How to Build a B2B Brand in 2022

Heyho!

We’re back with a shiny new Growth Report.

And I just counted, there is only two publications left until end of this year ??

So today in 26 days we are already curing our collective hangovers on January 1st of 2022, can you believe it?

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

For now, let’s grab a Glühwein and dive right into…

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...Today's topics

?? Sales & Marketing: How to Build a B2B Brand in 2022

???Tools of the Trade: Articles, Tools and Inspiration for Marketers

???Reflections from the Trenches: The Issue With "Keeping Your Options Open"

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How to Build a B2B Brand in 2022

Brand building for B2B has changed dramatically over the past couple of years. The old playbook of sponsorships, trade booths, SEO and banner ads become increasingly less important in a world where buying decisions are happening on social platforms and in niche-communities.

So following are four steps that I have seen success with personally and with our clients:

1. Open Up an Ongoing Stream on Customer Insights that your competitors never see

• Build a recurring community event where you offer free consulting to your target customers. All of the questions & data you get from this are pure consumer insights.
• Identify the social networks, groups, and communities where your customers spend their time. Don’t make assumptions!?Figure out how to be a part of those communities. Act like a peer, not a vendor (if you are not a peer, than choose someone else in your company).

If you approach this with the right mindset, you now have an ongoing stream of market insights every single day that your competitors never see (because they aren’t looking).

2. Build a Native Content Strategy Optimized for Social

• You need a completely?different content strategy for social than you do for SEO. That’s why most companies fail at social. Because they try to copy & paste their Google search strategy into LinkedIn (and it, obviously, fails).
• The difference is?on Google someone searches for something and then you give it to them?(they have intent to find that information). That’s not how it works?on social - there is no intent.?Which forces you to create content that people actually want.
• Who are we going after? Who is the target for this? What information are we sharing? What is our point of view? What are the key topics that they care about? Who is the subject matter expert who's going to create this information? How are we going to resource and produce it? How often do we need to produce it? What things are we going to need to do that?

Your content needs to be so much more relevant. So much more expertise-driven. So much more customer-centric. Build your team & allocate resources accordingly.

3. Identify the Social channels for initial distribution.

• We initially?distribute content on LinkedIn, Podcast & YouTube. We get most of the consumption directly on those platforms.
• Then there is secondary & tertiary distribution where people share the content & ideas in Slack channels, DMs, text messages, direct word of mouth, Facebook groups, LinkedIn shares, the list goes on and on.

There’s no tracking so companies don’t even realize it’s happening.

4. Strategize, Produce, Distribute, Analyze, Repeat

• Build a loop to consistently produce & distribute content. Listen to audience feedback. Engage in the comments. Look for qualitative insights about where they’re sharing it.
• The data here is mainly qualitative and not reflected in attribution software so most marketers don’t know what to do.

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If you’re a B2B company, your objective should be that everyone in your industry knows about you (and hopefully in a positive sense). Not just the people that use your product.

And they love you because:

1. You go into building the brand with the right mindset
2. You have a progressive, modern strategy for marketing and interacting with your customers and the market
3. You produce the best information on the internet for our buyers and you?distribute it?natively?in the channels where they actually pay attention.
4. You don’t spam people with sales-focused messaging all the time trying to shove them into meetings when they hate it

p.s. In 2011, brand was built with trade show booths & banner ads & SEO. But that was a decade ago and a lot has changed since then

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???Tools of the Trade:

Articles, Tools and Inspiration for Marketers

?? On Fate

“It is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves.”— Simone Weil

Marketing & Leadership Education

• A Culture of Writing ?- Why sharing your ideas publicly and in written form inside your company will make you a better leader, marketer and team mate.
• The Best Leaders are Feedback Magnets ?-?A fantastic article on how you can better deal with the feedback you receive and empower your colleagues to give you more of it.

Brands and (digital) Products that caught my eye

• Wisecut ?- An AI-driven video editing tool that creates automatic jump cuts, subtitles and background music for you.
• Clarity ?- Similar to HotJar, this new (and free!) tool from Microsoft shows you heatmaps and session recordings of your website visits.
• Buffer Start Page ?- A mobile landing page builder to showcase your work and digital portfolio. Looks really neat!

???Interesting reads

• To Be Happy, Hide From the Spotlight ?- Fame, despite its seemingly innate appeal, tends to be antithetical to happiness. And while many of us have abandoned our childhood dreams of becoming the next big popstar, we can still get lured in by the desire for smaller versions of fame, such as prestige. This fascinating article explains why that’s a bad idea — as well as what you can do to overcome the urge for notoriety and enjoy a happier life. (Source:?The Atlantic)
• How to Actually Remember People's Names ?- Studies show that people remember names better than faces, yet we’ve all experienced times when that’s simply not the case. The tips in this article will help you better recall names, strengthen relationships, and avoid embarrassing moments. It all starts with channeling your attention when you’re first introduced. (Source:?Wired)

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?? Reflections From the Trenches

The Issue With "Keeping Your Options Open"

A long time in my life I've been a big proponent of optionality — i.e. keeping as many options open as possible at any given time.

And it makes sense right? Options provide a certain feeling of freedom and peace of mind. When you got options, all the steps you take don't seem as risky.

But as I have come to see over the past couple of years or so, there is more nuance to optionality.

The trouble with optionality

In an essay called?The Trouble with Optionality ,?Harvard professor Mihir Desai worries that the language of finance has polluted life. He condemns the modern, finance-fueled affair with optionality.

Rather than taking risks or working on important projects, students acquire options.?In finance, when you hold an option and the world moves with you, you enjoy the benefits; when the world moves against you, your downside risk is protected and you don’t have to do anything. The more optionality, the better.

Picking a path reduces optionality, so people stay in limbo and don’t make commitments.?This language doesn’t only apply to career planning. Some students talk about marriage and having kids as the death of optionality (maybe that's why we're getting married later and having fewer children).

But the optionality metaphor is harmful if you run too far with it. Optionality is a means to an end, not the end itself.

The goal of optionality

Isn't the point of optionality to eventually commit to something?

When we pursue optionality, we avoid bold decisions. Like anything meaningful, venturing into the unknown is an act of faith. It demands responsibility. You‘ll have to take a stand, trust your decision, and ignore the taunts of outside dissent.

But a life without conviction is a life controlled by the futile winds of fashion.?Meaning and commitment are two sides of the same coin. The act of committing to something — a business, a child, a relationship, a place, or a community — brings forth the kind of meaning that so many people are starving for these days.

Societally, we overvalue optimization at the expense of commitment. There are tradeoffs in every decision you make, so past a certain point, having the perfect personal life is less important than having one you've simply committed to.

Instead of holding out for the best possible option to emerge, it's sometimes better to choose, commit, and start investing in something.

The proper balance of optionality and commitment depends on who you are and where you are in life, but urban technocrats are undervaluing commitment right now.

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That's it for this week.

Talk soon,

Sandro