Decoding The 6 Stages Of Brand Journey For B2B Businesses
Naseef KPO
Founder & CEO, Skalegrow - B2B Marketing Agency | IIM Bangalore | Speaker | Mentor | Helping 20+ B2B Marketing Leaders & CEOs Do Marketing Right | Building India's Largest B2B Marketing Community | ?? Book a meeting now
While the importance of a brand is well understood in the B2C space, not many business owners realize its value in the B2B world.?But to build a sustainable business that wins in the long run, developing your company into a recognizable brand is a must for B2B organizations.
The importance of brand equity
In any niche, there is an equally good competitor out there who can offer similar products and services to yours. So how do you differentiate??
One of the ways to do that is branding – it helps to establish trust and credibility. The higher your brand equity, the better your chances of winning a deal against your competition.?
Understanding the stages of a brand journey helps you devise your business and marketing plan with an aim to progress from one stage to the other. This requires not just number crunching and logical thinking, but your creative brain to work to understand the ‘emotional’ element behind branding.
Keeping these in mind, let us look at how branding plays its part in the B2B world through the 6 stages of the brand journey.
The 6 stages of a brand journey
As you might be already knowing, the 6 stages of the brand journey are:
Let us look at each of them in detail.
1. Formulating a brand identity
Brand identity refers to the subtle perception your target audience forms when they come across your company or product. In essence, it is brand identity that creates the first impression about your brand. So make sure your business’ ‘face’ is ‘well-groomed’ wherever your prospects see it.?
Some of the questions you could ask yourself to formulate a brand identity are:
By finding answers to these questions, you should be able to design a brand identity that 'defines' your business.
2. Increasing brand awareness
The brand awareness stage is characterized by your prospects having a recall and recognition of your company without having to force it. While recognition is about the ability of a prospect to identify your business while he/she sees any content about it, recall is about him/her remembering it without a trigger in a specific context.?
Following are a few reasons why brand awareness is important for B2B businesses:
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3. Building brand credibility
Brand credibility is about evoking a positive feeling about your business whenever people hear about it. This requires your business to be more than 'present' in the channels your prospects actively hang out.
And brand credibility – in today’s digital world – is determined more by online reviews, customer testimonials, social media sentiments, etc. than any physical evidence.?So it is essential for your organization to have a 'positive presence' across all these online channels.
Broadly speaking, given below are some of the ways in which you can do this:
4. Enabling brand engagement
Brand engagement is all about your business’ interaction with prospects and customers.?You need to have an omnichannel approach to this to enable brand engagement with your customers where they want and when they want. From email to videos to social media to events and conferences, the touchpoints are plenty.
This stage can be read along with the previous stage. Here, things like the following need to be managed with utmost care:
It is when you implement brand engagement the right way that you will be able to build brand credibility that lasts for the long term.
5. Ensuring brand receptivity
Your business attains brand receptivity when you become the most popular among the crowd.?This is the stage where your customers think about referring you to a peer as they enjoy and feel your products and services. At this stage you have:
Reaching this stage is game-changing for any B2B business, especially those which have to renew contracts every year or within a shorter period (examples of such businesses include B2B SaaS companies, media websites, lead generation service providers, etc.). This is because retention becomes less of a challenge and the company can focus more on new business generation.
6. Achieving brand resonance
This is the most mature stage of a brand journey where your customers become your loyal fans. They start to identify themselves with your company’s brand.?In B2B, this manifests in the following ways:
It is important to note that there is always a thin line between the 6 stages of a brand's journey. And often, one leads to the other (or one complements the other). So instead of looking at each of these stages in isolation, try to understand where your brand fits in as a whole, and what you need to do as a business to make the most of your branding efforts.
That wraps up how you can look at the 6 stages of a brand journey for B2B businesses. I could cover only so much in an article. If you got more questions, please do leave them in the comments section.
As always, until we meet next time, happy learning!
Consultant— Demand Generation | Content Syndication | Intent Data | ABM | Performance Marketing | Demo/Appointment Generation
2 年Good read, thanks for sharing it, Nassef