March 2023

Have you found that you made a mistake with your original brand positioning? The good news is that you can fix it no matter what stage you’re at with your brand and business. A good brand is constantly evolving anyways, so you can without a doubt revisit your brand positioning and revise it to make it more accurate, authentic, engaging, or whatever you feel is currently missing. Whether you missed research and data points when originally strategizing or you just feel that your brand positioning is no longer relevant to your mission, vision, and values – let us show you how to fix it.

What is Your Brand Positioning?

Brand positioning is simply the strategy you use to ensure your audience thinks of you in a positive light. Most brand positions have a somewhat emotional element that evokes a certain feeling in their audience, whether that be joy, sympathy, excitement, or other related emotions that can motivate an audience to interact. Your brand is so much more than your logo and sales, and it has been found that a consistent brand can increase your company’s revenue by up to 23%. However, you cannot position your brand blindly, instead you need to utilize data and market research to get to know your target audience and their needs, goals, and demands, as well as the overall market environment and context. To get started, consider the following:

Identify your target audience’s main needs
Define how your brand can meet those needs
Create a unique selling proposition
Evaluate the competition

Strong brand positioning is well thought out, and when fixing previous branding errors, it is crucial that you use a careful, strategic approach that ensures no step goes overlooked.

Assess Where Your Brand is Currently

Before you get started repairing your brand positioning, take a moment to step back and truly evaluate where your brand is at that moment. Be as honest and critical as possible, the more data you have the better. Assessing where your brand is currently will allow you to 1) ensure that the same mistakes are not repeated and 2) craft a successful brand positioning that sticks. Evaluating your current brand positioning also helps you understand what works and what does not so that you know where to pool your resources.

Connect with Customers

Your customers can tell you a lot about your brand and how accurate its positioning is. If customers have no clue what you do, or have the wrong idea entirely, that is a clear indicator that your brand positioning is not relevant and does not align with what your business is all about. If customers know what you do but do not know how to connect with you, this is another indicator that you are missing the mark. Connecting with your customers gives them the opportunity to be seen and heard in their frustrations, while also providing you with valuable feedback.

Connecting with customers can take on many forms, consider utilizing customer reviews, social media interactions, referrals, and related communications to learn as much as possible about your brand from your customers point of view. Knowing exactly how your past, present, and future customers feel about your current branding will allow you to repair your inaccurate brand positioning successfully.

Revisit Your Mission & Values

Your mission, vision, and values dictate your brand and serve as the motivation for what you do. If your mission, vision, and values remain the same and your brand positioning does not alight with them, it is still a good idea to revisit them. Refreshing yourself and your team on what drives your brand on the daily will help you ensure that it is reflected accurately in your brand positioning this time.

If your mission, vision, and values no longer align with your brand’s mission, now is the time to revisit them as well. You cannot choose to reevaluate one or the other, a successful brand positioning strategy will be cohesive and consistent across all platforms and communications.

How well does your brand positioning reflect your mission, vision, and values? Do customers know what you have to offer based off your logo or headlines? Or do they have to do a bit of digging to understand who you are and what you have to offer? Revisiting the core pillars of your brand will help you better reposition it.

Run Tests on Your Materials

Running A/B testing on your marketing and branding strategies will help you guarantee that your brand positioning is accurate and successful. For example, when redesigning your logo, create focus groups to review several final designs and gather their feedback. Does one choice stand out more than the other? Does certain wording perform better than others in advertisements? Utilizing testing will help ensure that when you put all the pieces of your brand positioning together, they all fit.

Take Your Time

One of the biggest mistakes made during the branding process is rushing through the steps in an effort to save time and money. However, your brand positioning can make or break your brand’s success so it only makes sense that you take the time and care needed to give the process your full attention. Cutting corners will not pay off in the long run, which is why hiring the help of a professional branding firm such as Millennium Agency can help ensure you get your brand positioning right this time. We are branding experts and have conducted countless successful rebrands. We stay current on the best practices and hottest trends in branding, so that you receive the highest ROI and a successful, fresh brand. Connect with our team today to begin your better brand.

About Millennium Agency  

Millennium Agency is a nationally recognized, top woman led B2B branding, positioning, and digital marketing firm who creates value that builds emotionally impactful brands that influences your customer’s buying decision, giving you the competitive advantage. As your industry partner for B2B pharma/biotech, technology and manufacturing, our proprietary research-based framework makes a strong impact and accelerates your brand growth. While you focus on what you do best – running your business successfully – our team will build your brand, and drive leads.  For more information, call 877-873-7445 or schedule time here.

In an increasingly digital society, it feels like everything is a marketing opportunity. After all, who hasn’t been talking to their spouse about a product and then gotten a pop-up video on their phone for that product a few minutes later? While this type of capture of data is central to most consumer-facing marketing in 2023, it is not necessarily the best approach when it comes time to optimize your B2B marketing.

True, successful B2B companies will undoubtedly find creative ways to leverage automation and collect/analyze data as efficiently as possible. However, the best B2B marketing concepts will be decidedly more informational and less transactional than those employed in B2C campaigns. To dig further into this topic, keep reading for 5 ways to optimize your B2B marketing.

Optimize Your Website

It might be cliche at this point, but the fact remains that your business is only as good as its website in 2023. However, website optimization looks a bit different for companies in the B2B sector than it does for those concerned primarily with B2C.

Yes, all of the basics of UX – such as fast-loading pages, robust images, and active links–remain very much in play for B2B websites. However, quality B2B websites need to provide more depth of information than their B2C peers.

A quality B2B company survives by addressing an acute need within an industry at large. For example, many lumber manufacturers never have to deal directly with customers because the need for lumber in the construction industry is so large that they can sell directly to contractors. Likewise, producers of educational software can sell directly to schools and bypass marketing to end users.

Therefore, highly optimized B2B websites should accomplish a few things:

Highlight a need that currently exists in the industry
Explain how this need is causing a problem or suboptimal performance for businesses
Demonstrate how its business is uniquely positioned to solve this problem for the long haul

Sourcing managers and procurement agents for commercial buyers will be decidedly more discerning than the average retail customer. Therefore, the content on your website must be robust and technical, the photos must be highly illustrative of your product in action, and video content has to be credible enough to gain the trust of key decision-makers.

Invest In an Asset Management Tool

One of the great challenges of marketing in the digital era is creating content that is consistent and cohesive across all channels. The problem is so acute that some sources estimate that B2B companies waste roughly $50 billion each year in unused, duplicate, or just flat-out bad marketing content.

To help avoid this pitfall, it is worthwhile to invest in a modern marketing asset management tool for your company. This type of software allows all pertinent parties to collaborate on marketing content and access key marketing resources as necessary. This helps keep all branding efforts unified, with in-person and remote agents and affiliates all pulling from the same content located in the most up-to-date digital repository.

Leverage the Power of Email Marketing

Email marketing can get a bit of a bad rap in 2023. Yes, procurement agents are flooded with hundreds of email solicitations each day. However, as it is their job to constantly be on the lookout for better business solutions, the chances of your marketing emails getting opened are a lot higher than you may think.

The key to successful B2B email marketing is understanding that like website optimization, business recipients will be less emotional and more discerning than B2C readers. As a result, consider eschewing the holiday promotions, flashy emojis in the subject lines, and click-to-buy icons in the body. Instead, focus on value-adding subject lines, limit your CTAs to one per email, and focus on segmenting your email lists to deliver the most relevant content to the right leads and clients.

Perform a SWOT Analysis

A SWOT (strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis is pretty standard in the business world. However, the firm’s marketing strategy is often just one part of a larger SWOT analysis, when it is often advisable to perform a SWOT analysis on the marketing strategy itself.

When it comes to strengths and weaknesses, it’s really all about self-assessment. Crunch your numbers and see how much you have spent on marketing and analyze how that has impacted revenue. Identify why certain campaigns have worked and why others have burned through cash. Remember, it can often be more cost-effective to leverage strengths and turn them into even greater strengths than it can be to fix a weakness and bring it up to par. It can be better to double down on what is working and cut out what is not.

As far as opportunities and threats, it is extremely beneficial to take an outside-in approach. Dig deep into the industry and see what competitors are doing well and see if you can efficiently add similar concepts to your marketing model. Likewise, get a clear picture of if there are any new products or technologies on the market that could severely undermine your business in the future and position yourself accordingly.

Focus on Developing Relationships

Although it may sound contradictory to the previous points that stress the importance of discernment and rationality in the realm of B2B marketing, there is a fundamental aspect of B2B marketing that is highly relational. It can take a lot to win the trust of a B2B client, but when you do, it typically results in a lucrative, ongoing relationship. Many businesses are willing to pay more to source from a vendor that they know will deliver products on time and provide customer service above-and-beyond the call of duty. Therefore, while it is important to leverage technology to the fullest, don’t overlook hiring the right people that are skilled in developing meaningful relationships with clients.

Go the Extra Mile to Optimize B2B Marketing

Businesses in all sectors are finding creative ways to use digital platforms and automation to help improve their marketing campaigns. While this certainly applies to B2B firms, they need to be a bit more meticulous and profound in their approach. To help you optimize your B2B marketing strategy, choose from any of the 5 ideas listed above and see revenues increase in the process!

About Millennium Agency 

Millennium Agency is a nationally recognized, top woman led B2B branding, positioning, and digital marketing firm who creates value that builds emotionally impactful brands that influences your customer’s buying decision, giving you the competitive advantage. As your industry partner for B2B pharma/biotech, technology and manufacturing, our proprietary research-based framework makes a strong impact and accelerates your brand growth. While you focus on what you do best – running your business successfully – our team will build your brand, and drive leads. For more information, call 877-873-7445 or schedule time here.

George is a freelance writer that loves sharing his experience and knowledge on website development and SEO. His work can be found on Building Product Advisor, a new construction industry resource.

So, a new competitor just entered the market right next to your own brand, what should you do? Your first instinct may be to panic, but that is not necessary. The only way to outshine the competition is to do better. Meet your customers’ needs more thoroughly, deliver better customer service, and have the perfect price for the product or service you have to offer. Strong brand positioning can help ensure you are ready to go at every point in your business. Whether you are the market leader, a startup, or somewhere in between, strong brand positioning can help you build strategies and campaigns that succeed.

Understand the Competition

Get to know the competition through and through, from top to bottom. There are many tools you can use to accomplish this, including data analysis, Google searches, data gathering software, and more. You can utilize data analysis to see where their brand started, where it is now, and gain insight into the future of their brand. Is their brand positioning strong enough to outdo your own? Keeping it simple is also a great way to get to know the competition; a simple Google search will show you how they are being presented to customers and how they have positioned their brand. You can view their marketing efforts, their website design, evaluate the customer experience, and see how they connect. This research will help you get a clear understanding of their brand positioning so that you can do better and stay ahead of the market. Some questions to ask yourself about the competition include:

What need do they serve?
How are they similar to my own brand?
What are they doing differently?
Why do customers choose them?

Knowing what your competitors are doing will help you stay ahead of them and plan your next move. If they are moving one way, move another. If they are doing something revolutionary, figure out how to do it better. Understanding the competition will help you position your brand more effectively.

Identify White Space

One of the best ways to ensure you stay at the top of your industry is by identifying and occupying white space that is not currently being addressed. What customer needs are currently unmet? Where can you provide a solution that only you can offer? White space makes up all of the currently empty markets for products or solutions that customers demand but no one currently makes. If you enter the white space before the competition, there will be no competitors to outdo. It is one thing to compete, but another to completely exceed expectations. If no one can compare, then you do not need to worry about competing until they find a way to break into your white space as well, which is why strong brand positioning is needed to stay one step ahead of your industry.

It can be tough to know how to break into white space, so consider:

What am I currently providing?
What makes my brand unique?
How can I do better than what I’m currently doing?
What do my customers demand?
What needs are currently unmet?

Being able to corner a market and anticipate what customers need will secure your spot as an industry leader and make it harder to disrupt that position. Doing the bare minimum and offering another variation of the same products that everyone else offers is no longer going to cut it. Customers demand more from their top brands.

Consider a Rebrand

If a new, fresh-faced brand has just entered your market, you may be feeling like your own brand positioning is stale. Revamping your brand positioning can help you reinforce what works and rethink what does not. A rebrand can look like many different things. You can opt for a complete rebrand or even just refresh select aspects like your logo or website. You should structure your rebranding depending on the state of your own brand and how successful the newest competition is. The more pressure they apply to you, the stronger your rebrand will need to be. A rebrand is a great opportunity to rethink your brand positioning, and there are many resources available to guide your process. An experienced branding firm will have the expertise and tools needed to successfully take your brand to the top, but choosing the right agency can be tough. Consider:

How does this branding agency approach clients?
Does this agency know my industry?
Where do their clients rank?
Is this firm focused on long-term strategies?
Who makes up their team?

Your brand positioning is everything when it comes to your business, and undergoing a rebrand to outdo the competition is only successful if it is done correctly. Engaging with the right branding agency will help ensure your rebrand is enough to exceed the newest competition.

Don’t Remain Stagnant

Remaining stagnant in the face of new competition is not going to serve you well. The last thing you should do is nothing. They are going to be coming in hot, with the drive and passion of a new business, and you need to be prepared to outdo the “new business buzz” that they are sure to drum up. Your brand positioning may need to change, whether that be through breaking into a white space that is previously untapped or undergoing a rebrand. When a new brand enters your industry, you need to be prepared to step up your game and stay ahead of their success.