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.
