The 101 of Building a (B2B) Brand

La Famiglia shares learnings from Laura Schröder

In early spring, La Famiglia had the pleasure of hosting Laura Schröder to share some of her deep wisdom on building B2B brands with a group of early stage founders. The following article is a summary of Laura’s top tips for the broader founder community.

For many early stage companies, brands are a mystical concept. This is especially true for B2B, where the target audience of a brand can vary widely: from the size of company targeted, to the user versus decision maker of a product, what your brand embodies and whom it should speak, all can be difficult questions to answer.

Laura does away with this mysticism. She highlights that from the outside strong brands look easy, but tons of work goes into building them. Moreover, building a brand is a journey that is never over — there is a reason behind the rebranding of even the most successful companies (think Google or Airbnb). With scale, customer profiles, a company’s market positioning and internal culture all evolve, often maturing, or widening from the niche a company started in. As a result, the former brand — think the body of the company’s character — does not fit anymore. A good product marketing engine helps position and promote your brand but building a great brand goes deeper than that; it begins with the very fundamental question of why your company exists. But first things first.

Part 1) The typical B2B Brand Journey

While branding is important for B2B startups, most startups have not yet completed a proper brand-defining exercise when they hire their first product marketers. In the spirit of moving fast, this is not a mistake but it does mean that once your company hits a certain threshold of success and is suddenly surrounded by competitors you will need to go back to basics and do this properly.

For more information on building a strong B2B Brand, see Part 2) defining a strong B2B brand.

Image 1: The Typical Brand Journey (credit: Laura Schröder)

Baby steps

First there is nothing. In the earliest days of a startup’s evolution, many companies do not have sales pitch decks yet, let alone ones adapted to different client personas involved in the buying process. While the pressure might be high, not having perfect materials to start with is okay. Your customers will know they are dealing with a young company that will evolve over time. Notably, we are often impressed when companies, despite a weak brand and early (aka still slightly shitty) product, are able to generate early customer stickiness and product love.

• Key Strategies: Focus on setting up Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and digital marketing to help potential customers find you and closing first deals
• Key People: Founder or Product Manager writes content; external agencies / freelancers support with website
• Key Expectations: Sales presentation and website cover bare necessities to get the job done; no refined material given priorities lie in building the product and finding first customers

Learning to walk

Once a company has its first customers, thoughts around product marketing and brand perception start to arise. Oftentimes, this period will be quite messy because several people (often without product marketing expertise) are involved in producing product content, often without any clear guidelines around how the product and company should be communicated. With limited human resources, companies make do with what they have, creating a somewhat messy product marketing strategy. However, any content is better than no content and speed requires not insisting on perfection. It is okay to hire more junior talent to ensure some content gets “out there” and you will fulfil the basic communicative demands required to close deals with customers (a website explaining the product, sales collateral, customer success collateral).

• Key Strategies: Find efficient ways to create a larger pool of content to bring the product to market and set up first outbound marketing channels (e.g. e-mail, search); hiring specialised talent to relieve founders and product managers from marketing tasks
• Key People: First focused resources (junior product marketer, interns); (freelance) content writer; in-house designer, first promotions of enthusiastic business development talent into sales enablement; first PR hires (agencies); first marketing expert
• Key Expectations: See first repeatable results from product marketing strategies — while there are first workshops around values of the company and brand, the overall external brand is often still not yet well-defined or professionalised

Learning to Run

When customers repeatedly find value in a solution and a product takes off (remember that famous hockey stick?), an early stage of product-market fit is reached. At this inflection point, startups start to feel strong pressure to serve demand more efficiently and build expert-guided processes to align core activities of the business. The experience of experts who have built up and led teams throughout this phase before becomes key. Time to market is critical at this stage as new entrants may have entered and existing offerings may have adapted to your product offering. This often doesn’t allow existing talent to make a lot of mistakes, experiment, and slowly figure things out.

The goal now is to show strong quality in several dimensions while also investing in building scalable working processes to operate quickly and at scale. For brand purposes, quality is increasingly important — clear differentiation and value are key. You may need to rethink your brand at this stage, which in turn requires that you know your customers and target market and how you uniquely serve them.

Given the scaling demand, all touch points with your brand need to be reconsidered and professionalised. Starting with demand generation and top of funnel, to website landing pages, as well as any sales collateral. PR also becomes of higher importance to help position a company in its target market well and build brand recognition within the customer base as well as towards potential hires.

• Key Product Marketing Strategies: Bigger PR push to build a brand’s position in the market; strong customer success stories; redesign of key collateral (marketing campaigns, content, website, sales collateral); up-levelling visual identity, personas, and value proposition; stronger focus on optimising scaling budgets in performance marketing
• Key People: Experienced product marketing hire(s); Specialised customer marketing hire; dedicated brand expert
• Key Expectations: Building thought leadership — The brand needs to be taken to the next level and needs strong professionalization; introducing integrated marketing for key campaigns; Improving sales productivity

Overall, as a company matures in its growth journey, it will move from the early stages of bare necessities for Go-to-Market, including basic sales collateral and a website, to specialised support in lead generation, branding and PR, to sales enablement support for positioning and messaging, and lastly more sophisticated materials that includes strong case studies and materials adapted to different verticals and/or new markets.

Part 2) Defining a Strong B2B Brand

In the beginning of the startup journey, companies are focused on deeply understanding their customer needs and building an early product that they can sell successfully. Over time, as the product takes further shape and the customer base grows, more structured branding exercises allow startups to define their brand, positioning, associated content and visual identity.

The brand should convey the company’s personality and mission, evoking a desired emotional response within your target audience.

Image 2: What’s in a brand? (credit: Laura Schröder)

The below questions will help you express your company’s mission and vision, reflect on your value proposition, contextualise your product within your customer base, and consider existing descriptions about your product and company.

Image 3: The Five Pillars of a Brand (credit: Laura Schröder)

Taken together, these insights will help define your company’s brand.

Part 3) Oiling the Engine

We have outlined the different branding needs of growing B2B companies as well as what is required to build a strong B2B brand. In the following section, Laura shares more tactics for building a scalable product marketing engine.

Different marketing approaches

In product marketing, one size does not fit all. Depending on your product, you might exclusively target small businesses or enterprises, but more often than not the customer ecosystem tends to comprise companies of different sizes. When targeting companies with up to 150 FTEs, Laura recommends focusing on content-led growth. Positioning content at the core of the marketing strategy, with investments focusing on strong SEO as well as performance marketing to capture a strong funnel for conversion.

When targeting bigger enterprises with more than 500 FTEs, brand-led sales becomes more important, and sales cycles are likely to be longer since on the customer side more stakeholders will be involved in a sale. Thought leadership and tailored evidence-based collateral is important to optimally cater to different audiences.

Understanding your audience

No matter if an SME or an enterprise-sized customer base, chances are you won’t have a single buyer persona. Understanding the needs of your different customers as well as different people within a single customer is pivotal to building a product marketing efforts that cater for multidimensionality.

To that end, messages need to be aligned to different stakeholders. In this phase, you will likely adapt the tonality as well as content of your brand messaging, although your overall brand messaging and identity should remain consistent.

• There are likely different pain points and goals of customers, depending on the (digital) maturity of the business, industry, or geography. Consider a venture-backed scale up with low organizational and high digital maturity versus a traditional mid market company with high organizational and low digital maturity.
• Users of your product are not necessarily identical with buyers of your product. For example, some products, require the C-level to sign off the purchase decision, but saving time and having less friction in day-to-day processes might not make the list of top priorities of a CEO; instead they might care most about achieving strategic business outcomes for the next 6 months, such as harmonising their company’s technology infrastructure. When creating product marketing material, ensure you have appropriate — often separate — content for different stakeholders.
• Your audience might not only consist of customers. Depending on your business model and industry, other stakeholders may become important audiences to communicate with effectively. These could include: regulatory entities, as well as partners and influencers that can act as multipliers.
• Your mission statement is not equal to your customers’ needs. Every strong company needs a why, a bigger mission and vision that creates a north star for the organization as a whole. However, it is important not to confuse this mission with the business reality of your customers. Each company cares primarily about their own pains and your solution should clearly address these pains.
• Rather than only hearing about what you can do for a potential customer, let your customers speak for you. Strong case studies about the value your solution drives for different customers can serve as strong marketing collateral, driven by authentic insights that are contextualised through tangible business realities.

Content is a (never ending) process

You have now successfully defined your brand, created strong marketing and sales collateral. However, an important thing to remember is that content is a process and never done as such. Every brand messaging will need a retouch every now and then to more authentically speak to the different phases of maturity of your business, changing customer bases and new market realities. Equally, your audiences are content-hungry and require a refresh in messaging and communication to stay curious and engaged.

Luckily, you can reuse a lot of previously produced content, cutting and mixing it in different ways to create new collateral, or sometimes a simple refresh also does the job. And while experienced marketing leaders, alongside your growing business, will allow you to set up processes for a marketing engine that works like clockwork the job of building and maintaining a strong B2B brand is never done.