🕵🏻‍♂️ Building a powerful B2B brand strategy

^{Written by Adechina ODJO, Content Marketer @Trenches}

Hey ,

Here’s a short story you’ll love.

Alan is a company founded in 2016 and now 7 years later they employ 830 people.

In 2022, their annual recurring revenue was 258 million dollars. That’s a whopping 62% increase compared to 2021, and currently, they serve 380.000 members and partnered with 20.000 companies within just 3 countries: France, Belgium, and Spain.

And that’s not all.

The company raised 500 million euros in just seven years, and that’s partly thanks to the top-notch brand strategy they have in place.

In today’s newsletter, we’ll pick the brain of the person in charge of brand strategy at Alan and walk you through the step-by-step guide to creating a brand strategy for a B2B company.

Ready? Let's start first with what brand strategy means for Alan.

Brand strategy for Alan

Alan sees brand strategy as a platform for marketing initiatives that connect with the company's strategy. For Alan, it's not about creating a brand strategy for the sake of having one. Instead, it's about understanding how brand development initiatives relate to and influence the growth of the business.

So, for a good brand strategy, you must first define a growth trajectory, and then create a strategy that gets you there.

In the following sections, we’ll show you how.

The step-by-step process of creating a B2B brand strategy (a case study of Alan)

One of the things that have made Alan very popular in Belgium is that they position themselves as a one-stop healthcare partner. Instead of just selling insurance, which is a large part of their business, they take a holistic approach to the healthcare industry, which puts them in the category of health tech startups as opposed to other insurance players.

For most people, when they hear about branding, they think about big initiatives, expensive campaigns, and huge events. But in fact, you should really start small. When you do want to infuse brand strategy into a company you should first gain a lot of context about the business and the category.

Start lower in the funnel with initiatives that build links towards the top of the funnel and slowly start building conviction about why you actually need to invest in the brand top of the funnel, how you are going to do that, and why it is relevant for your business.

Here are some questions you should answer:

• What is the internal vision?

• What is the company culture?

• What are the visual assets?

• What is the verbal style of communicating?

• How is your category behaving: how is it evolving, who’s winning, and who’s losing?

• How are consumers interacting?

Before you start anything at all, you need to understand the needs of not only the decision-makers but also the desires of those who are using your product.

And then once you converge on an idea of how you can position your brand within that, you also need to define some of the boundaries. That includes the following:

• What are the things you absolutely cannot do?

• What are the edges of where your brand lives?

This is important in that a brand is not a single thing with a single style. It can be a lot of things in a lot of different contexts, especially in B2B as you have different segments. While it’s not really a big deal to act differently, you need to set up boundaries on how far you can go.

Now when it comes to the yearly planning cycle where you’re basically thinking about how you are going to deliver on your promise, you need to plan actual initiatives and of course, the biggest part here is executing with excellence.

Furthermore, it's not just because you made a plan that it will work the whole year. Oftentimes, the market changes, competitors behave differently, trends happen, consumers change, and COVID/ChatGPT happens.😅

What have you got to do in this case? You evolve. You learn from your initiatives. And you change them and try out new stuff.

At the end of the year, you make sure that you analyze what the impact was. For example, you can track metrics like the number of meeting requests you had from your initiative.

Who should be involved in brand strategy development? 

One of the key players here is the brand manager. Apart from him, you can have people from the content and the marketing teams who we’ll be looking into other things like performance marketing and product marketing.

Furthermore, you need to involve leadership and give them a quick overview of what the plan is and how it aims to contribute to the business objectives. You don’t need to pull them into the nitty-gritty of the brand strategy but those are the difficult players you want to have involved right from the get-go.

Finally, you need to bring in the sales and product teams at the right time to get the right feedback and also validate the overall plan and ideas. This is important in that it is often people in sales, product, or customer service that are actually a lot more in tune with what customers are saying and thinking about the brand.

So, involve them but when it comes to decision-making, you need to make the pool a little bit smaller.

How should the global brand strategy be aligned with the local brand strategy?

Here's a truth that most B2B companies learn the hard way: you can't apply the same principles that you were using if you're entering a brand new market where you have no existing customers.

First, you need to understand the context of the market you are in because there could be a different level of competition and challenge.

For example, Alan is a big thing in France. The company is quite famous and the founder is well-known. But in Belgium, they are at a totally different stage of growth and are applying other types of marketing initiatives to raise their profile.

Matter of fact, what is global for Alan is their overall positioning. That's something they don't believe should be hyper-local. But what is local in terms of brand strategies is the following: the actual initiatives they need to take to make sure everybody understands that position.

That can consist of working with local famous people or hosting local events. It requires, for example, working together with HR influencers, or buying media space to get more exposure.

In a nutshell, there are a lot of different tactics per country, but overall, when it comes to branding, it is very beneficial to have one global brand identity, because you can create a lot of synergies and over time, build something huge and become more profitable.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Andrei, Stapho, and Stef spent an hour diving deeper into this on our weekly podcast. You can watch the full recording here.

Upcoming Community Event

4th ANNUAL FULLFUNNEL SUMMIT

Here is what you can expect from the Full-Funnel Summit.

1. Theme days

We have 3 theme days and tracks:

• ABM (Tuesday, 28th Mar)

• Demand generation (Wednesday, 29th Mar)

• GTM Strategy (Thursday, 31st Mar).

Every day we'll have 5-6 live and actionable sessions with top-notch speakers.

Have you signed up for any sessions? If not, click here and add sessions you want to attend to your calendar.

2. Pitches-free actionable content

You can expect:

• Keynotes focusing on what’s really happening in the industry, not the rose-colored lens

• The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly case studies, with lessons learned

• Implementation of case studies, with an emphasis on pitfalls and workarounds

Here are some interviews we've done with summit speakers that will give you an idea of what to expect.

• ABM playbooks with Jim Gilkey from Terminus

• Setting up LinkedIn ads strategy with Justin Rowe

• ABM during economic downturns with Jon Miller

• B2B marketing communities 101 with Arthur Castillo and Nick Bennett

• How to Make the CFO Say YES to Your Marketing Budget with Amber Bogie 

3. Summit community

You'll be able to connect with speakers and other participants, ask questions, access the session summaries, or share your takeaways.

If you didn't join the Trenches community yet, do it now.

4. Live sessions

You can join all the sessions and ask your questions live: in the chat or join the discussion, whatever works for you.

If you'll miss a live session, you can still watch a recording and ask your question in the community.

Super excited to see you on 28th March, dear . 🤩

BEST SHARES FROM THE TRENCHES COMMUNITY

• How to implement account-based marketing from scratch: 9 steps to go from 0 to a full ABM motion (Andrei Zinkevich)

• Get going with revenue growth mapping, and forget traditional b2b marketing planning (Daniel Zsolt Rényi)

• How to use AI and Jasper for sales (Stefan Conic)

QUESTIONS FROM FELLOW TRENCHERS

Dear , your help is needed. If you can answer any of the questions below, please click on the link and share your ideas.

• Are there any other marketers here working specifically in health IT who would want to form a chat thread/group specific to this industry?

• How do you guys measure/identify accounts on the ABM + Demand Gen process?

• Hello everyone, does anyone have familiarity with expert writers/influencers from the IT space? Thank you!

NOTE: If you found this content interesting and insightful, chances are you 1 or 2 colleagues (well, maybe 03) who’d enjoy it as much as you do. Help them by sharing and earning some exclusive perks.

See you in Trenches 😉

Adechina ODJO