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When undertaking a B2B rebrand, stop chasing your tail, assess the bigger picture and rebuild from the ground up, starting with your positioning strategy, writes Ian Blake, founder and managing director of Squaredot
Plenty of B2B brands grow by being the only, the biggest or the best. Others grow by taking a me-too or probably-fine or pretty-cheap position instead. Many (perhaps most) don’t really consider their position in the market at all. Instead, they start out with a solution, then just plow ahead and see what happens.
But this rarely works in the long term as the market inevitably floods with competition, and in the blink of an eye, your brand loses relevance. And when that happens, it can be a real challenge to keep momentum going. Trying to generate leads, website visits, conversions or hitting any marketing KPI becomes a bigger challenge by the quarter.
Find Your Pole Position
Unless you’re a unicorn startup, the likelihood is that you’ll have a lot of competition. A Google search (or a social media feed) will throw up any number of companies who all offer pretty much the same thing or the same services to the same target market – with all of them claiming they are the best.
So how will you stand out? In layman’s terms, take in the bigger picture and look at how you show up in the market in relation to what you do – what the market needs – and how the competition shows up. Find your unique position and pitch your tent there.
In Association with
I’ll use my agency, Squaredot, as the example to illustrate my points, as we recently rebranded. In Squaredot, if it’s not B2B, it’s not to be (sorry Carlsberg, Coke, Nike etc.) But we wanted a sharper stake in the ground to match our niche expertise, so we honed in specifically on B2B tech. However, that alone was not enough to separate us from our competition.
In marketing and communications, brand personality and tone are critical parts of the service we offer and it’s an area we wanted to compete on. So we researched the competition and assessed the landscape from this perspective.
We plotted the charts and saw white space open up that played to our strengths and differentiated us. ‘Bold’ and ‘impactful’ were the two words that would define us going forward. This gave us a direction for our rebrand that would inform both the visual identity, our website presence and our communications going forward.
It’s revealing to plot such charts – the axis parameters will change depending on your industry and offering, but it’s good to get this all down on a whiteboard, so you can visualise success and the journey you face. Even if you don’t necessarily find an empty white space, at least you will see where your new brand fits naturally and the competition you face.
Bold and Impactful
This personality and tonal shift for us impacts on more than words. It formed the backbone of our visual identity and our creative expression. From a slight logo refresh to our new colour palette, website design, social media presence, videos and slideshares, everything now sings from the same bold and impactful hymn sheet.
Bold and impactful is how we view the potential of our clients also. B2B tech companies are having a huge impact on the business world, helping to ramp up digital transformation in every industry. To make a bold and impactful statement to them, and to help promote our rebrand and new website, we put together our ‘love letter’ (video, actually) to B2B tech. You can watch it here https://www.squaredot.agency/who-we-are
B2B Brands Grow Faster With Fame
This insight might seem pretty obvious, but it can get lost when you’re focused on generating leads and other short-term KPIs. Binet and Field’s groundbreaking research into marketing for B2B growth identified the importance of a balanced approach between brand-building and lead generation activations, and the golden ratio they identified is roughly 50/50.
This balanced approach also played to our multi-disciplined strengths, from brand to strategy, creative, websites, design and content through to campaigns and promotion. It’s important to note that without the right marketing foundational assets in place (your website most importantly of all), all your best efforts are likely to fall short.
Get Your House in Order, Then Send Out the Invites
With your positioning nailed down, all of it needs to come alive and be clearly signposted and communicated on your new website. It’s your most important marketing asset, so treat it accordingly. Your target persona should find your content insightful and your website experience informative, intuitive, engaging and hitting all the right notes.
Fame Beckons
With a new positioning that makes you stand out from the competition, a rebrand that gives you a fresh, contemporary, visual identity and a website that does your brand justice, you have everything in place for campaigns to springboard your brand to the next level. The journey will be an exciting one for you.
Perhaps we’ve inspired you to have a rethink about your brand’s position and potential?
If so, think big.
Fame beckons.
Leads await.
You’re going to need a bigger sales team.
About Squaredot Agency
Squaredot help make B2B brands famous. With years of combined agency and client-side B2B experience, we spotted a gap in the Irish market for a specialist creative B2B marketing agency. Our clients now include some of Ireland’s most ambitious B2B tech companies who seek international revenues and fame.
From beautiful websites, designs and all the content, tools and tactics of lead generation, to the longer-term brand-building campaigns that attribute recognition, meaning and emotion to your brand – our story is telling yours.
Our services include research, strategy, planning, persona development, content creation, website design and development, branding, creative, advertising, design, account based marketing and promotion.
Photo: Ian Blake, founder and managing director of Squaredot
