How a strong B2B brand leads to marketing performance

Good B2B brand marketing helps your company be seen the way you want it to be seen, with the primary goal of driving pipeline (i.e. sales). 

A robust B2B brand has the power to not only influence your marketing performance but create demand, helping you develop an image of trust, securing customer loyalty, and opening doors to lucrative opportunities with larger companies.

Let's explore how a strong B2B brand drives marketing success, delving deep into the art of brand positioning, and giving you the tools to measure and optimize your brand's effectiveness.

How does a good B2B brand impact marketing performance?

A good B2B brand makes it easier for customers to make purchase decisions, acting as a guiding light towards buying with confidence. 

But what are the mechanisms that make this possible?

There are plenty, but you can really boil it down to just one:

• Higher trust

Trust is the cornerstone of all successful B2B relationships, one if not the most important aspect when building brand affinity.

A well-established brand exudes trustworthiness and credibility, reducing perceived risks for potential clients. When your brand is trusted, it's easier to transform your prospects into actual customers, as they are more likely to engage with your content and consider your products or services.

3 building blocks of great B2B brand marketing

Building trust through your brand requires 3 fundamental aspects:

1. Credibility;
2. Reliability, and;
3. Consistency.

Credibility is the most important pillar, emphasizing your expertise and knowledge in the industry.

Without credibility, your brand is as good as a paper weight. By showcasing your competence and authority through content, customer interactions, and problem-solving—you reinforce your credibility. 

This in turn builds trust, as clients are more inclined to engage with a brand they believe is well-informed—an expert in the industry.

Reliability is also important, it helps the brand build long-term relationships by always meeting customers’ expectations.

When clients have confidence in your ability to consistently deliver value, they are more inclined to continue doing business with you. 

Consistency is achieved through maintaining a uniform and reliable brand positioning across all platforms, from your website and social media to your email communications. By consistently delivering your messaging across channels, you build tangible brand awareness, further strengthening trust and driving sales interactions.

There are 2 fundamental benefits to great brand marketing:

Higher customer stickiness

A strong brand creates an emotional connection with their customers, making them more likely to remain loyal to your business long term. 

These "sticky" customers not only provide repeat business but also become advocates who refer new clients to your brand.

Even in 2024 (and beyond), word-of-mouth is one of the best advertisements for your brand.

Building customer loyalty requires exceptional customer service, personalized experiences, and a commitment to adding value. 

By actively listening to your customers, addressing their pain points, and exceeding their expectations, you create a strong bond that goes beyond a transactional nature.

A well-executed B2B brand strategy can put your company on a much faster growth trajectory than traditional business models, building emotional connections with customers, resulting in word-of-mouth referrals. 

This, coupled with the allure of a strong brand, can bring in waves of new customers at an exponential rate.

A well-recognized brand can also unlock new channels and opportunities that are not available to companies lacking a strong brand presence: partnerships, collaborations, and endorsements with other well-established brands become more attainable, giving your business access to previously untapped business and growing your pipeline.

Larger enterprises also prefer to work with established brands.

A strong B2B brand can open doors to new contracts with big companies that might otherwise be hesitant to engage with lesser-known firms, and a stable brand that conveys scalability attracts them to do business.

With a stronger brand, you can also charge higher prices without customers getting mad at you (there are whole studies on this).

Apple is an obvious example, but SaaS apps like HubSpot aren't cheap either, yet they sell a lot of professional and enterprise licenses.

Read more: Successful B2B branding examples

Why positioning is the cornerstone of a great B2B brand

Positioning is the bedrock on which your B2B brand strategy must be built. It defines your unique space in the market and what sets you apart from competitors, communicating that distinctiveness to your audience. 

How to find your own brand positioning

Start by conducting comprehensive market research analyzing your target audience, competitors, and market trends to identify gaps and opportunities.

This way you can better understand the landscape in which your brand operates and also analyze it to find possible gaps, informing the so-called "go-to market strategy" which is essentially how you position yourself to achieve your business objectives (usually revenue targets) within a specific timeline.

You also need to identify your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) by considering factors like your service excellence and product innovation.

Source: Pipedrive Blog

In a market saturated with similar products or services, a well-defined USP helps your brand stand out, but it also provides clarity about your brand—not only to your customers, but also internally within your company. The USP is the keystone of your positioning strategy.

What unique value do you offer to your potential customers?

And finally, you need to determine your brand’s mission and values, aligning them with the ones of your ideal customers.

Where individuals have personalities, brands have archetypes.

Are you the trusted advisor, or the innovator? Understanding your brand archetype can help you find your messaging and brand voice.

Building key messages on top of your positioning

Once your brand's positioning is established, it's essential to create key messages that resonate with your target audience and possible customers. These messages should be clear and concise, and they can help you reinforce your position in the market. 

To create clear messaging you need to communicate your value proposition, but you also need to connect with empathy to your target audience, relating to their aspirations and problems—showing how your brand can help them.

A well-crafted message should be memorable, relatable, and emotional.

Source: Tamara Urukalo on LinkedIn (LinkedIn B2B Institute)

After finding a clear messaging, you have to work on consistency, making sure that all your marketing materials align with your positioning and your messaging. 

This will help you create a brand that's recognizable, coherent and trustworthy.

Adding any extra "flavor" (the tip of the iceberg!)

Lastly, add some extra flavor to your brand to make it truly recognizable: a powerful story that conveys your brand’s personality, a high-quality content strategy to reflect the brand’s values, and a strong and consistent visual identity that makes your brand truly stand out among its competitors. 

B2B brand storytelling is often misused, especially when brands focus on it before finding a relevant positioning.

However, creating compelling stories helps you foster emotional connections. Share your journey, challenges, and triumphs. 

Humanize your brand.

A compelling narrative sets you apart, resonates with clients, and makes your brand unforgettable in the crowded market.

Also, an effective way to keep this “extra flavor” consistent is to establish brand guidelines; a set of rules and standards to define how your brand will be presented visually, in text, and with audio, including instructions on the logo usage, color schemes and tone of voice.

However, this is just the tip of the iceberg!

Do not use brand guidelines as the sole guiding principle behind what you do or your brand will become rigid, inflexible.

Storytelling and visuals are a tool to spread and reinforce your message, but they must only come after finding your positioning: focus on a strong positioning before having fun with colors, logos and design.

How do you measure brand marketing effectiveness?

To ensure that your branding efforts are producing successful results, you need to employ effective measurement strategies. Here are some key metrics and methods for measuring brand marketing effectiveness:

Share of voice, mental availability, brand mentions (awareness)

The first factor with which you can measure your brand marketing effectiveness is B2B brand awareness, which refers to the level of familiarity people have with your brand. It is measured by how well they can recognize the brand's logo, name, products, and services.

Are people aware of the existence of your brand and—most importantly—of how your brand can help them solve their problems?

By analyzing social media discussions or industry conversations, you can measure your brand's presence in the market. It helps you gauge how your brand stacks up against competitors in terms of visibility.

To track your visibility you can monitor your brand mentions across all channels, online and offline, and this can help you understand your brand’s reputation and analyze your presence in the landscape.

You also need to understand how much your customers are thinking about your brand when they consider solutions.

This is called mental availability. 

Mental availability goes deeper than awareness; it promotes strong associations influencing future sales in various situations.

Brands with higher mental availability come to mind more easily when considering a purchase.

To build it you need to create consistent messaging and engagement with your audience, basically to get stuck in the customers’ heads.

Ads are particularly useful to do this at scale.

Branded search terms, content engagement (consideration)

To measure active Interest in your brand you need to monitor the consideration stage your ideal buyers go through. You can achieve this by monitoring branded search terms and content engagement.

Branded search terms are a direct indicator of active interest in your brand. When people specifically search for your brand or products using branded terms, it means they are already aware of your existence, and that they have a specific interest in your products or services.

(Or to learn more about them generally)

By analyzing the volume of branded searches for your company, products, or its services, you can monitor the level of interest and curiosity your brand generates.

Through content engagement metrics instead (including click-through rates, likes, shares, or comments), you can measure how effectively your content resonates with your audience.

Tracking content engagement provides valuable data and insights into what works and what doesn't.

This information can help your content strategy, allowing you to create more of the content that resonates with your audience. Are your marketing efforts actually capturing the interest of your audience?

Positive reviews, customer retention, brand sentiment (decision)

Last but not least, you have to be able to measure the satisfaction of your current customers, especially the loyal ones, and to use this satisfaction to your advantage. 

This invaluable feedback serves as a compass, guiding you toward areas of improvement and offering insights into how to improve your products, but it can also become a powerful testimony to your brand’s impact.

Through customer reviews you can monitor your brand reputation, but positive reviews also work as real-life testimonials of your brand’s effectiveness at solving a problem. 

Reviews are also often accessible to a wide audience, giving your brand increased visibility.

This is why many brands prefer to include success stories on their website, contributing to the company’s online presence and reputation.

(Often referred to as "social proof")

Reviews play a pivotal role in the decision-making process, as they can inspire trust in your brand to other potential customers.

Just like many brands include success stories from their customers, you can do the same thing with your employees: this is called employee branding, and it involves aligning your employees with your brand's values and messaging.

By including employee success stories, they become advocates for your brand, impacting its reputation and building trust with customers.

They’re kind of a positive review from your other set of customers ;)

Customer retention rates are also a real-life measure of your brand's ability to satisfy its existing clients and to make them come back for more.

High retention rates show that your brand delivers value and meets customer expectations.

These should be highlighted publicly where relevant.

Lastly, use sentiment analysis tools to monitor the overall sentiment surrounding your brand. Sentiment analysis—often referred to as "opinion mining"—is a powerful tool that involves using natural language processing and machine learning techniques to determine the emotional tone expressed in text data, such as social media mentions, comments, and other forms of user-generated content.

Are people generally positive, neutral, or negative about your brand? 

These tools can help you understand where you may need to improve and tailor your future strategies accordingly.

Market your way to B2B brand glory

Developing a strong B2B brand isn't just a strategic choice; it’s a necessity. Instilling trust and nurturing loyalty opens doors to new and larger customers.

That in turn helps your marketing generate even more demand.

It's a vicious cycle that can turn a relatively small organization into a large player in a matter of a few years when done right.

The only question left is…

Are you ready to start that journey today?

P.s. If so, Sagewill might just be the right solution for you ;)