With people encountering up to 5,000 advertisements daily—from billboards and YouTube pre-rolls to persistent online retargeting—it’s challenging for B2B brands to capture attention. Breaking out of the clutter and standing out is crucial. But how can your B2B brand cut through the noise?
We’ve all heard veteran marketers reminiscing about a time when creating a famous brand felt within reach. They fondly recall eras of meticulously crafted campaigns that resonated for months. Today’s marketing landscape, however, moves at lightning speed, with campaigns sometimes lasting only days, making it easy for B2B brands to lose focus on what matters: becoming memorable to your audience.
To elevate your B2B brand above the fray, we recommend three pivotal steps, ensuring your message not only reaches but also resonates with your target audience.
Follow these three steps and you’ll be on the path to making your B2B brand legendary.
Your customer and prospect come first
With all due respect, it doesn’t matter what you think when it comes to strategic messaging. It doesn’t matter what we think either. You have to understand what resonates with your current customers and prospects. In the insights from a recent research project for a client, product benefits the marketing managers had thought were most important were actually not important at all to their target. Had we pushed only the benefits that mattered to us, those advertising dollars would be wasted. Now that we have the right information, we can work together on the best creative strategy to market that product.
Remember what matters
It’s true in life and it’s true in marketing. You need to paint a picture to your customers and prospects about why your brand is the best. Don’t focus on product features, like horsepower, torque, mileage, etc. Focus on the result of that feature—the customer benefit. Theodore Levitt, a renowned marketing professor at Harvard, once said, “People don’t want quarter-inch drills. They want quarter-inch holes.” People don’t care about the features. They care about what the features can do for them.
Be the superhero brand
We live in a time when superheroes are all the rage. As you prepare your B2B brand for 2025, be thinking about how you can outperform your competition and be a hero to your customer at the end of the day. Over a recent summer, we worked with one of our clients on ways to say “thank you” to their customers. On a hot summer day, they surprised crews on jobsites with barbecue and cold drinks for lunch just to thank them for being loyal customers. Even small gestures like this build rapport with customers, and will be remembered by the people on that crew for a very long time.
As we wrap, keep these in mind as the new year approaches. Sooner or later (probably sooner), you’ll see another ad trying to convince you to buy something. Keep your B2B brand in mind as you encounter these different ads and lead the charge to make your brand famous.
