A Complete Guide to Branding Your B2B Business

Branding has become a hot topic for both B2C and B2B businesses. More and more, potential clients look at a brand’s image when deciding who they’ll do business with.

To stand out in a crowded market, your branding needs to be on point. But what exactly is branding? The simplest definition is that it’s the way you develop your business, its image, and its products. Since so many different elements can contribute to your brand, a wide range of activities fall under the branding category. The color scheme of your site, your slogan, and your logo would all be considered types of branding.

There are several reasons that branding is so important to your business.

It Makes Your Business More Recognizable

For your business to stick in people’s memories, it must be easily recognizable. Creating a strong brand identity will ensure that potential clients have no trouble noticing and recalling your business from memory.

When you look at some of the most successful businesses of all time, you’ll notice that one thing they all have in common is recognizable branding elements. McDonald’s has its famous golden arches. Nike has its swoosh and the slogan “Just Do It.” These are all carefully selected branding choices that people now associate with those companies.

Clients Gravitate Towards Businesses that Match Their Values

Part of the branding process involves figuring out what your brand’s values are. Choosing those values and making them a part of your brand’s story is vital to gaining new clients, as now more than ever, clients do business with brands that match their values. Just look at the trend toward cruelty-free products and brands that practice social responsibility, which is especially important to Millennials.

Not only do matching values help you gain clients, but they can also build brand loyalty. Millennial clients, in particular, are very brand loyal, provided they feel that your business is authentic.

It Forms the Basis of Your Marketing Efforts

Before you can launch an effective marketing campaign, you need to understand your brand and its identity. Otherwise, any marketing efforts will be disjointed and will lack consistency with your brand’s image. It’s impossible to show potential clients what your business is about if you haven’t even answered that yourself yet.

No matter the type of marketing campaign you choose, everything about it must match your branding elements. Your branding determines the color scheme of your ads, the tone, and what points about your business you emphasize.

Your Branding Can Improve Employee Satisfaction

Employees are looking for more than just a steady paycheck and some benefits. They want to feel like they’re contributing to something special, and they want to take pride in the work that they’re doing. Just like clients look for brands that match their values, so do potential employees.

When your employees know what your brand’s mission is and what it stands for, they’ll be more motivated, which leads to greater productivity. They’ll also enjoy working for your company more, and that means you’ll have higher employee retention. Considering the cost of replacing an employee who leaves, anything that helps you keep more employees around is a big plus.

Good Branding Helps with Referrals

Building your client list can be one of the most challenging parts of growing your B2B business. It’s not easy to convince new clients to work with you, especially if you’re trying to get them to make a switch. Businesses often resist change, because they’re more worried about the potential issues than the potential benefits.

That’s why referrals are such a key part of gaining new clients. When your business is recommended by a client, potential clients have a strong reason to give you a chance. And the only way clients can refer others to you is when your brand has made an impression on them.

Now that we’ve covered the importance of branding, let’s move on to how you can brand your business properly.

Find the Story Behind Your Business

A significant part of the branding process is coming up with your brand story. This is essentially the background of your brand and why you decided to create it in the first place. If your business has a specific mission or cause, that would also be part of its brand story.

Why is a brand story important? The reason you need this is that clients aren’t just choosing what your business can do for them, they’re choosing what your business represents. Perhaps your brand story is that this is the industry your family has been involved with for several generations. Or, maybe there’s a charity that your business is part of that relates to what it does.

When your brand has a good story behind it, people can better relate to your brand and connect with it. Of course, the story needs to be authentic for your brand to be successful. If you take too much artistic license with your brand story and people find out, it will ruin their trust in your business.

Choose Your Brand Values

As you know by this point, your brand values can attract clients who have similar values. You need to choose and define brand values for this to happen and to keep your business going in the right direction. The challenge is finding the values that fit your business.

You could go with attributes that are important to you, but the risk here is that you could end up with very generic values that don’t make your business unique at all. It’s like when a jobseeker mentions that they’re “hardworking” – anyone can describe themselves this way, therefore it doesn’t mean anything when someone does. If you choose values in that vein, such as “reliable,” your business will fail to stand out.

One of the most effective ways to choose brand values is to look back on previous experiences you’ve had with a business that prompted a strong reaction in you, good or bad. The good experiences will likely demonstrate potential values that you can emulate. Maybe you admire how a business gives back to its community, and you work on doing the same with your business. The bad experiences show you things you can avoid. For example, if you felt a business’s employees had a snobby attitude towards you, you could aim to make your business more laid back and approachable.

Base Design Elements on Your Brand Identity

After you know the story behind your brand and what its values are, you can start working on all the design elements. These include your logo, your website, and your marketing materials.

You need to have the story and the values first because they play a major role in the design elements. Your brand’s design will look significantly different if you’re going for a cool, casual look than if you want something more serious and professional. Any good designer you work with will want to know about your brand, and they’ll be able to do a better job for you when you have all this information ready.

Keep It Consistent

Getting people to remember your brand is no small feat. With most people, it will take multiple exposures to your business before you build that brand recognition with them. But you won’t have any luck building brand recognition if your branding is inconsistent.

Everything about your brand, from its story to its values and its design, needs to stay consistent for it to form an impression on people. You’re fighting an uphill battle if your LinkedIn ads have a different color scheme than your business’s logo and website. When you have a consistent brand image, people will have a much easier time remembering your business.

It’s not enough to simply have a great product or service that your business provides. For your business to succeed over the long term, you need to build its brand, and that requires you to go through an extensive branding process in the early stages. Although this can be a significant commitment in terms of time and money, it will pay off in the future when you have a recognizable brand that brings in clients.