How To Create Brand Awareness Amongst Decisionmakers

As discussed in my previous blog article , the state of brand awareness in B2B is generally pathetic, and your brand probably needs to do better. The reason why can be summed up in one word – decisionmakers. When the time comes for them to weigh in on a purchasing decision, most of them will never have read your blogs , social media, or other content that B2B marketing uses to create awareness. And even if they have, they still have trouble telling you apart, or remembering you when you come back for repeat business.

Companies like Cisco, Oracle, and Qualcomm address this awareness problem, and all other awareness problems, by running national TV ads and putting their names on sports stadiums. But even if you can afford conventional B2C-style advertising, that does not always mean that you should, as demonstrated by all those godawful B2B ads you see at airports.

B2B companies often are not staffed with the right people to make conventional advertising decisions, and that’s okay. You can still create brand awareness using content marketing and other brainy methods that are more in your wheelhouse.

As tactics go, they’re fairly conventional, but there’s one thing to keep in mind when going after the c-suite. Unlike the levels below, where work-related reading is more patchy and self-directed, CXOs have loads of required and discretionary reading, and they're handed more things to read all the time, and never have time for it all. So you can’t just add something to the pile and hope it gets read, you need an unfair advantage, and that advantage is validation, from an authority, or someone else decisionmakers respect.

Consultancies

One of the differences between rank & file employees and decisionmakers is that the latter reads a lot more content from, and has more dealings with, consultancies. In other words, consultancies are part of their circle, and one good way to make sure that your content gets read when you offer it to them is to have a consultancy's name on it.

It could be a whitepaper (research) or an e-book (advice). The format doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it’s drawing on original data, and thoughts and insights, from them, not stuff from you, which might be original, or might just be the results of a Google search mixed up in a blender and later baked into a PDF waffle by a content writer (not that I’ve ever done anything like that).

And if you’re going to take the time and expend the resources to do this, I don’t think you should be too geeky or industry-specific with your content. Go broad. Talk about something that affects all your customers, not just some of them. Because the goal is brand awareness, after all, so make it brand-level.

Media Coverage

B2B is funny. The brand, if anyone is actually responsible for it at all, is usually considered marketing’s baby, and yet we leave most of the tasks involved in creating awareness of the brand to media relations. In theory, this makes sense. Media validation is the best kind when it comes to brand awareness, because not only can it reach the c-suite, it can reach everyone else (if you’re lucky).

Thus, it’s the closest your average B2B business can get to putting your name on a stadium. Content written by journalists is best. Bylines written by you are second-best. But either way, media is perhaps the largest piece of low-hanging fruit, content-wise, that B2B businesses are neglecting.

At this point, you might think that you’re not neglecting it. In fact, you might be putting a lot of time and effort into it. But it might not be very effective, because media relations success doesn't happen in a vacuum. It requires the involvement of marketing, because unless you do in fact have your name on a stadium, a B2B brand cannot be separated from the product, and media relations needs marketing support to make sure your products and solutions are presented to journalists in the right way. Because if marketing doesn't help, either product owners fill the void, or nobody fills it. Neither result is desirable. Here’s an article I wrote that goes deeper. ?

Influencers

People tend to think of influencers as a way to enhance your social media reach. And while, yeah, they can do that, I don’t think this is what they’re best for in B2B. I actually think the most bang for your influencer buck can be achieved by using them as a shortcut to decisionmakers. Because a lot of CXOs aren’t going to be following you on social media. Or receiving your emails. Or running into you while futzing around on Google.

However, they might be following a book author they respect, or the person who gave that TED talk that everyone in your industry watched last year. But separating the influencer wheat from the chaff is hard, even in B2B. There are a lot of freeloaders commanding bot armies out there. There are also people who’ve attained a lot of followers by relentlessly sharing industry news & discourse, without really adding anything of value to it.

Nobody in B2B cares about validation from either of these types. Useful validation comes from people who write respected books and well-read newsletters. Who’ve run businesses and have their names on patents. And who speak at tradeshows. Not the people sitting in the audience at those tradeshows, live tweeting what the real influencers are saying, with crumbs on their clothes from the free food that your brand is paying for.

Peers

Some industry influencers are also peers of your customer’s decisionmakers, but in this case the sort of content that I’m talking about is case studies. And I’m not talking about those truncated, abbreviated, bullet-pointed, 400-word long case studies. I’m talking case studies that are worthy of their label as the single most effective type of B2B content. I’m talking about slick videos and glossy PDFs, thousands of words long, with colorful figures, customer testimonials, and a snazzy layout.

Think about the one or two or three real kick-ass promoted case studies you could do each year for the same amount of money that you’re paying half a dozen middling content writers to keep your blog populated with articles nobody who matters reads, or what you’re spending yearly on organic social content that nobody who doesn’t work for you shares. Here’s an article I wrote on what's holding your holding case studies back.

How Do You Maximize Executive Impact?

Of course, getting your content read or seen by the c-suite is only half the battle. How much do you read and see every day that’s just “in one ear and out the other?” Your content needs to have an impact. To achieve real awareness for your brand, your content must make them sit up and say, “Wow, these people are really onto something. This is a brand worth noting.” Of course, “impact” is kind of vague. There are many ways to impact an audience. But I can think of two ways to do it that are reasonably close to what I would call “replicable.”

Talk Business

Probably the biggest mistake that I see B2B businesses make with content aimed at decisionmakers is that it’s too technical. I remember once watching a major telecom CEO take questions from a crowd. Someone asked him about whether they were using public or private Cloud, and he said that he didn’t know. And that pretty much says it all right there.

But non-technical content is not easily produced by many B2B companies, mostly because content writers are often paid for their technical or SEO expertise (or the appearance of it) as opposed to their empathy or business savvy. And people tend to think that content formats often aimed at CXOs, like whitepapers and e-books, are inherently technical. But this is not true. All that whitepapers and e-books really need to be is authoritative (i.e., well considered and well researched). Whether they have to be technical depends on the topic and audience.

What works best with an executive-level audience will not always be consistent (the c-suite can bring together people from very diverse backgrounds), but probably the safest route is to talk business. Don’t just talk about some kind of technology, talk about how it’ll transform your customer’s industry. Offer practical, easy-to-grasp advice on how they can stay competitive, create new revenue streams, or maximize shareholder value using that tech.

Remember, we’re always saying that sales content should talk about business value, and the c-suite is the reason why. So it’s probably a savvy move to make your other content aimed at them focused on business value as well. And include some graphs and piecharts. Executives are attracted to data visualizations, probably because that’s what they’re always being shown.

Be Original

As I mentioned earlier, B2B decisionmakers are being constantly bombarded with content. Much of it might have merit or value, but according to a joint LinkedIn-Edelman study , what CXOs really thirst for is content that tells them something counterintuitive, or something they otherwise don’t already know. There’s a lot of content out there, even content that companies spend a lot of money paying consultancies and influencers to make, that basically just confirms or drills down into prevailing dogma, without really adding anything to it.

But CXOs don’t need that. They’re always having the dogma repeated to them by people they trust and rely on anyway. What they need from you is other stuff. They need new perspectives. They need challenges to their assumptions. They need vision. And what you say doesn’t always have to be right (CXOs certainly aren’t). It just needs to stimulate discussion, or add to it, which is something all good content should do.

And it can make a real difference. According to LinkedIn , 45% of decisionmakers claim to have invited a thought leadership producer to bid when they had not previously considered the organization, with roughly 60% saying that thought leadership directly led to awarding business (something only 26% of sellers believes possible). Of course, people are not the best judges of their own decisionmaking. And also of course, LinkedIn makes money by helping you create thought leadership content and advertise it, so a bit of skepticism is required here.

I think it more likely that what that “60%” number really means is that roughly 60% of business decisionmakers have awarded business to vendors that wrote thought leadership content that impacted them. Correlation is not causation, but a number that big can’t be ignored either.

Remember The Brand In Brand Awareness

Most of what I’ve discussed so far is tactical, but if you really want to increase your brand awareness, the brand must be more than just your logo. As I’ve alluded to once or twice already, probably the single biggest awareness problem, or problem in general, that B2B brands have is that buyers can’t tell you apart. Followers try to look and sound just like leaders, while leaders look and sound like each other.

Leader brands can get away with this, because our brains are comfortable with distinguishing and remembering three or so leaders in any particular category, and because recognized leaders have what might be called “attention gravity.”

If you’re a follower, you have neither advantage. If you want to create awareness, you can’t just follow the leaders (it’s too undistinguished), and you can’t just copy them (too expensive). Instead, you must challenge them. Here’s an article I wrote that discusses more on why, and what this would look like.

And if you are a market leader but not a leader brand (i.e., you’re a leader but not recognized as one), typically this means you’re good at what you do, but your brand lacks prominence and definition. This can happen in B2B when you rely heavily on partners to make sales, and/or because you can't imagine a future where you can command more of a premium with less acquisition cost because of a strong brand.

In this case, it can be hard to convince leadership to invest or commit more to the brand directly, so instead focus on some of those non-technical types of content I mentioned earlier. Success here, especially with decisionmakers, can convince leadership of the value of brand awareness tactics, which will inspire commitment to the brand in turn.

Should You Do Conventional Advertising?

This is a thorny question. Most B2B advertising is awful because digital advertising formats are awful. And even if you’re advertising in an analog format, it mostly sucks anyway, even if you throw a lot of resources at it. Let’s face it, if you sell something complex to enterprises, it can be hard to summarize in a zippy way on a billboard.

And even if your advertising doesn’t suck, conventional brand advertising works by repetition and commitment; years’ worth of commitment. And B2B marketing departments are often beset by short-termism, high turnover, and the lack of a clearly-defined brand to be aware of.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t advertise, but I think there are two general conditions where it works best. One is when your B2B business sells heavily to freelancers and small businesses. Those audiences are easier to appeal to in a simple intuitive advertising-friendly way (i.e., they’re not corporate). And two, don’t advertise conventionally, do it unconventionally.

Here’s a good example of a highly-effective unconventional B2B tactic used by SAP involving ant farms as swag. And you don’t need to have an SAP-sized budget to make something like this work, just the willingness to approve an off-the-wall idea.?