B2B Brand Strategy

Clarify Who You Are and What You Stand For

Why do you need a brand strategy?

Your industrial brand is more than just a logo. It’s a promise to your customers that your company is uniquely qualified to help them get something done, whether it’s finding a new compressor for a hydraulic pump or engineering an industrial air filtration system. Creating a brand strategy is essential to ensure that your company separates itself from the industrial pack.

60%
of industrial brands have become less visible over the past five years
—McKinsey & Company
49%
of customers in the U.S. say brands don’t meet their expectations for a good experience
—Acquia
56%
of customers stay loyal to brands that “get them”
—SmallBizGenius
What B2B Brand Strategy Is
  • Defining your unique offerings
  • Identifying how you can connect with target industrial audiences
  • Aligning around your core values
  • Establishing a reason to believe your brand promise
What B2B Brand Strategy Isn't
  • Mimicking competitor brands or logos
  • Appealing to everyone
  • Changing your logo color to reflect trends
  • “Re-branding” to improve your reputation

HOW TO DEVELOP A B2B BRAND STRATEGY

To develop your brand strategy, you will need to articulate key aspects of your business while connecting to your customers’ needs and emotions. You will also need to assess your competitive environment.


Get Started

Don’t worry, creating a brand strategy isn’t rocket science (even if your business is rocket science). Think of it like creating a blueprint for your marketing and sales efforts.

Strategy

B2B BRAND STRATEGY ESSENTIALS



Internal Brand Alignment
Define your brand promise, including your mission, vision and core values
External Brand Messaging
Identify customer personas, brand value pillars and your value proposition
Competitive Analysis
Analyze how competitors position themselves and differentiate yourself

INTERNAL BRAND ALIGNMENT

Internal alignment is critical to developing a brand that all your employees and internal stakeholders can rally around.

MISSION & VISION

The mission and vision for your company are foundational in describing “why” you exist. These statements should capture the passion of everyone in your organization. They should account for the current state and the future. The key elements that your mission and vision statements should address:

  • Explain why your company exists
  • Reflect your core values and culture
  • Motivate and inspire employees
  • Be aspirational for what you can become

BRAND PROMISE

Your brand promise is “what” your company promises to deliver. It describes the value of what you offer to the market. This can be framed around quality of products, customer support, legacy of expertise and success in the market, and many other attributes. But don’t try to account for everything; no company can do that. What are the non-negotiables? What will everyone in your company stand behind? You can define your brand promise around:

  • Reasons to believe in your brand
  • Problems you solve
  • Scope of operations
  • Unique attributes; what sets you apart

CORE VALUES

Your core values are the “how” your company will fulfill its brand promise. Collectively, these values are what make your company uniquely qualified to deliver your promise. This could be a detail, such as committing to respond to customers within a specific time frame. A promise can also be part of the big picture, such as continuing to invest in research and development. Your core values are likely to revolve around:

  • People and personal integrity
  • Processes and efficiency
  • Products and quality
  • Innovation and sustainability

EXTERNAL BRAND MESSAGING

Brand messaging begins with discovering and documenting: who your customers are, what they want to accomplish, what their challenges and pain points are, and how you help them.

CUSTOMER PERSONAS

Your target customer personas represent the decision makers who ultimately decide whether or not to partner with your company. This can be challenging as there often are many influencers in the complicated and often elongated industrial buying journey. Your customer personas often come from these functional areas:

  • Leadership, such as an owner or decision-making executive
  • Operational, such as engineers and on-the-floor managers
  • Asset managers of people, materials or facilities
  • Finance, such as purchasing, accounting or corporate

VALUE PROPOSITION

Why should your customers choose your brand over the competition? This is you making a case why they should work with you. A value proposition explains how you will help a target persona, and how that service benefits them in their position and the company overall. So while you can offer different value propositions for each persona, all value propositions should have this in common:

  • Target – who you are communicating to
  • Value – why they should choose you over others
  • Need – how this helps them
  • Examples – so the persona can relate your message to their situation

VALUE PILLARS

Your value pillars can be specified to each customer persona but should always ladder up to your overall brand promise. While you offer the same products and services to everyone, what is important to an engineer is far different from what is important to a CFO. Your value pillars should:

  • Address what is important to your personas
  • Acknowledge their challenges and objections
  • Articulate what you can do for them
  • Articulate your brand experience

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

Developing an effective brand strategy requires that you understand untapped market opportunities, how your competitors go to market, and what you offer that your competitors do not.

MARKET OPPORTUNITIES

Market research can unearth key market metrics that you might not be aware of, especially in emerging or disrupted ecosystems. This is not your standard scouting of the known players in your sector but investing in how you can expand your network of prospects and clients. The benefits of investing in market opportunities include:

  • Identifying gaps in the market
  • Developing new products and services
  • Uncovering market trends
  • Marketing and selling more effectively

COMPETITOR LANDSCAPE

Competitive research is the in-depth discovery work to identify differences between your products and services and those of your competitors and also how they message and go to market. Where are the value gaps that your competitors are not filling for your customer personas? How you address those gaps compared to competitors defines your competitor landscape. Questions to ask:

  • Where do my competitors show up?
  • How do my competitors get visibility/traffic?
  • Where are they that I am not?
  • Where am I where they are not?

UNIQUES

You should be aware of what makes your competitors unique in your industry. Look at their brand messaging to see how their values compare to your brand’s value pillars. The more you know about your competition, the more nuanced you can be in your marketing and sales strategies and tactics. Differentiating your brand requires learning where your brand is outperforming the competition and where you fall short. The sweet spot you seek is at the intersection of:

  • What your customers are demanding
  • What solutions you offer to meet that demand
  • What you offer that your competitors do not

Uncovering your brand’s sweet spot is where you should focus your communications when you speak to your customers at different stages in the marketing/sales funnel.

Next Steps

BECOME AN INDUSTRIAL BRAND STRATEGY LEADER

The right partner can help you create and execute a brand strategy that successfully positions your company as the brand of choice — even in the most competitive industrial environments.


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Identify Needs

Identify your brand’s purpose, who it needs to reach, and how to talk about it with your personas

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Research Solutions

Find marketers well-versed in brand strategy as part of a comprehensive marketing and sales approach.

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Find a Partner

Identify partners to support your brand strategy efforts and reach out to assess compatibility.

REQUEST A BRAND STRATEGY CONSULTATION

At INDUSTRIAL, we’ve worked with hundreds of industrial leaders and marketing teams to create and execute brand strategies that outshine the competition with brand positioning that connects with B2B customers’ needs and emotions. Contact us today to learn how we can help you align your teams around an effective industrial brand strategy.