For a moment, put yourself in the shoes of one of your ideal clients. Using that clients’ point of view, how would you describe your branding for your business? Would you say that your branding is successful in reaching your ideal clients and generating revenue? If you’re not sure – don’t fret! In this article, we are going to discuss why your branding matters and how impactful branding can generate revenue for your business.
First off, let’s define what branding is. A brand identifies your business and differentiates it from your competitors. Defining your brand lets your customers know what your business stands for, what you do, and how they should perceive your company.
Why does branding matter?
Simply put, conceptualizing your brand will allow you to get on your prospect’s radar. When reaching out to a prospect, your branding should be able to support your presented value proposition. Additionally, it will answer their questions and establish trust. Your branding helps to set the bar high when obtaining clients, and your company doesn’t follow through on its promises, it can affect your reputation.
Statistics show that 71% of B2B customers are actively considering moving their business to a different company. If your brand has a reputation for pushing back deadlines, overpromising and underperforming, or even poor communication skills, you’re at risk of losing your biggest clients.
Moreover, branding matters because it can improve your ROI, or return on investment. Hyper-focused branding, such as account-based marketing, is a method that can help support the idea that your brand is the solution to an individual business. To learn more about account-based marketing, check out our in-depth blog.
97% of B2B businesses who have used ABM had a somewhat higher or much higher ROI than other marketing methods. More importantly, those businesses saw a significant benefit for their brand from focusing on expanding their established client relationships through account-based marketing.
Your brand could be your company’s support, or it could be the very thing pushing your clients out the way. Creating an authentic, well-rounded brand can position your business as a reputable and reliable source in your niche. Using a hyper-focused method, such as account-based marketing, can transform your branding efforts and improve your ROI.
Examples of successful branding that has generated revenue
Now that we’ve explained why branding is important for your business, let’s take a look at some B2B companies that have been successful in their branding and in turn, grew their revenue.
B2B customer relationship management leader Salesforce is considered a master at the art of branding. Their team is dedicated to helping their clients, and they even have a database of over 250 success stories for site visitors to filter through based on the product, industry, company size, and company type. Over the years, Salesforce has acquired a customer base that is loyal to its brand. In fact, they have an annual conference called Dreamforce that attracts nearly 170,000 attendees.
Taking it a step further, Salesforce makes community engagement and philanthropy a large part of their brand. Salesforce’s philanthropic approach, 1-1-1 Integrated Philanthropy, ensures that 1% of profits, 1% of employee time, and 1% of their products are dedicated to helping others. Since the company was founded in 1999, they have donated more than $240 million in grants, 3.5 million hours of community service, and have donated products to more than 39,000 non-profits and educational institutions. Salesforce’s branding reflects their commitment to not only their customers but to give back to their community.
Salesforce’s brand serves as a testimony that strong B2B branding leads to major business results – the brand was the fastest enterprise software company in the market to reach $10 billion in annual revenue.
Another great example of successful branding that has generated revenue is Trello, a web-based list-making application. Trello’s brand is based around having a freemium product that is both easy-to-use and customizable, as well as nurturing relationships with their customers.
Trello allows teams to have a collective view and understanding of their company projects. Since Trello wants a range of people, whether in the office or working remotely, to use their product, they knew they had to make the tool as easy-to-use and as customizable as possible. Their branding efforts were successful – companies preferred Trello’s method of project and task management. Within the first year, Trello had over 500,000 users without any paid advertisements or paid subscriptions. Trello’s base product is free forever, but they do offer 3 tiers of premium subscriptions with more features.
Instead of using paid advertisements to attract their customers, Trello preferred to use word-of-mouth and referral strategies to obtain an organic clientele. As part of their branding goal to nurture customer relationships, Trello incentivizes users who refer their product to their networks with a one-month subscription to Trello Gold. In addition to this, they send out free goodies and merch to their champion customers. Trello is constantly interacting with their loyal customers – they even have a Slack channel where they can chat with Trello members directly about announcements, feedback, best practices, and more.
Through Trello’s successful branding, the company has seen an incredible ROI with more than 25 million users and has been acquired by one of the largest tech companies in the world.
How to use analytics to measure ROI
In our previous article, we talked about some of the ways that your business can collect analytics. Now, we’re going to show you just how you can use those analytics to measure your company’s ROI.
When using analytics to measure your ROI, you first want to make sure that there is a central goal set in place by your company. If you don’t have a goal, what are you comparing your analytics to? For instance, let’s say that in December 2020, 23% of generated leads for the month came from your website. For January 2021, you had a goal of turning that number into 30%. However, when reviewing the data for website lead generation, your team found that only 28% of generated leads came from your site for the month of January. Using these analytics, you can measure what marketing strategies performed the best on your website, what you can improve on to reach your next goal, and what you return on investment was for those 28% of leads compared to 23%.
Measuring your ROI in B2B marketing using analytics helps your company to understand not only how much revenue your marketing strategies are producing, but also which strategies are performing the best.
After reading this article, we hope that you have a clearer vision of what you want your branding to look like, how branding can impact your ROI, and how to measure your ROI using analytics. Or, are you still debating how to define your brand? Feel like it doesn’t align with your business goals! Our team of B2B marketing experts is here to help and guide you. Reach out to our team today!
