B2B Branding Mistakes: Which One Describes Your Business?

Building your business's brand is as important as innovating and marketing your product. Just look at the sales of large companies in the past 10 years.

When Tata Motors bought Range Rover and Jaguar from Ford Motor Company (for $2.56 BILLION), they weren't buying them for the factories, employees, and raw materials. It was the brands they were after.  Kraft's purchase of Cadbury (for $19.5 BILLION), wasn't for their chocolate recipe. It was for their brand. 

Increasing the value of your B2B brand should be a strategic initiative. How will you increase your brand awareness (and your business's value) over time? 

You can start by evaluating your brand's 'personality' against the following B2B branding mistakes.

B2B Branding Mistakes - Don't Fall Victim To These Brand Personality Traits:

Your Brand is a Social (Media) Sasquatch

Is your B2B brand elusive in social media? If only a few people have had sightings of your brand on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, your brand is most certainly a social (media) Sasquatch. 

A social Sasquatch often fears the worst with social media, which is why they remain unseen to most. They fear that if their team shares the wrong thing in social channels, it will undoubtedly get them in trouble and ruin their brand. 

Social Sasquatches are often misguided in thinking that their buyers aren't using social media. This dangerously untrue notion will stifle even the best brand awareness growth strategies.

Being a social (media) Sasquatch is a mistake if you are looking to build your business's value, increase trust in your prospects, and reach today's social buyer. 

Your Brand is Self-Centered

If your web presence is all about you, your brand is self-centered. While everyone's favorite person to talk about is them self, it's a mistake for a brand.

Here're some common signs your brand is stuck on itself:

• Your website and social media content is all about your company, products, and/or services
• Your website's only interactive features are contact us and/or RFQ
• You only rank in search engines for keywords that include your brand name
• You haven't clearly defined what your ideal buyer wants from you online
• You haven't considered what you can do to make your prospects' buying process easier

Today's successful brands know they need to be focused on their buyers' needs, not themselves. This means being at or near the top of search results for keywords their buyers use when they start their buying process. This means having truly educational content that helps their buyers. This means adding value for your buyers instead of shoving a brochure (your me, me, me website) in their face and asking them for a meeting.

Your Brand Attracts Negativity and Accumulates the Wrong Friends

If you seem to attract the wrong customers more often than not, bringing negative business relationships that are a drag on morale, you've probably made the following mistake...

You don't carefully attract and qualify for the right friends customers. From your marketing to your sales qualification process, you should be clearly establishing who you want to work with. 

A surefire sign you're making this B2B branding mistake is if you have 2-3 customers that you love to work with and many others you wish would stop calling you.

Working with bad customer after bad customer negatively impacts your brand because it kills your employees' view of your brand and your inevitably lost customers' view of your brand. 

Your Brand Relies On Fate to Connect with Buyers in Google

Is your B2B brand a free spirit that lets fate determine who enters and leaves your website through Google? If so, that's a mistake. 

Some common symptoms that come with relying on fate include: 

• Ranking well for a keyword in Google, and not knowing or caring, why or how it happened -- fate
• You don't have an active strategy to get your brand noticed for relevant keywords in Google
• You don't know what the acronym SEO stands for

In this day and age, your B2B branding strategy must include a significant effort to be found in Google. Fate won't cut it.

Your Brand Wears Blinders to the Signals the World Sends It

Are you blind to the signals all around you that could be improving your branding strategy?

If you aren't actively using an analytics program like Google Analytics on your website, you're definitely wearing your branding blinders.

This is a huge detriment to your brand awareness growth. Using an analytics tool to monitor what's working and what's not is a fundamental step in building your B2B brand awareness.

If you don't have the slightest clue what all of those numbers mean and you fail to find someone to help you, you're still wearing those blinders. 

Measuring the growth of your brand, especially online, has become easier than ever with the abundance of FREE data at your disposal. Not taking advantage of that is a HUGE mistake.

These B2B Branding Mistakes Can Inhibit Your Brand's Growth and Value

As a business owner, you want to maximize the value of your business. As history has shown, a strong brand carries tremendous value. In fact some companies even add their brand's value as an asset on their balance sheet.

If you're making any (or all) of the B2B branding mistakes above, you should start by establishing a brand awareness strategy. Here's a good resource to get you started: