Marketing Briefs

Building Your B2B Experience Brand

The key premise of positioning your B2B company as an experiential brand is ensuring your brand values are incorporated into every way you interact with your stakeholders – employees, customers, prospects and shareholders.

 

Many people believe experience brands are consumer brands like Apple and their ability to connect via many different channels including their website and store or BMW that connects on a passionate level with their cars and the ultimate driving experience. However, B2B companies that embed their brand essence into every marketing and communication touch point can become experience brands with greater customer loyalty and more profitable business results.

 

What are four attributes of B2B experience brands? Experience brands:

 

• Enlist employees as brand ambassadors to ensure they understand the B2B brand promise and how that is realized in the company’s vision, culture and day-to-day behavior
• Enable customers and prospects to learn about a company’s products, services and capabilities via the channels they like to use. How customers learn about what you have to offer can’t be a passive experience on your part. B2B marketers need to be vigilant about how the “experience” is for your customers when they interact with your brand.
• Engage customers and prospects before, during and after the sale. Even though technical or customer support may not report into marketing, B2B marketers need to act as though it does and interact with these groups who embody critical customer interaction points on a regular basis. On-going customer satisfaction with the “experience” of interacting with your company is a key driver of not only on-going loyalty, but in delivering referrals of new customers.
• Empower all stakeholders to interact with your company and brand via today’s “water coolers” – social media and mobile platforms – via a digital experience that’s intuitive, easy and that promotes an on-going dialogue between your company and other customers and prospects.

As you think about your on-going marketing activities, don’t miss out on leveraging what you’re already doing to extend your central marketing and brand ideas into compelling conversations at every touch point with your customers, prospects, employees and investors resulting in being a B2B experience brand.

Market With Every Box You Ship

Don’t stop marketing and selling once you take an order and ship out the package. Take the opportunity to market and sell with every box you ship!

Market Outside the Box for Free Brand Awareness

On the outside of the box, you have the opportunity to use your packaging as a traveling billboard that anyone who touches your package in shipping will see. Include your company name, logo and web address on the outside of every package. If you ship many packages, have your box supplier imprint this messaging for you. If you ship in smaller quantities, use stock boxes shipping boxes and affix preprinted stickers with your branding information.

Market Inside the Box for Add-On Sales

Marketing on the outside of the packages you ship is only the beginning. Move inside the box to market additional products and services to your customers. Include brochures or fliers that advertise complementary products and services to what you are shipping to the customer. Include ordering information to make it easy for your customers to re-order consumables like ink cartridges or complementary products like a color printer to go with a camera. Another way to continue the marketing “conversation” with your customers is to include fliers inside your packaging that educates them on the various uses of your products or care instructions for your products. You can both sell inside your package as well as educate your customers. This also gives you the opportunity to follow-up each shipment with a phone call to see how they liked their order, to ask them if there is anything else you can do for them and to specifically ask if they would like to take advantage of a special offer you have included in their package.

Market Throughout The Customer Journey

Your business delivers world-class products or services and your customers experience your business through multiple steps of their “customer journey” with your company. Use every “touchpoint” your customers experience in their “journey” with your company to provide a tangible standard in how you deliver your products or services. This will delight your customers.

Five Stages Form The Customer Journey

Break the sales cycle and delivery process of your products and services into a five-stage “customer journey” including:

· Contract Delivery

· Delivery of Your Product or Service

· Customer Welcome

· Getting Started With Your Business

· Salesperson Recognition

Mapping out a “customer journey” system for your business will reinforce your brand attributes and product/service benefits. You will enhance your customers’ experience via a world-class process of packaging and delivering what you sell.

Stage 1: Contract Delivery. Don’t just drop off the contract in a plain folder or envelope. Create a simple, professional, customizable and consistent way to deliver your contract while closing a sale. This could be a well-designed contract that incorporates your brand messaging and that is delivered in a folder branded to your business. Too many businesses miss this point to start reinforcing your unique identity versus the competition. This is your first chance to build a strong “brand bond” with your new customer.

Stage 2: Delivery of Your Product or Service. Ensure that your products or services are delivered in the appropriate packaging that is branded to your business. This is the difference between delivering your product in a plain, cardboard box or some packaging that incorporates your brand, corporate colors and key messaging.

Stages 3 and 4: Customer Welcome and Getting Started. At this stage, you should welcome your customer and the key members of their team who will interact with your staff to the new relationship. Create a standard “welcome kit” that may include a thank you letter for the business and a binder or folder of materials that outlines the benefits of the relationship and how to “get started” using the product or service you are providing. You may also want to include a small appreciation gift – something low-cost with your business name on it like a polo shirt or a pen set – to reinforce your brand and your appreciation for the new business in a memorable way.

Stage 5: Salesperson Recognition. Finally, you should award your sales person for their effort and dedication in closing the new sale. You may want to create an internal recognition reward – a plaque or certificate – to acknowledge and celebrate their success.

Pump Up Your Brand Volume!

Business of all sizes must contend with a myriad of messages encountered by their customers. It’s not only messages from competitors you must overcome. You have to contend with the broader market in general. Whether you are marketing to business buyers or end-user consumers, they are being hit with mass media, e-mails, voicemails, interactive ads and content on websites they visit just to name a few.

This onslaught of content that is competing for the attention of your business customers and prospects is tough for any business to deal with but even more tricky for a small business.

Use Sharper Nails, Not Bigger Hammers. I don’t know who originally coined the term “use sharper nails, not bigger hammers” but it is an appropriate mantra to use in shaping your go-to-market programs to allow your message to be heard above the noise. Better creativity and execution, not big budgets and staff, will allow you to succeed in breaking through. Focus on a limited number of programs and don’t spread your budget too thin trying to emulate your competitors. Do what you can afford to do and do it well.

Define Your Brand Essence. It’s not just about the features and functions of your product or the specifics of the services you offer. Have you ever evaluated several competing products or services only to forget which one offered the feature you wanted since they were both similar? Instead, you need to evaluate the brand essence of your business. What is the underlying difference you offer over your competitors? It could be a verbal identity like your business stands for superior

customer service (the “we answer on one ring or the service is free” company) or a visual identity (like a specific color that is out of the ordinary).

Deliver Brand Relevance To Customer Interests. Of course your website, for example, must look good, fit your brand and be consistent in how you present your company. However, it’s not about more features or even more content. It’s about having the right content. It’s usually more difficult to say what you need to say in one paragraph instead of one page. The same is true for your website. Streamline your navigation. Put your most important content within two clicks of your customers’ and prospects’ mouse. How do you know what content is most important to your customers? All you need to do is ask them!

Focus, brand essence and delivering relevance will all help you pump up your brand volume to breakthrough to your customers and prospects.