See if this scene rings a bell:
Your website’s last big update was 5 years ago. Your LinkedIn bio was written by a long-forgotten past employee, potentially when the account was first opened. Your sales decks, homepage, and social media posts have no connective tissue or shared language. And, somewhere out there, a self-published Medium post from a total stranger is telling potential customers what you charge.
OK, maybe the last part was a little too specific to issues we’ve handled with a client.
But this kind of dissonance is the norm in many B2B spaces – especially with small to mid-size companies. Why? Because it’s instinctive to keep things as they’ve been, especially when reconsidering your company’s brand or its cohesiveness sounds like a huge undertaking with no immediate payoff. It’s better to play it safe.
Except those assumptions are all wrong. And they may be costing you in ways that are tough to catch.
What Does Brand Identity Mean for B2B Organizations?
Let’s be clear: A strong brand identity isn’t just about your logos, colors, and a style guide. It’s the sum of all your answers to: Who are you, whom do you serve, and why should anyone care? Ideally, those responses are clear, consistent among channels, and reexamined on a regular basis. But that’s often not the case.
Before you can standardize that identity, you need to have clean, confident answers to the following:
- Whom are we talking to? And a follow-up: Whom are we excluding?
- What’s our purpose? Don’t allow for vague or empty wording here – be honest and interrogate this response. The clearer, the better.
- What makes us the better option for our target audience(s)? If you’re not sure what your value proposition is or why your audience should choose you over the competition, winning them over is going to be extremely difficult.
These are business questions that must have answers before marketing makes them visible and memorable. This discussion might take time and effort, but it’s worth it.
Take Stock of the Institutional Knowledge Available to You
How long has it been since you talked to other departments about your brand? If you’re like a lot of B2B marketers, the answer is simply, “Too long!” Or, worse – “Never.”
It’s easy to overlook all the value your brand can gain from leveraging your internal braintrust. Maybe you don’t want to “bother” people, or maybe your org doesn’t encourage cross-pollinating information as well as it could, but you might be missing key opportunities like:
- Digging into the sales information goldmine – Your reps and CRM platform can unearth an already-existing brand brief from pain point discussions, objections, and competitor comparisons that keep cropping up.
- Consulting with SMEs on their focus areas – In addition to Sales, lean on Operations, Product Management, Account Management, and anyone else who really knows the audiences you need to reach. These pros often get left out of brand-level conversations, even though they have valuable knowledge about your products/services and their features.
- Stepping outside the marketing silos for some fresh air – It’s tempting to think about advertising, SEO, content, and sales as separate lanes. They are, but they’re also all part of the same highway heading toward better leads.
Internal misalignment on branding has always been an issue on its own. But there’s a new amplifier making problems more apparent and costly: AI search.
How Does AI Search Change the Approach to B2B Visibility?
In the old world, brand inconsistency was a missed opportunity. In the AI search world, it’s an active liability.
Case in point: We had a SaaS client that had unclear pricing on their website. It made sense, since things could get complicated when quoting a custom solution dependent on a dozen variables. But their approach was so vague that we noticed AI-generated responses to queries about their pricing relied on information from a random Medium article. It was written years prior by someone with no connection to the company, but it had specific, inaccurate information that AI was all too happy to parrot back in full confidence.
The risks for not establishing core components of your brand aren’t hypothetical. They’re real, and they’re affecting areas you might not even be monitoring yet.
LLMs can synthesize information from anything available about your brand. Your carefully crafted About Us page with beautiful, but nondescript language. A year-old unflattering mention on a Reddit thread. A biased competitor-published comparison between their offering and yours. It can all be processed, then weighted by consistency and confidence in the source.
That means if your brand consistency is already fragmented – and let’s be honest, most brands are, unless you’ve been very proactive in aligning your messaging – everything from your LinkedIn posts to your listings in partner directories could give AI systems conflicting signals. The result is a flattened, potentially inaccurate representation of your company.
You can’t fully control what AI says about you. But you can put your thumb on the scale by owning as much of the information landscape as possible, and making sure what you put out there is consistent, clear, and authoritative. That’s what builds solid brand positioning in the modern day.
Beyond Building Brand Awareness: Establishing Brand Salience
Awareness is a vital part of a B2B marketing strategy, but it’s vital to pursue both awareness and salience. So not only do audiences know about you, but they also think about you when a problem arises that you can solve. All the awareness campaigns in the world won’t move the needle if no one brings up your brand name when there’s a pain point to address. That’s why building salience is the crux of B2B marketing.
Improving salience requires:
- Maintaining a consistent brand voice across your platforms (with slight shifts to best suit a given medium or channel)
- Solidifying and communicating what differentiates you from the competition, specifically a line prospects can pass along to their CFO or other stakeholders
- Committing to regular, ongoing brand maintenance, rather than one-off, big rebrands every few years
In other words, you’ll need to synthesize the elements we’ve been discussing here!
This Branding Conversation Is A Must for B2B Companies
Most digital marketing agencies are still a bit behind the times, drawing a hard line on brand strategy. They say, “Brand strategy is out of our scope; go figure that part out and come back to us.” That’s understandable, but our B2B specialists on the Enterprise Team take a different approach.
Even when our clients are contracted purely for our SEO services, we’ll bring branding into the larger marketing conversation. We’ve seen what happens when we don’t. Building a technically sound SEO strategy on a foundation of vague or inconsistent brand identity is – at best – a missed opportunity.
That’s not us trying to upsell our clients. Rather, we’re trying to make sure siloed thinking doesn’t limit our strategy.
Ready to See What Strategies Can Improve Brand Visibility in AI Search Engines?
Your gut is right. Things are uncertain now. Search is changing, buyer behavior is evolving, and the way B2B purchase decisions happen is slowly but surely shifting. But the companies that will come out ahead aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones who are clear on who they are and who they’re for, and making sure that brand story is consistent everywhere someone might look.
If you’re not sure what your brand is saying about you right now, or how that plays into your visibility in search, AI, and other digital touchpoints – that’s exactly the conversation our B2B-focused Enterprise Team is equipped to have. Book a discovery session with our team today to get on the right track with today’s best practices.
