The Real B2B Brand: Your Industry Expertise

I work with B2B brands from startups to big enterprises, and as marketers, we often desperately want to talk about the importance of investing in "brand" as an important lever to gaining market share in crowded and competitive spaces.

But in the midst of that conversation, I think we've made a mistake. Several, actually.

Most of the discussion we have about brand is centered on creating that amorphous "awareness" we know is important but we have a hard time pinning down. I mean, is it really enough for someone to just know you exist? In today's environment where marketing is undergoing more pressure than ever account for below-the-line results like pipeline and execs are allergic to long time-horizons to deliver returns, that's a tough conversation to have.

The second problem is that most brand marketing still centers the brand itself and is self-promotional by nature. Here's who we are, here's what we do, here's what we offer.

The third and perhaps biggest swing-and-a-miss in B2B marketing is how we talk about thought leadership and where we place it in the marketing funnel.

(Funnels are a really outdated rubric in a lot of ways and we can have that conversation another day, but for the purpose of this dialogue, let's agree that it's a simple way of describing the journey we hope someone takes from being a total stranger to our brand to being a customer and eventually an advocate through a series of touches, experiences and decisions about how they'd like to work with with us).

It's first important to recognize that brand marketing, demand marketing, and lead generation may (somewhat misguidedly) sit separately on many marketing organizational charts, but the reality is that all marketing is demand generation marketing and in a B2B world, all marketing efforts should eventually generate prospective customers. I mean...that's our job.

By that same token, all marketing that our prospective customers touch is, by definition, brand marketing since it's continuing to form impressions with those prospective customers about our company, products, people and purpose in the marketplace. Every touchpoint is shaping what our audiences think about our brand, no matter where in the purchase or consideration journey they may be.

Thought leadership often gets relegated to what I'll call "mid" funnel, or Consideration, or the idea that once someone knows about you, thought leadership is what helps them consider whether or not you're qualified to actually partner with them.

To me, that's the mistake.

Thought leadership, when done well, is very likely the impression your audiences will have of your brand even before they're aware that you exist.

Let me bring this to life with an example or two.

The Future of Commerce is a crazy good website, spearheaded by my fearless friend and colleague Jenn VandeZande. It's chock full of insights, research, opinions, examples and trends shaping the world of commerce including marketing, customer experience, sales...and across a whole bunch of different industries.

It's also produced and resourced by SAP, an industry leader in enterprise technology, including (but not limited to) solutions tied to CX. (Disclaimer, I've contributed to this site in the past and SAP is a client of my employer, LinkedIn, but this is just my personal POV on why I think what they're doing is so smart).

So if you encounter and read content from FoC, you're having a "pre-brand" experience with SAP. You're learning that they have perspectives on the sector, ideas and insights to bring to the table, relationships with industry experts, and they're investing in the betterment of their customer and future-customer community by making all kinds of really great information available out there for free. Along the way, you'll inevitably learn that the site is the product of SAP's intellectual property, and that touchpoint and link begins to form associations in your mind about SAP's qualifications and when you become an "in market" buyer at some point in the future for the kinds of solutions they provide, they're more likely to be on your radar because of that association.

Autodesk does something similar with their Design & Make library, and Gong publishes their Gong Labs blog that's a collection of insights informed by the data research team and their own technology across 375M+ calls they've captured and analyzed.

Want something more creative? The Message is a podcast by GE, followed closely by its second season LifeAfter. It's a fictional sci-fi serial that explores the limits of technology and features many real-world innovations that GE has brought to life. The series was a Cannes Lions winner and while I guess you could argue whether or not this fits the mold of "thought leadership" as we've always known it, I'd argue it's doing what thought leadership is designed to do: LEAD in THOUGHT and provoke different, innovative, or exploratory ideas and perspectives.

There are countless examples of great thought leadership that really pre-wires concepts and associations with the relevant brands. The point is that audiences are much more likely to encounter this kind of content before they're even in the headspace to be receptive to or interested in what we'd traditionally consider "brand marketing".

It's entertaining, or its informative, or educational, or all of the above and most importantly, doesn't come with overt commercial associations that can sometimes turn off or away audiences who aren't yet in market (research shows that's about 95% of the market at any given time).

So my pitch is this:

When you're looking for ways to justify "brand" marketing, I encourage you to look at the business value of establishing your industry expertise as your differentiator to bring people into those early peripheral associations with your brand.

Awareness isn't enough. And its stickiness depends on it happening in the right context (I'm now "aware" of a brand more readily because I need it). So perhaps more valuable than "knowing we exist" is offering up our expertise, knowledge, insight, and relevant mastery over our industry to introduce ourselves and contribute something of value to the market first. I'd argue that doesn't come after the "top" of the funnel, it's happening before there's even a funnel to begin with.

If your B2B brand is the collection of associations and experiences your audience has with you over time, building thought leadership intentionally and strategically is arguably the most important brand investment you can make.

So this is my petition to move thought leadership out of the middle of the funnel—or maybe out of the funnel altogether—and consider how it may very well be what we've intended, wanted and demanded from B2B "brand" marketing all along.