Hi there! It’s Matt with MessageUp.
Sooner or later, like it or not, your company brand will demand a refresh.
Design trends wane, your business matures, and the places in which you want your brand to function evolve.
To the untrained eye, there might not appear to be anything wrong (but if they do notice a deficiency in your brand, the matter has become urgent!)
To the expert practitioner, however, any shortcomings will eventually rise from background annoyance to a major inconvenience.
Brand marketing is all about creating a memorable experience for your prospects and customers—one that positions your company and solutions at the top of an audience member’s recall list when they’re ready to make a purchase.
This requires exquisite coordination of visual elements, voice, tone, and style to evoke a consistent, desirable emotional response.
When your brand no longer delivers that impact, it’s time for a tune-up.
If the brand is sufficiently misaligned, you might start with a blank canvas.
Which … can be daunting.
We have all witnessed the outcry when popular businesses or products are unsuccessfully rebranded, often reverting to their original packaging a few humiliating months later.
There are fewer media reports on B2B brand flops but, rest assured, they exist.
So, what are the keys to adjusting your brand without upsetting the proverbial apple cart?
As with most tricky endeavors, proper planning prevents poor performance. (Feel free to insert the sixth P if you are so inclined😉)
Rather than leaping straight into the color picker and sketching up new logos, start by:
Defining the problem: What about the old brand is the impulse for change?
Setting clear goals: What will a successful rebrand achieve?
Creating a solid communication plan: Who will care most about the change?
To help you navigate the process as efficiently as possible, this week’s post on the Framework blog covers How to Tune-up Your B2B Brand—A 13-Step Guide.
To create this playbook, we’ve distilled advice from a number of sources and blended it with our own experience. And while we don’t have a generalized formula for crafting each of the detailed brand elements—that’s too business-specific—we hope this guide will help you focus your team’s efforts and avoid the worst of the rebranding pitfalls.
The B2B Builders Community
The priority waitlist is still open for the B2B Builders community. If you’re interested in meeting leaders from other B2B companies to exchange ideas and experiences, read this prospectus, then click on the embedded link to complete a quick online application (to help us weed out bots and timewasters).
We’re also running a private beta to test the online experience. If you’d like to join the beta, sight-unseen, and collaborate on a content roadmap for the community, drop me a line at b2bbuilders@messageup.com.
Reading and Taking Action
This week, our What We’ve Been Reading collection includes articles on:
Nine principles of B2B marketing.
Articulating the ROI of social media for B2B businesses.
Marketing leaders’ insights on how B2B marketing is maturing.
Why B2B web stores are driving buyers away—and how to fix it.
As the proponents of a content marketing framework, we’re always intrigued by listicles that promise an equivalent of the Ten Commandments but for marketing. While Kenneth Shen doesn’t claim to have chiseled his list into stone tablets while hiking in the mountains, he does provide a helpful set of tenets for the average B2B marketer to consider.
To round out this edition, my One Step actionable tip asks five rapid-fire questions about your brand, to help anticipate when a tune-up might be needed.
Have a safe and consistently branded week 😜.
I’ll see you back here next Wednesday.
Cheers!
~ Matt
Our Latest Posts on The Framework Blog
Apr 03, 2024 - How to Tune-up Your B2B Brand—A 13-Step Guide
Mar 27, 2024 - The Top 5 Questions B2B Leaders Ask About Content Marketing
What We’ve Been Reading
Here are some articles we’ve been reading this week that we hope you will enjoy and find valuable:
The Nine Principles of B2B Marketing
Wait, there are 9 principles of B2B marketing? Says who? Says Kenneth Shen in this piece for Fast Company. Actually, his article isn't quite so presumptuous—he doesn't claim they are THE nine principles—and definitely offers food for thought. If nothing else, it got us thinking about how we would answer if asked about "the X principles of B2B content marketing".
Six Ways Social Media Fuels B2B Startup Growth—Generating Revenue
Nat Lennox, VP of Marketing at Sift, writing for Forbes Communication Council, astutely tackles the persistent belief among business leaders that social media is cheap and easy, while also providing helpful advice on articulating the ROI that social media effort can deliver.
Conceptualizing B2B—What Marketing Leaders in the B2B Space Hope to See Change as the Industry Matures
The Drum's Sam Anderson presents feedback from a roundtable with B2B marketing leaders where they shared insights on how B2B marketing is maturing and where they hope to see it go next. By all accounts, B2B still has a lot of growing up to do. [Note: We've modified the title in our link because we found the original headline a bit misleading.]
B2B Web Stores are Driving Buyers Away, According to New Survey
B2B vendors continue to lag behind the expectations of B2B buyers—something we've been sounding the alarm about for a while. This concerning article by MarTechCube highlights the level of disappointment revealed by a recent Sapio Research survey, including a surprisingly high rate of order errors. It breaks down the biggest reasons holding buyers back from placing B2B orders online and explains their non-negotiables for web stores.
Books on B2B Content Marketing
Secure yourself a copy of Content Marketing: Mission Critical, a guide for B2B CEOs, and Content Marketing: Making the Magic Happen, a guide for B2B marketing leaders, in paperback, e-book, or audiobook format, by visiting www.messageup.com/books. There you’ll find discount codes as well as details on limited edition boxed sets that include copies signed by the author.
One Step…
This week’s One Step actionable tip involves answering five questions about your company’s brand. They are designed to help you anticipate when a brand tune-up (or wholesale rebrand) might be valuable.
A few caveats before we get started:
If you have recently implemented a new brand, give it a chance to succeed. Initial feedback on a brand is often subjective and reactive rather than objective and meaningful. If issues persist for a few months, however, it’s time to ask some serious questions.
If your business is undergoing structural change, such as merging, being acquired, pivoting to a new line of business, or entering a new market, resist changing the brand until you are on firmer ground. If you change the brand as well, you’ll be asking your loyal audience to keep up with too many things at once and you risk losing some of them unnecessarily.
If key leaders are preoccupied with another major initiative, don’t throw a brand redesign onto the fire. You need a meaningful slice of their attention to ensure that the brand project is properly conceived and supported.
Alright, with those disclaimers out of the way, try this:
Ask yourself the following 5 questions:
Relative to your competitors, does your brand seem more modern, contemporary, or a bit dated?
Does your brand instantly convey the key reasons why your company is in business and what it stands for?
Do customers and new hires cite the brand as one of the things that attracted them to doing business / working with your company?
Is your brand easy for team members to use, or do they complain that it has to be bent to fit their needs?
Do all of the brand elements—colors, fonts, images, logo, voice, tone, and style—work in unison to convey a consistent message, or are the relationships between them difficult to explain?
If any of those questions made you hesitate, get defensive, or cringe, it’s a sign that some part of your brand isn’t working as well as it should. Minor tweaks might make a big difference.
If many or most of the questions provoked less-than-stellar answers, you are in urgent need of a brand redesign. Engage other leaders in the conversation and consider when and how to start the process.
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