FACT: Your business must find a way to stand out from the competition in order to flourish.
Sounds easy enough. Only it is not.
Branding is always viewed as an airy fairy, hard to measure marketing method. A cop out for most of them. Nurturing leads is first on the B2B marketing priority list.But over time, I’ve begun to see that Brand awareness has a powerful role to play in the B2B marketing function. In fact, Building a strong and respected brand accelerates all stages of the revenue-generation process.
A powerful brand is what can create the difference between having a successful business and having an unsuccessful one. Without strong brand personality and identity, you’ll have difficulty attracting customers. However, with a strong brand that resonates with your target audience, you can ensure your customers their loyalty.
In B2B marketing, lead generation is the foremost goal. The trouble is, that many marketers don’t understand how branding and lead generation work together to help them achieve those outstanding results. While it’s true that brand awareness and lead generation are two separate things, they’re also closely interrelated.
Brand Awareness: The first goal of your B2B marketing should be brand awareness. You want people to be aware of who you are and what you do. If they don’t know who you are or what you do, why would they even have a business relationship with you?. It should be at the top of the marketing funnel, to spread awareness of your company and brand identity throughout the market. This means making sure that they have heard of your company and that they know what you do.This is what brand awareness can do for a brand. Brand is much more than logo and its design
Lead Generation: Once you create brand awareness about your company, the next step of the marketing funnel is the consideration phase. This is the phase where people decide to sign-up for a free subscription of an email newsletter or sign up for the free services moving them further down the marketing funnel. Once they give over their contact information in exchange for your free services, you can then nurture them through lead generation marketing efforts.
Why Brand Awareness Over Lead Generation
1. Brand awareness opens gateways: McGraw-Hill ran a campaign in Business Week that has been called “the most famous B2B ad of all time.” Its headline was: Sales starts before your salesman calls, with business publication advertising. It’s much easier to get an appointment when representing a well-known company, says the salesperson. The positive side of building brand awareness is that it helps in increasing your market share. Branding is an aid to the final purchase decisions. Brand awareness builds brand equity. Once a consumer trusts your brand, they’re more likely to make repeat purchases with little to no forethought — which then creates trust and loyalty.
2. Emotion plays a real part in business buying decisions: The role of our emotions when making decisions can’t be ignored. Humans still rely on emotions when making buying decisions. We like to think that B2B decision-making is all rational, based on facts, and analysis. This is why a good marketer will try to identify, nurture and emotionally connect with a champion in the buying committee, to help make a persuasive case to the group. Happy content = More shares, Sad content= More clicks. When it comes to decision making, big or small, people will not change their beliefs or behavior if they don’t emotionally experience the payoff.
3. B2B relationships are based on trust and loyalty: Let’s evoke this fact again, that brands aren’t built by marketing communications alone. In fact, a strong brand is established in the mind of the customer from experience—thousands of interactions, recommendations, built up over time. Where, tragically, one bad experience can destroy trust of a good brand. Maggie being the relevant example.
Business buyers/consumers seek a long-term relationship with their vendors. Trusted, reliable partnerships are vital to a company’s ability to deliver value to its own customers. The giveaway here is that brand building is the job of everyone in the firm. Guided by marketing, which thus plays a larger, more important role in the firm’s success than mere lead generation and advertising. B2B marketers should take up the challenge of ensuring a positive customer experience across the entire breadth of the customer relationship. That’s our mission, accept it.
Conclusion:
Market Your B2B Business the Right Way
Both branding and lead generation play equally important roles in your business’s marketing efforts. However, to be successful at your marketing campaign, a perfect blend of both the concepts will continue to guide people down your marketing funnel towards sales.