The majority of the goals that B2B companies set when designing their digital marketing plan are around sales & lead generation, these actions must have a strong “foundation” to bring the desired results.
As the potential customer moves from the beginning of the marketing funnel to the next steps, the buyer’s journey starts more effectively when the audience learns your company name and gets the basic information they need. Brand awareness, in short, is how consumers perceive your company’s identity, your products and services, and how the business is positioned among those of your competitors that they may already be aware of.
B2B Brand Awareness, unlike its more direct version in the B2C sector, is not a race. It is a marathon whose results positively influence all other actions of your company and play a key role in how you are perceived by the most important decision makers in the industry your brand belongs to!
How can I properly build B2B Brand Awareness?
1. Give “faces” to your company through social media
Whether it’s more casual social media channels like Facebook & Instagram, or more professional ones like LinkedIn, social media audiences connect much more directly with brands that don’t hesitate to communicate their own team and the expertise of their staff.
In the case of B2B companies, salespeople and senior executives are usually the most communicative individuals who may be familiar with their industry. But by creating social media themes that include staff through tips, short stories and know-how, a B2B company succeeds and immediately stands out from its competition as it opts for a more “warm” and “human” approach to a more serious and often inaccessible corporate world.
2. Create a corporate “voice”
When researching a digital marketing strategy, we need to decide how we want to “speak” to the online audience, i.e. the “tone of voice” of the company. This decision is directly related to the corporate identity and what impression we want customers to get about us.
The only common denominator in any choice we make is that we want to build trust and be seen as a trustworthy company that they want to work with. According to Sprout social research, the public always prefers brands that place honesty and open communication at the top of their communications strategy.
3. Share know-how and corporate “know-how”
According to CMI/SmartBrief research, 74% of B2B Decision-makers consider it a more influential factor in their partnerships when a company shares the results of its own primary research through blogging within its website.
Thus, a company that is consistent in creating corporate-themed articles through its website and social media, it seems that it is not only not afraid of competition but also wants to contribute to the progress of the industry it belongs to.
By incorporating into our social media themes posts that aim to showcase our experience and expertise through more “digestible” visual material, we achieve an increase in brand awareness among the B2B audience as we constantly communicate why we stand out from the rest of the companies in the industry.
4. Use social selling
Once we have created content on social media and our website that we believe will be of interest to our audience and customers, the next step is to communicate it appropriately in the respective online channels. Brand awareness does not only need to be promoted through advertising campaigns, but it must be communicated by the right people with the aim of directly building relationships with potential customers and decision makers.
So-called social selling is essentially the time-honored and proven method for salespeople to get in touch with customers and their wider network, but using specific social media channels for a more direct communication.
LinkedIn is the ideal social media channel for B2B social selling as globally, 61 million users are in senior level positions and over 40 million users hold the main decision-making positions respectively. When we share the content of our company LinkedIn page through personal LinkedIn profiles, we make our company even more “visible” and on the next level, we connect with people who have interacted online with the company in order to show them exactly what we can offer them.
Brand awareness is the first step to standing out from your competition. In the context of B2B Marketing, it is equally important that not only your customers but also the main “players” of your industry know who you are and what your company offers so that you are always at the centre of the so-called “buzz” as one of the most influential forces in the industry.
Through proper research at the beginning of creating a digital strategy, we manage to find the strongest and most unique elements of the company and build around them a unique brand awareness sequence of actions for the benefit of the company.
