Guide to Build Brand Authority for Small B2B Companies

These days, authority matters. For small B2B companies or professional service providers, your perceived authority is what allows you to up your game.

Not only will building your brand’s authority help attract new business, and create more opportunities, but it’ll also drastically shorten sales cycles.

But here’s the thing you must understand — building brand authority is a marathon, not a sprint. It can influence customer behavior over time as you effectively communicate with your audience. This will not only help you sell services and products, it will help you better forecast the growth of your business.

Before you get started on Building Brand Authority:

• Step 1: Define the characteristics, problem/challenges and behaviors of your ideal customer
• Step 2: Discover or create your value proposition/difference
• Step 3: Document your vision, mission and objectives

Demonstrate Your Ability to Lead

Any small business that’s had success in building brand authority has showcased their ability to lead. One of best ways to demonstrate leadership is to discover and develop your own core point of view.

Let’s face it — B2Bs large and small have a problem standing out in our modern landscape. Products and services are largely undifferentiated to buyers, and trust is at rock bottom, especially for unfamiliar brands.

This sets the expectation for every small business to develop a set of foundational principles that their company is built upon. Then turn each of those steps into the building blocks for creating a message for how their approach, process or method to solving their prospects and customers problem is unique.

This point of view must run through every element of content you create for generating awareness, educating, building trust, converting prospects and retaining customers. It’s the basis of your organizations presentations, newsletters, tradeshow material, special reports, whitepapers, webinars and speaking.

When you create and nurture a meaningful package of principles you also start to build a methodology that your prospects, can begin to understand, share and extend.

Step By Step Guide to Build Your Brand Authority

1. Write a blog post on your core point of view. For example, 7 Components of a Successful _______, 7 Steps to ______________ Success, 7 Habits of Highly Effective _________,
2. Create an image for each of the 7 Steps and share one tip per day on social channels
3. Expand the blog post into 7 separate blog posts — one on each topic
4. Combine the posts and add an introduction. Send off to a designer and have it turned into an whitepaper
5. Take the whitepaper and translate it to presentation slides. You now have your hour presentation.
6. Go even deeper and turn the hour presentation into a 1/2 workshop by adding action steps and worksheets to support your presentation.

You now have 8 blog posts, 7 social media posts, an whitepaper, an hour presentation and a 1/2 day workshop — from your content foundation.

Focusing on the foundation of your brand authority will mean your marketing will be easier to create ideal customers, will reach more potential prospects and, most importantly, help your company achieve your business goals.