How to Build Your B2B Tech Brand with Limited Resources…
Building a brand might seem daunting, especially for bootstrapped B2B tech startups, but that need not be the case. Chances are, you are not competing directly with Microsoft or Apple for a slice of their global dominance. More likely, you have a highly specialised technology or service for a clearly defined market niche that can be reached cost-effectively via accessible channels. The challenge, therefore, no longer appears an insurmountable task, with or without series funding. Before investing any time and effort to build your brand, first you must create it – see post on how to do this HERE.
Brands Create Long-Term Value
A strong brand is built through a combination of clear messaging and positioning and consistent communication with a meaningful impact. Your content strategy is central, which is then shared with your audience through appropriate syndication channels. It takes thought and time, but if done with commitment, it will pay dividends. In this way, you can create momentum in the marketplace for your brand that builds up over time, pushing your tech startup toward its goals. By stimulating revenue generation, this helps create long-term value for your business and its investors.
Top 10 Brand Building Tips for B2B Tech Startups
Here are my top 10 tips that any B2B tech startup can do to help even the smallest company extend its reach and make a significant impact without breaking the bank.
1. Content
Your marketing must focus on developing thought leadership content, followed by distributing that content via relevant channels, specifically where you can reach your target audience. For example, do not waste time and resources advertising on Facebook if all your potential customers are on LinkedIn. Instead, commit to the places, platforms and events where your prospects already hang out. Then, devise new and exciting ways to engage them.
Be as relevant, consistent and helpful as you possible your content. By creating and distributing valuable resources, your startup can address the pain points and needs of your target audience, positioning the company as experts in your area of specialism. This thought leadership approach helps develop credibility and trust, helped by highlighting customer use stories and demonstrable examples of your capabilities. Do as much as you can to spread the word and expose your brand to the people you are trying to sell to.
2. Get Social
Use social media platforms to interact with customers and prospects. This is a powerful channel for sharing content and showcasing the brand’s personality, helping to amplify your reach and engagement. When marketing content is shared in this way, post analytics will provide quick feedback on what topics, messaging and content formats are the most popular. This helps you direct resources to the things that work best because they appeal to your market. The more you can align your messaging and content with your audience’s expectations and needs, the more impact you will have. Only use the social platforms that make sense for your audience and avoid wasting time with others.
3. Influence the Influencers
Beyond sharing engaging content, such as customer stories that showcase your value, it helps to find and work with independent spokespeople who influence the people you are marketing to. For example, aligning with respected industry leaders and analysts who are well-connected, write articles, talk at industry events and are interviewed on podcasts, can be a great way to help get your message out. Nurturing relationships with recognised industry spokespeople is a great way for them to get to know your startup, and for you to learn from them about where they think the industry is going. If they then start to comment about your solution, this can help boost credibility and brand awareness. Marketing through people who help shape the industry with market reports and white papers can be powerful, and the assets they produce are great tools to use in your sales process.
4. Get Involved
Startups with founders who are prepared to invest time building up their personal profile tend to fare better than those that stay behind the scenes. There is no substitute for getting your own founders and leaders to represent the business at speaking events, roundtables, podcasts and in the industry press. Founders must be prepared to present, comment and evangelise wherever and whenever the opportunity arises. Company spokespeople are the public face of any young tech firm, and the more they get into public forums, the better.
5. Partner to Extend Your Reach
The tech industry is built on partnerships and many B2B tech companies sell their products through channel partners, such as resellers and distributors. You may also find other businesses that align well with your solution and may be able to combine efforts and brand equity to sell with them. If you associate your startup with partners who already have established brands in your target market, it can help you get faster recognition through association. Whenever there is an appropriate collaboration opportunity, embrace it.
6. Speak to Investors
Another group worth talking to and nurturing relationships with is the investor community, not least because you may one day want to pitch them for funding. In the meantime, it helps if they are aware of your existence and where you fit in the market. Some investors may even have significant influence over some of your key target prospects, as they may sit on their company boards. When investors suggest or refer a technology to one of their assets, they are more likely to take it seriously. If you can get to know the relevant investors in your target market, so they understand how you can increase the value of their investments, then this could be a good way to initiate a sales conversation.
7. Extend Your Community
There may be existing industry forums and online communities where you can share your expertise and build relationships. Explore these opportunities and experiment with different ways to expose your brand to these groups. You may invite members to attend your events and webinars, where you demonstrate your knowledge and connect with potential customers. Such groups could be beneficial in recruiting new team members as well as finding new customers.
8. Online Events
Webinars are an excellent and cost-effective way to reach your audience. Keep your online events short and to the point; 30 minutes is usually long enough to outline your proposition and provide a quick product overview, highlighting your most valuable use case(s). You do not want to show everything, just enough to whet the appetite. Focus on the objective, which is to generate as many follow-up sales calls or demo requests as possible. These follow-up one-to-one sessions are where you drill down into the details and start to learn about your prospects. Once recorded, webinar events can be made available as evergreen content for prospects to view on-demand. Equally important as running an engaging online event for a live audience is contacting everyone who registered afterwards, whether they attended or not.
9. From Freemium to Premium
If you have a free version of your product, you may be able to quickly build a valuable community of users who progress to a paid version once they have experienced the value. By giving them free access to your tech, users who like your product may be happy to join a community and engage with you to provide feedback. This can also be a great source of leads and future revenue. Many tech startups have used free versions of their products as a strategy to upsell users to a more premium or enterprise license later. Companies like HubSpot use this tactic to good effect.
10. Engage Your Customers
Once you have started to build your own user group of paying business customers, you must deploy appropriate ways to engage them, relevant to their size and importance. Segmenting customer organisations and individuals within them, based on their job role and responsibility, means you can address them appropriately. Schedule regular customer events such as user groups, product review updates, training workshops, customer advisory sessions, and so on. They can be a mix of virtual and in-person sessions, mixed with a social element to help nurture personal relationships.
These events are used to keep customers informed, but also allow you to learn about their experiences. Relationship building keeps you updated on their biggest challenges, revealing how you might further assist them, and provides a direct feedback loop on your product and performance. In this way, you can continue to improve by developing products and services that customers want. On an individual level, it’s good practice to schedule quarterly reviews for major clients with their account manager and customer success representative as a minimum and include subject matter experts as required.
Guidance to Help Build Your Brand
LinkedIn can be a useful channel to reach B2B target prospects. Try to connect with as many relevant contacts in your target company list as possible. Connect with them personally and invite them to follow your company profile. This means when you post new content, or like and share content from your company profile, there is an opportunity for them to see and engage with it. All your startup’s employees must do the same to benefit from everyone’s personal networks; otherwise, you will have to spend more money promoting your posts. Promote LinkedIn posts when running events or posting content with a perceived high value, such as an explainer video or informative eGuide.
It’s All About Selling
The purpose of your marketing activity is to increase awareness in your target market, generate new business leads and assist the sales team to close them as quickly and efficiently as possible. Demonstrating the expertise you have gathered in your startup and highlighting the individual and combined skills, and how this benefits your clients, is a good way to build trust with prospects. By showcasing customer case studies and quantifying the value they derive by using your technology, you can tell a meaningful story of what new prospects can expect from you. A well-planned and executed content marketing strategy can significantly enhance brand awareness, drive website traffic and help grow revenues. Selling is the one true performance indicator that tells you if your strategy is on point and must be the overarching focus everyone is collectively working towards.
You may want to read: “Why B2B Tech Startups Must Invest in Marketing.”
