Most B2B organizations already understand the importance of branding and marketing for finding new clients. Go to any B2B website and you’ll see an identifiable logo that communicates the competence and seriousness needed to do the sometimes unglamorous but incredibly vital work that B2B organizations do behind the scenes.

As competition for customers increases, however, B2B branding has to go beyond the logo. You have to be able to clearly communicate a set of values that resonates with your ideal customer. That’s because the goal of B2B marketing isn’t just to get leads and turn them into customers; it’s to attract the right kind of customers for your business. To achieve this goal, branding has to take place at every level of business communications and must be consciously integrated into everything you do.

Positioning

Not all aspects of branding are necessarily customer-facing. B2B branding begins with understanding your brand identity: how you want customers to see you, how you want them to feel about you, or how you go about doing the work that you do.

From there, you then have to figure out how to best convey those ideas to your customers. You can’t be everything to everyone, so it’s important to nail down what your business is all about to give your branding some direction.

You can do this by thinking about the strengths of your team and the kind of work culture you want to create. You can also use competitive intelligence to get an idea of what your competitors are doing and how they’re doing it.

Values

Don’t think of values in terms of a moral, ethical, or political disposition. They don’t have to be binary in nature: “we stand for this and reject that.” Your company values are simply a statement of what parts of the job are more important than others. They are an articulation of your standards and give potential customers an idea of what it would be like to work with you.

Voice

Your brand voice is how you convey your values to customers and potential customers. The typical B2B voice tends to be a little terse, conveying that no-nonsense, get-the-job-done image of the typical B2B organization. While you probably don’t want to lean too hard into posting memes and quippy one-liners on your social media accounts, you should still give some consideration to the voice of your business in relation to your values.

If your business is built on customer service, for example, you should strive for a warmer, friendlier style of communication. If you want to build a brand around your high level of technical expertise, your brand voice should demonstrate thought leadership and be able to break down complex products and services to demonstrate their value to potential customers in straightforward, demystifying ways.

Your Employees Are Your Brand

You might have one person writing your marketing emails, another writing training materials for sales staff, and another running your social media accounts. Everyone who communicates with customers has to understand your brand strategy and work from the same playbook to ensure that customers are hearing the same message across all channels. Your employees are your brand as much as your logo is.

Live Your Brand Values Every Day

This is where we go from creating a brand to building one. You’ve decided what your brand is going to be. The next step is to be it. Branding is a promise, whether that’s a promise of a certain kind of service, a certain kind of product, a certain kind of relationship, or a certain way of communicating. Everyone in the company has to be equipped to deliver on that promise. That’s why B2B branding isn’t just the role of marketing; everyone has a part to play in adopting brand values and knowing how to embody them, whether they work in the warehouse or behind a computer. It’s an ongoing process that continues long after the work of designing a logo is done.