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Branding is essential to your marketing strategy. You rely on your brand to convey credibility and build a trusting relationship with potential customers. Successful branding helps you make emotional connections with your target audience, drive awareness, and establish yourself as their chosen solution.
You can take multiple approaches to branding. This article takes an in-depth look at brand-to-demand, a strategy in which you take a holistic approach to branding to boost awareness and generate leads.
Brand-to-demand marketing strategies combine brand awareness and lead generation. This approach to branding assumes that brand identity, positioning, and awareness efforts contribute to creating demand and generating leads.
Building Your Brand Identity: The First Step in Content Marketing
Keara Dowd, a senior manager for content marketing at Clutch, takes a brand-first approach to content marketing. Instead of taking a search engine optimization (SEO)-first approach to content strategy, Dowd and the Clutch team make sure each piece of content fits into the brand. Her approach involves understanding, “What kind of unique angles or perspectives can we bring to the table?” The Clutch team then develops content around these perspectives.
Knowing your brand identity and what makes you unique is critical for developing content that resonates with your target audience. It allows you to be consistent with your messaging across marketing channels.
Without a clear narrative around your brand attributes and values, your content can become disjointed, making it difficult to scale your content efforts. By integrating your brand values into each piece of content, you can create impactful content for every stage of the marketing funnel while solidifying brand awareness.
The Consequences of Imbalance Between Brand and Demand
Focusing your marketing efforts on one end of the funnel can impact your business. Neglecting the top of the funnel for short-term conversions can cause people to forget your brand. Sure, you have conversions, but you aren’t driving loyalty.
Not taking the time to build a strong brand can also make your sales team less effective. Instead of walking into a pitch with a polished presentation designed to convert, they should spend more time highlighting why a potential customer should choose you over the competition.
Conversely, if you focus only on top-funnel efforts that drive awareness, you could struggle to convert customers. Without a clear demand-generation strategy, it becomes harder to convince buyers at the end of the funnel that your brand is the best solution for them.
The Art of Storytelling: Connecting With Your Audience
Cohesive storytelling is critical to the success of brand-to-demand approaches. Your content marketing efforts should inform your audience about your solution while inspiring them to feel connected to your brand.
The business-to-business (B2B) space makes it easy for decision-makers to feel constantly bombarded with pitches for various products and services. Honing your storytelling skills helps you stand out among the noise. Learning how to create content based on your brand and its mission helps you strike an authentic tone that is more likely to resonate with your target audience.
Authenticity can also improve your SEO efforts. Instead of building content around keywords, you naturally work those keywords into your content while staying true to your brand. Search engine algorithms are adapting to weed out irrelevant content, so this approach helps build your authority and relevance to search terms.
Why Podcasting Is a Game Changer for Marketers
Content marketing and storytelling are core components of the brand-to-demand approach. Strong content positions your brand in customers’ minds and can also educate potential customers. Some potential customers may not know they need your product or service until you tell them about it and how it meets their needs.
Podcasting is one avenue for telling your story and positioning your brand. With new technology available, starting a podcast has become easier and more accessible for anyone. You no longer need to be skilled in radio or have a background in sound engineering.
In 2024, over 500 million people listened to podcasts. Many of these listeners are also decision-makers in your industry. In the modern sales cycle, decision-makers often research multiple companies before reaching out to schedule a demo. Hosting a podcast and facilitating meaningful discussions is a fantastic way to make an impression on potential buyers without contacting them directly.
Producing a professional, engaging podcast does take time. You must invest resources to plan for and produce your show. Make sure you compile data outlining a podcast’s potential benefits before taking the idea to your CEO to add to the marketing budget. Compile examples of others who have produced quality shows with a modest budget.
Leveraging Journalistic Skills in Content Strategy
Storytelling plays a pivotal role in marketing strategy, and your marketing team can leverage journalistic skills to improve your content strategy. Journalists need to tell captivating stories that connect with an audience while remaining faithful to facts.
Like journalists, B2B marketers should understand their target audience and develop content that speaks to their needs and interests. B2B marketers should also be well-versed in multiple strategies. Instead of having part of your team focus on brand awareness while others focus on demand strategies, involve the whole team at each stage of the sales pipeline.
When your marketing and sales team members understand how branding and demand generation are connected, they can create cohesive messages that enhance your brand while encouraging conversions.
Overcoming Content Challenges in a Dual Marketplace
Depending on your mix of product or service offerings, you may be speaking with diverse audience segments. These audiences may have differing needs and interests. Dowd encounters this issue at Clutch, whose audience includes businesses and service providers.
Clutch has separate marketing teams for its business customers and service providers. However, these teams collaborate, so the messaging is always consistent. Dowd and her marketing team colleagues segment their audiences and create buyer personas that drive content. They try to reach each segment where they are with the right digital media platforms.
Although these users have different needs, Clutch’s brand story drives each message. People in every buyer persona should have the same idea about the brand regardless of the content.
Evolving Marketing Dynamics
Marketing continues to shift with changing buyer behavior and market conditions. Consider these factors as you execute your marketing strategy.
Focus on Meaningful Business Objectives
Instead of developing your content and marketing strategies as a department, you should integrate them with your overall business goals, which helps you allocate resources and effectively target your campaigns. It also encourages you to understand how your marketing efforts fit into your business as a whole. This understanding drives your brand-to-demand strategy.
Redefine Customer Centricity
With more companies taking a personalized approach to marketing and customer service, customers have come to expect it. To succeed, you must go beyond customer satisfaction and anticipate your customers’ needs.
Platforms powered by artificial intelligence (AI) can analyze large volumes of data that help you understand customer behavior. Use these insights to tailor your marketing messages and personalize offers to specific audience segments. Gathering customer feedback also helps you improve your products and services to better meet their future needs.
Embrace Continuous Experimentation
As a modern B2B marketer, you have reams of data at your fingertips. This data lets you assess and refine your marketing efforts in real time, which is great for experimenting. As you implement your brand-to-demand strategies, you can measure your results and refine future campaigns.
You can measure anything from conversions to brand sentiment analysis. These insights will tell you if your storytelling efforts are making the right impact. If not, look at your customer data again and take a different approach.
Strategies for Implementing Brand-to-Demand Integration
Start implementing your brand-to-demand integration by defining your brand identity. Gather your sales and marketing teams and use customer insights to define your brand position in the market and your unique value proposition.
Once you’ve reached a consensus, craft content that highlights your unique value in relation to your customers’ key pain points. Segment your audience by similar characteristics, including where they are in the buyer journey.
To target buyers at the top of the funnel, create memorable content and use the right marketing channels to place yourself in front of buyers who aren’t yet aware of your brand. Integrate your brand story into demand-generation campaigns to capture people at the bottom of the funnel who are ready to buy.
Track each marketing campaign and sales pitch and use the data to refine your marketing efforts to speak to your audience.
Transforming Brand Awareness Into Demand Generation: The Path Forward
Taking a brand-to-demand approach to marketing and content lets you build a strong brand based on trust and credibility. It also helps you reach potential customers who are ready to buy and make a compelling case for their purchase. This strategy helps you create a seamless customer journey from awareness to purchase, which often drives brand loyalty.
Learn more about how Clutch approaches brand-to-demand on Compose.ly’s Content Matters podcast interview with Keara Dowd. Subscribe today.
