Creating a unique brand personality for B2B marketing is not just a nice-to-have, but a strategic way to stand out from the competition, connect with your target audience, and build trust and loyalty. In this article, you will learn how to define, develop, and communicate your brand personality in the B2B context.
Brand personality is the set of human traits and characteristics that define your brand's identity and voice. It reflects your brand's values, mission, and culture, and influences how your brand interacts with your customers, partners, and stakeholders. Brand personality can be expressed through your name, logo, design, tone, style, and story.
B2B brands usually have a certain fixed set of rules to look professional. If this is done wrongly, it can look generic and just like any other B2B. The key to this is understanding what you'll want to convey to your target audience, how it makes them feel and what you want the company to represent. Even a simple mark in a logo plays an important distinction in brands.
Brand personality is important for B2B marketing because it helps you differentiate your brand from your competitors, who may offer similar products or services. It also helps you create a memorable and consistent brand image, that resonates with your ideal customers and their needs, preferences, and emotions. By having a strong and distinctive brand personality, you can build a lasting relationship with your customers, based on trust, credibility, and value.
Having an established brand personality can be a helpful steering mechanism, both externally (advertising) and internally. It should help guide what your brand IS and what it ISN'T. Example: A vendor designs an ad with a bold, humorous headline but your brand personality is neither of those things. Your brand's employees should have enough of an understanding of your brand personality that they can prevent that ad from running. It doesn't matter if you actually like the headline –?having an established brand personality takes away some of the subjectivity and provides guardrails for marketers and designers to abide by.
To define your brand personality, you need to understand your brand's core attributes, such as your vision, mission, values, goals, and positioning. You also need to research your target market, including their demographics, psychographics, pain points, and motivations. Then, you can use frameworks, such as the brand personality spectrum or the brand archetype model, to identify the most suitable traits and characteristics for your brand. For example, you can choose whether your brand is more sincere, exciting, competent, sophisticated, or rugged, or whether it aligns with an archetype, such as the hero, the outlaw, the lover, or the sage.
To develop your brand personality, you need to translate your chosen traits and characteristics into tangible and consistent elements of your brand identity. This includes your name, logo, color palette, typography, imagery, and slogan. You also need to craft your brand story, which is the narrative that explains who you are, what you do, why you do it, and how you do it differently. Your brand story should showcase your brand personality and connect with your audience on an emotional level.
To communicate your brand personality, you need to apply it across all your touchpoints and channels, both online and offline. This means using your brand identity and story to create engaging and relevant content and messages for your website, social media, email, blog, podcast, video, webinar, case study, white paper, and more. You also need to use your brand personality to guide your tone of voice, which is how you express your brand's attitude and values through your words and style. Your tone of voice should be consistent, authentic, and appropriate for your audience and context.
To measure and improve your brand personality, you need to monitor and analyze how your audience perceives and responds to your brand. You can use tools, such as surveys, feedback forms, reviews, testimonials, and social media analytics, to collect and evaluate data on your brand awareness, recognition, recall, preference, loyalty, and advocacy. You can also use tools, such as SWOT analysis, competitor analysis, and gap analysis, to identify your brand's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and to find areas for improvement and innovation. By measuring and improving your brand personality, you can ensure that it remains relevant, distinctive, and appealing for your B2B market.
For a unique B2B brand personality Understand your audience. Simplify your values and mission. Differentiate from competitors. Personify your brand with traits. Maintain consistency in voice and tone. Use a compelling brand story. Design a visual identity. Develop content strategy. Be consistent across touch points. Align employees with the brand. Focus in problem solving solutions for customers. Continuous measure and adapt. Create a robust brand personality cultivates trust and the connections in the competitive B2B environment.