have an AI
write daily LinkedIn haikus for them to share.
But employees, real employees, a roomful, or even rooms full, working together and
celebrating together, are harder to fake, and it can make for some very effective brand
communications, while swelling your social media reach since their personal reach is often
a lot larger than a small brand's
company
reach. So don't be afraid to let your employees talk sometimes (or at least get
in front of a camera). Such content travels well on LinkedIn by its very nature anyway,
especially as part of a proper brand advocacy or
employee advocacy program.
Have Something To Say
"I exist, pay me," only really works as brand messaging when you've got a founder who can
really sell smoke. Or if you're in a hot area like AI.
If you're not, your brand narrative and communications need to dig a little deeper. How is
complicated. There are probably whole books on the various approaches you could take. But
if you want a hint on how to get started, look at your positioning.
Challenger brands might talk about what's wrong with the champion. Pioneers often offer a
vision of the future. Innovators can talk about why they're innovating (hopefully it's to
solve some problem your prospects face).
Brand storytelling is a term that's often used. But I think it's often misapplied
and misinterpreted. Prospects rarely care about your story and whether you're the hero of
it. They care about their own story, and that's what you should focus on, how buying from
you can make them the hero of their story (at least to their colleagues and boss).
Dress Your Brand With Style
Brands are converging
visually. And B2B brands have always been somewhat converged. Why? Two
big reasons. One, unlike B2C brands, who may be shooting for one of a wide variety of
emotions from the audience, B2B brands all pretty much want to elicit the same
emotions.
They want to appear trustworthy (blue) or smart (purple) or techy (light blue), while some
might want to appear dynamic (red or yellow).
And the second reason is tribal affiliation. They want customers to feel like they're
one of them. Or at least they want to appear like they're part of the same club as certain
other brands (it seems like every SaaS startup's website was made by the same clipart-loving
AI doing variations on a theme).
In theory, this makes sense. But remember what I told you earlier about buyers failing to
tell vendors apart. So, in practice, it's not working.
Visual blandness is a luxury of the B2B leadership class. Small brands need to work a
little harder at standing out through their look and feel. Don't ask me how. I'm just a
content guy. But there's plenty of
creative talent in the world who can conjure it for you.
And it doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg, which means conjuring it won't be the hard
part for you. The hard part will be accepting it, the actual commitment to
looking different or special. As marketing becomes more automated, committing to being
different or special will get harder. And in B2B marketing, it'll go against every fiber
of your professional being.
Well, boss up, buttercup. If you want to be noticed or remembered, having a distinctive
visual identity, reinforced by being distinctive more generally, may be the best shot a
B2B business with no unfair advantages (i.e., a small brand) has at brand success.
Whether that's by a great logo and visual identity, great promotion of your brand, or
using the f-word in your brand assets, you've gotta try something. Because the alternative
is death, or more of the tedious grind of being an also-ran.
So get cracking. You've got a lot of wool to darken.
