5 Ways to Put Brand Values at the Heart of Your B2B Marketing
When your company buys goods or services from other brands, what’s the top influence on your decision?
Features and benefits? Price and value proposition? Reviews and testimonials?
Or maybe it’s the brand’s identity and reputation?
Research shows a brand’s values increasingly drive purchase decisions, especially as millennials and GenZers move up the ranks as business buyers:
- 77% of millennial and GenZ B2B buyers said brand is a significant factor in their purchase decisions, compared to 55% of older buyers, according to a Merkle report.
- 97% of CMOs in a Boston Consulting Group study believed brand marketing was important for awareness and consideration, although a far lower percentage made it a priority.
Here are five essential ways to put your B2B brand’s values at the heart of your marketing efforts and truly resonate with today’s business buyers.
Brand purpose is the positive impact you want to have on your customers, your industry, your society, and your planet.
1. Define and communicate your brand purpose
Brand purpose is the reason why your brand exists beyond making money. It is the positive impact you want to have on your customers, your industry, your society, and your planet. And it’s a guiding principle that informs everything you do as a brand, well beyond a slogan or tagline. As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
To define your brand purpose, you need to explore these fundamental questions:
- What customer pain points and problem are you solving?
- What is your unique strength that can help those customers?
- What are your brand’s core values and beliefs? Long-term goals and vision?
- How is your brand contributing to a greater good? Is it a competitive white space that you can truly own?
The answers will help you develop a clear and compelling brand purpose that you can amplify across all your marketing channels, consistently and authentically. Show your customers how your brand purpose aligns with their values and aspirations, and back up your words with actions, so they see how you’re living up to your brand purpose.
2. Create Engaging Brand Stories
Brand stories are narratives that showcase your brand personality, identity, and values. They are not sales pitches or product descriptions. Instead, brand stories connect with your customers emotionally and resonate on a human level.
Brand stories take many forms — origin stories, customer stories, employee stories, behind-the-scenes stories, social impact stories, etc.
You can follow some basic storytelling principles to have a compelling story:
- Make your customer the hero.
- Show you understand the conflicts and challenges your customers face.
- Explain how what you offer will help them on their journey.
- Provide a satisfying resolution — their “happily ever after.”
- Communicate in vivid language and imagery to capture your audience’s attention and imagination.
- Use the appropriate tone, style, and format for each marketing channel.
Brand stories can help you build trust, credibility, and loyalty with your customers.
Brand stories can help you build trust, credibility, and loyalty with your customers. Told well, they can increase your brand awareness, recall, and preference. And they help you connect on a human level by showing your customers the people and passion behind your products and services.
3. Develop and Nurture a Brand Tribe
A brand tribe is a group of customers who share a common interest, passion, or identity related to your brand. Far from passive consumers, they are active advocates, influencers, and co-creators of your brand.
A strong brand tribe can help you foster a sense of belonging, loyalty, and engagement among your customers, as well as generate valuable feedback, insights, and referrals. For example, think of Salesforce and its Trailblazer community, or Adobe Live as a creative community.
How can you develop and nurture a brand tribe?
- Provide your customers with platforms and opportunities to interact with your brand and with each other.
- Use social media, online forums, blogs, podcasts, webinars, events, or other channels to create and facilitate these interactions.
- Encourage and reward your customers for their participation, contribution, and advocacy and show them that you value and appreciate their voice and input.
If you create enough interaction and passion, your customers will grow into a loyal and passionate fan base, who will not only buy from you, but also recommend you, defend you, and co-create with you. Brand tribes can also help you amplify your brand message, attract like-minded audiences, and enhance your brand reputation.
4. Collaborate and Partner Internally on Brand Goals
Today’s business buyers crave authenticity and consistency that proves your brand promise over and over, across all the ways they interact with you. To build that consistent brand experience, internal marketing departments need to forge strong internal partnerships across various departments to amplify the brand promise successfully.
Strong internal collaborations deliver huge benefits in three key ways:
- Facilitating a unified brand voice
- Fostering innovation through expertise from diverse areas of the company
- Ensuring brand consistency across all customer interactions.
Brand tribes can help you amplify your brand message, attract like-minded audiences, and enhance your brand reputation.
Marketing teams lead the way by identifying shared objectives, communicating strategically, and celebrating collective achievements. Leveraging these internal alliances can enhance the brand’s market presence, drive employee engagement, and solidify its reputation, ultimately contributing to a resilient and thriving brand identity.
5. Measure and Optimize your Brand Performance
Brand performance is the degree to which your brand achieves its desired goals and outcomes, by factors including:
- Awareness
- Recognition
- Preference
- Loyalty
- Advocacy
- Equity
- Profitability
These measures give you a way to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of your brand strategy. They can also help you identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for your brand.
To measure and optimize brand performance, you need to define and track relevant and meaningful metrics against a baseline. That requires collecting and analyzing data and feedback from various sources such as surveys, interviews, reviews, testimonials, social media, web analytics, or sales reports.
A dashboard of these measurements will give you greater insights and responsiveness, especially as you see how your brand performance changes over time.
Ready to Put Your Brand Values at the Heart of Your B2B Marketing?
At Brunner, we help B2B brands across all types of industries develop a road map to attract and keep millennial and GenZ business buyers. B2B brands that lead with purpose and values — and consistently deliver on their brand promise — will win the competition for the next generation of buyers.
If you’d like to chat about ways to build your marketing around your brand values, please reach out. We’d love to hear about your challenges and offer our thoughts on creating solutions.
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Patrick Culhane
Vice President, Brand Strategy
Patrick Culhane, is vice president, brand strategy, for Brunner. A UK native, has 21 years of agency experience in brand strategy, planning, and development. He has a BA in Marketing and the Psychology of Communication from De Montfort University and has completed the Association of National Advertisers Integrated Marketing Certificate. Patrick advocates for B2B brands to understand the impact of the new millennial buyer and he co-presented “Marketing to Hearts, Not Businesses” at an Atlanta Business Chronicle event in April. He’s a proud juror at the 2024 ANA REGGIE Awards.
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