Why B2B Needs Brand-Level Content Teams

“We must stop focusing so much on leads and conversions and build our brand.”

This advice is proliferating across B2B marketing. And it's the correct advice, but not that simple.

This recommendation is mostly coming from B2B marketers. And B2B marketing often thinks “brand building” is when you give the nerdiest person at your company an unlimited blowhorn to bore the world to death with unrelenting geek speak.

Without a script. Without guidance. And with little-to-no effort to tie it to what you sell.

But this can only work when you’ve got a rockstar founder whose personal brand drives the company brand. Without that, you need proper brand building, which is best done by a brand-level effort across the organization — including a brand-level content team.

That’s right.

You need a content team separate from the people handling your content marketing.

Because content marketing should be focused on filling your marketing funnel and keeping it flowing, while brand is largely a different thing than marketing.

A brand campaign and a marketing campaign may have some or even all of the same goals, but brand covers many things outside of marketing as well and therefore so must a brand content team.

Who Should Run Brand-Level Content?

Ideally your corporate marketing department (if there is such a thing separate from the daily grind of generating MQLs). But if there isn't one, I'd recommend media relations take charge, since their goals (brand awareness, sentiment, salience, etc.) are more or less the same goals that your brand content team should have.

And if hiring in-house people for this isn't practical (which it may not be because you'll need diverse skills), you may want to let an agency be your team, as they're often better suited than your content marketing people to create the sort of high-gloss, less-technical content that builds a brand.

And it also may be easier for an agency to work with the brand consultant in charge of your overall brand-level efforts instead of a B2B lifer who lacks brand experience.

What Should This Brand-Level Content Team Do?

Brand touches everything, making it hard to summarize the responsibilities of a brand content team. But they should include:

Run Social Media

Content marketing, with its focus on inbound tactics, newsletter subscriptions, and email, has little incentive to be interested in social, since social media is too random in terms of who sees it.

But brand is a much better fit, because brand isn’t so particular about who sees it. Conversion isn't the name of the game with brand. They mostly just want the word out.

Both brand and social content also work better when less technical. And brand doesn't care if media relations wants to post a press release instead of giving today's LinkedIn slot to some piece of marketing content, since brand isn't under pressure to sell.

Brand also doesn't care if today's post focuses on other things marketing may consider trivial or distracting, like recruitment or employee stories.

And that stuff does great on LinkedIn.

Create Branded Marketing Content Assets

Recently I wrote a blog article about the need for B2B brands to create more content assets in the brand's colors and with the brand's logo (as opposed to mere text on an otherwise non-descript webpage with brand elements largely confined to the periphery).

While a brand-level content team can't necessarily make all these assets (a good whitepaper or e-book may require more subject matter expertise on your side than you'll find on the brand team), they can take charge of adapting marketing content already made in non-asset form into something glossier.

The brand team can adapt that ultimate guide you wrote into a slick PDF. The brand team can mine your whitepaper for stats, figures, and factoids and adapt them for social. They can take your "7 Reasons Why" blogs and adapt them into carousels.

You don't want your content marketing people doing this stuff if you can avoid it. You don't want them focused on "hey look at me" content, which requires a lot of sweating over the surface details.

Content marketing people may not have time for this. They've got to keep the wheel turning.

Create Memory-Making Content

This doesn't sound very technical, I know. But I honestly can't think of what the correct technical name is for the type of content I'm about to describe, or if there even is one.

One of the primary ways brands are built is by creating memory associations that lead to your brand's name being recalled if a prospect encounters a certain problem or situation where what you sell can alleviate it.

Some call this mental availability, and the cues that trigger it category entry points (CEPs).

B2C brands often create them through advertising ("Rolaids spells relief"). But B2B rarely does conventional advertising, so we'll call it content. But it'll essentially be content that works like advertising.

What might such content look like?

It might be some branded visual stating a statistic related to your customer's industry that makes obvious the need for what you sell. The stat doesn't even need to be sourced from your research (though it'd be better if it was).

Or it might be a social media image showing someone trying to escape from an office that's flooding with a helping hand being extended from above, all next to the headline: "Need a Rescue from Unstructured Data?"

It could be a lot of things. And you may indeed need a lot of these things to create the brand associations you want, especially if you're a brand that sells a lot of different things to different industries.

I know I'm being vague here. But this whole concept is vague because in B2B it's unexplored. But I know it's the future. Some of the brightest bulbs I know in B2B also think so. And the B2B brands that figure this stuff out will make history.

This all may sound a little too B2C-ish, but B2B needs to untighten its collective sphincter.

Your brand isn't just competing with other brands on LinkedIn. You're competing with politics, fuzzy purple creatures, thirst-trap influencers. All kinds of unfair sh*t.

You can't win attention serving up nothing by dry chicken. You've got to be juicier.

Create Non-Commercial Brand Content & Communications Assets

This is your "none of the above" content. Your recruitment content. Sustainability content. Live event coverage. Anthem videos. Your history of the company video.

You want content pros making this stuff. You don't want individual departments sorting this out themselves. It leads to poor quality and brand inconsistency.

Let your brand-level content team be their center of excellence (remember those?).

One Other Thing

If you're wondering whether content marketing can be run at the brand level, as Liam Moroney proposed in a recent post, it can, but in most cases I wouldn't recommend it.

The main reason why is incentives. Brand-level content should remain largely uncontaminated by conversion or lead-gen pressures, or the general lack of sexiness of B2B marketing. While brand isn't terribly suitable as a KPI for content marketers since it's not tied to any stage of the funnel and is influenced by too many things outside of their control.

It'll be damn hard for a single team to reconcile this.

And if you're wondering if a brand-level head of content could manage two pipelines, yeah, they could, but I'd recommend having the brand pipeline be external. You don't want two in-house teams with sometimes opposing goals feeling like they're competing for resources and attention.

Moroney is a smart guy and I'm sympathetic to his argument (which is that B2B marketers have been too lead-gen and conversion focused and can't be trusted with content marketing). But it's still "content marketing" after all, and it should remain marketing.

Because if it doesn't, you end up creating content for content's sake. And that leads to one of two outcomes.

Either you get sucked into playing the volume game through AI. Or your content stays human but your brand falls into the friend zone and your funnel becomes a hula hoop.

My thanks to Liam Moroney and Haris Spahi? for helping inspire this article.