Hello there! Matt here from MessageUp.
Tonight I will be giving a presentation on B2B marketing to an audience of IT professionals. It’s the local chapter of an international society but not one that I’ve encountered before, so I’m debating what to wear. Not in some narcissistic desire for appreciation but because I want to look the part.
That’s an interesting turn of phrase, don’t you think? What does looking the part mean when one’s role is keynote speaker? In the finance world, 3-piece suits are still de rigueur. Groups of entrepreneurs and some venture capitalists are prone to wearing sneakers, whether paired with an Armani suit or a SaaS-branded hoodie.
However, what’s more important to me is the emotion my personal brand evokes in the audience. I don’t care how keynote speakers look in general; I care that the way I look jives with the things I’m saying and the message I’m trying to convey.
This thought process can be applied to all aspects of your company’s brand and how you apply them to your content. An element that evokes a different emotion from the content to which it was applied creates dissonance for your audience and distracts them from the message. In a worst case, they’ll leave the site—or stop reading or watching the content—and jump to whatever the competition is offering.
This is an important consideration because B2B buyers make most of their purchasing decisions based on emotions, and branding plays a primary role in determining which emotions your content evokes.
In this week’s post for The Framework blog, I tackle the subject of keeping your branding up-to-date under the seasonally apropos title, Taking Down the Decorations - The Impact of Branding on B2B Content Marketing. My argument is that outdated or out-of-fashion branding is as disconcerting to your audience as seeing holiday decorations lingering deep into the New Year. Whether that analogy works for you or not, the discussion that follows will hopefully provide valuable stimulus for reviewing and potentially refreshing your branding.
After you’ve perused the blog post, scroll down to What We’ve Been Reading to find summaries and links for four more thought-provoking articles. This week’s offerings cover incorporating B2C tactics into your B2B marketing strategy, turning your promise into brand DNA, how effective content catches sales, and a SaaS CMO’s lookback on B2B marketing themes from 2022.
For this week’s One Step actionable tip, I explain how to spend a few minutes isolating and reviewing one particular aspect of your brand. You might be surprised by what you discover when you zoom in from the overall brand level and investigate its component parts.
Until next time, happy brand-building!
~ Matt
o/b/o Team MessageUp
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Our Latest Posts on The Framework Blog
Jan 18, 2023 - Taking Down the Decorations - The Impact of Branding on B2B Content Marketing
Jan 11, 2023 - Use a B2B Content Marketing Framework to Avoid Random Acts of Marketing
What We’ve Been Reading
Here are some articles we’ve been reading this week that you might enjoy and find helpful:
5 B2C Marketing Tactics to Incorporate into a B2B Marketing Strategy for Your Firm
We frequently treat B2C and B2B marketing as if they're as immiscible as oil and water but, as Kristyn Brophy writes for JD Supra, there are several tactics B2B marketers can borrow from the B2C space to help increase brand awareness and connect with prospects on a more human level.
Transforming Your Promise into Your Brand DNA
At MessageUp, we talk a lot about anchoring B2B content marketing in statements of purpose, mission, and vision. Zsofia Raffa, regional marketing manager at Kodak Alaris, uses slightly different terminology but makes a lot of consistent points in this piece about creating a bullet-proof brand.
Going Fishing: How Content Catches Sales
There's so much to like about this catchy piece (pun intended) by Caroline Petersen, writing for the Forbes Business Council, that it's hard to know what to highlight. From the snappy title to the buyer's journey map structure to the emphasis on intentionally building a content library—it's a quick read that touches on many things we hold true at MessageUp.
7 B2B Marketing Themes from 2022
Amanda Malko, CMO at G2, reflects on her top takeaways from B2B marketing over the past year. Her tips are thought-provoking and she has included links to relevant reports and recorded presentations. Definitely give this one a read before diving headlong into your plans for 2023.
One Step…
In keeping with this week’s theme of branding, here is an approach to brand evaluation that’s based on how writers work to tighten up a manuscript before submitting it for publication.
The writer’s goal is to inspect their manuscript through many different lenses, bringing to light words and phrases that can be removed or improved. They might make a first pass looking solely for unnecessary adverbs. Then they go back and look exclusively for phrases written in a passive voice that can be replaced with something more active. In all, a piece might undergo dozens of micro-revisions like this before it is considered ready—although many authors will tell you that a manuscript is never ready, you just get tired of working on it!
Evaluating your brand can also seem daunting. There are many elements working together to produce the overall effect, so where to start?
Try this:
Pick one element of your brand that you’re going to evaluate. This might be the choice of colors, the application of colors, the choice of fonts, image selection, the use of white space—and many other possibilities. The key is to zoom in tightly on one element.
Then, study examples of your brand in action while focusing just on the way the element you’ve chosen does its job. This might include web pages, printed collateral, social media posts, posters, and so on.
Take note of where the element is doing its job well—for example: making the content easy to ingest, pleasing the eye, and evoking a desired emotion—and where it could be improved.
In this way, you’ll be able to see the forest for the trees, isolating the effectiveness and impact of each element as a part of the greater whole.
Repeat this exercise once per week for different brand elements and soon you’ll have built a comprehensive assessment of your brand in action. This will then serve as valuable input to an overall brand review and improvement program.
Until Next Time
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