You’ve done all the hard work that’s involved in creating your B2B brand strategy, including defining all of your graphic elements, from font to colors, and creating brand guides to ensure consistency across all formats and vehicles. You’ve defined your value proposition, and you’ve developed your buyer personas.

What’s next?

Now it’s time to put all of these elements that make up your brand into action. Let’s look at the next steps for buyer personas, your social presence, your brand voice and website.  

Buyer personas

Let’s say you’ve developed four different buyer personas. Now, for each, you’ll need to:

• Develop targeted content that speaks to their specific needs, goals and interests
• Determine the best channels for each persona, and place your content there

In addition to attracting the attention of your buyer personas, this targeted approach will allow you to maximize your analytics by matching the behavior of your prospects to your content, and share this insight across your teams for better understanding of your prospects’ needs and expectations.

The beauty of online is that you know a great deal about your prospects and customers, making it easy to automatically create segmented, personalized experiences for each of them. If you have a well-stocked library of content – how-to videos, user testimonials, thought leadership pieces – you can easily keep the contact alive by sending content to nurture the level and type of interest that they have shown.  

According to HubSpot, your content has a big responsibility – it represents your salespeople, your store and your marketing department, all wrapped up in one. That’s why it’s so important to avoid boring content that doesn’t engage your prospects.

Social media

Do you have to be active on all social media channels? No – you should choose the ones that work for your company, products and goals, and focus on those. For certain niche businesses, LinkedIn is the only platform that offers traction. For others, different platforms help them meet different goals. Many companies use Instagram to showcase company culture to help in recruiting, for example, while their Facebook pages focus on connecting with people who use their products.

YouTube is a separate category. If you create any video at all, you’ll need to post it on YouTube. It’s a social media site, but it’s also a key content platform. 

Figure out your brand voice

Is your brand voice fun, or serious? Consider your buyer personas. Does the head of purchasing for a hospital group want to see your light-hearted musings on Twitter? Not if it doesn’t match the seriousness of your product and brand.  Some brands can have a lot of fun on social media. Sadly, this doesn’t apply to most B2B companies. But you still need to define your brand voice. You’ll likely want a blend of serious, helpful, knowledgeable and succinct, tailored to your audiences.

Fine-tune your website

Don’t just post a static version of your website and consider that your work is done. To make sure your website is doing what you want it to do, you’ll need to continually monitor and adjust your content and the way it’s presented.

Consider these tips:

• Include share links on all content. Your visitors can help spread the word for you, and you can see where and how they’re sharing your content.
• Make sure that your value proposition is highlighted on each page.
• Give your key products the best placement on your web pages.
• Conduct A/B testing to see what version and structure of your website your visitors prefer.
• Put a CTA on each page, for content downloads, to watch videos, sign up for your newsletter, etc.

Want more inspiration on creating and managing a great B2B brand?

Sign up for Living Stone’s Infusinar on “How to create a knockout B2B brand in the inbound marketing age,” on Thursday March 15, 14h - 16h, at Brewer's Corner, Oudenweg 42 in Beerlegem.

Living Stone brand experts Anne-Mie Vansteelant and Gunther Walravens will explain how a strong brand can help you to:

• Create value
• Generate valuable leads
• Connect with your customers
• Generate more sales 
• Establish a solid reputation

They’ll also share will share 8 actionable steps you can take to establish a winning B2B brand in the inbound marketing age.