Your brand is not the products or services you sell. It’s not the features of your products or the cost of your services. Rather, your brand is the value that you offer to your clients.
Refining your brand story and telling that story through your marketing and everyday activities can be a little tricky. In this blog, we share a 5-step process for refining and telling a B2B brand story.
Define Your Value Proposition
The first step is to make sure that you have a clear, concise value proposition. Since your B2B brand is what prospects and clients see, it’s essential that your brand story clearly conveys the value you have to offer. This isn’t what matters to you. It’s what matters to your clients and prospects.
Ask yourself what is the main value that clients gain from working with you and use that to define your value proposition. [bctt tweet=”Keep your value proposition to one sentence, not a paragraph. It’s easier to control and tell a brand story if you have a straightforward value proposition.” username=”@bopdesignsd”]
Create a Buyer Persona
This sounds elementary, but if you can picture the person you are talking to and articulate their pain points, your B2B brand story is more compelling. You may have more than one buyer persona, especially if you work with different verticals or different seniority levels at an organization.
Your buyer persona should include:
- Title and role at the organization
- Pain points/needs/requirements
- Biggest challenges or issues the person faces
- Why this persona would consider your product/services
- Any other preferences/skills/traits
When crafting the buyer personas, marketing should get input or feedback from the sales team (since they understand the pain points) and from the service delivery/customer service team (since they understand the challenges and hear feedback from new and existing clients). Getting input from these departments helps create a complete picture and may uncover issues your company can solve.
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Discover How You Retain Clients
In order to create a compelling brand story that demonstrates value and appeals to your prospects, you need to know why your existing clients stay with you. It’s unlikely that your clients stay with you based on pricing. Rather, they stay with you because something about your firm’s relationship or product is valuable to them. Find out what drives client retention.
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Learn What Drives Your Employees
Your B2B brand isn’t just represented on a piece of marketing collateral or in your website. It’s evident in the way the sales team closes deals, the way your onboarding team talks to new clients or gets products out to a new client, and in the way your organization continues to manage that relationship.
Learn what your company’s employees believe about your brand. Do you have a mission statement that everyone understands and uses to guide their daily decisions? Are your employees on the same page? What are they saying about your company? For example, if a passion for innovation drives your employees, that should be reflected in your brand story. However, if your brand says you are passionate about innovation, but you don’t troubleshoot or present new products or service options on a regular basis, there is a disconnect that is fracturing your brand ideal and your brand’s perception.
Find the Right Visuals
A brand story isn’t just a written tale that unfolds in a brochure, B2B website design, or sales pitch. There are visual elements that are instrumental in telling your brand story and need to flow with your value proposition. If your company focuses on bespoke products that are tailored to meet the needs of your clients, it would be ideal to have photography that upholds that custom approach. If your company focuses on building relationships, it’s important to choose visuals that reflect that human component and how essential that is to your brand.
[bctt tweet=”Crafting and refining your B2B brand story isn’t something that happens overnight. In many cases, it takes a lot of internal dialogue and reflection to get it right.” username=”@bopdesignsd”] In other cases, it takes an outsider’s perspective to help you whittle down the truth of your brand and how you want to tell your brand story.
