B2B Brand: Lead Generator and Competitive Defense at Minimal Cost

I just had lunch with a former client who is perched on the verge of amazing market success. She's bringing a new product with a solid ROI into a new market with no competitors currently focused on this market opportunity. Even better, she's on the verge of lining up significant endorsements and a government regulation change that - together or separately - will literally shove customers at her. She's poised to make a killing, but she's got a strategic problem. When the endorsements go public and the leads start to flood in, competitors will start crawling out of the woodwork, targeting her first mover advantage in this new juicy market opportunity she's helped to create. She's smart and knows she has to prepare so she doesn't end up handing the market she's spent so much time and money developing to some other company in the space who spins up fancy marketing to confuse her prospect base and extend what is already a frustratingly long sales cycle.

So we brainstormed. She's certainly got business assets: a patented technology that works, happy customers willing to talk, financial support from the parent company, endorsements from multiple and diverse influencers in her industry and a no brainer business case. The asset she doesn't have in her arsenal yet is a brand and a messaging platform to support it. What? Can I seriously propose that a soft and squishy brand could be an asset for a startup that can't afford zillions in advertising? More importantly, does she have the time and money to create it? The answer to both questions is Yes! it will be an asset for her and best of all, she doesn't have to budget a major (i.e., high cost) advertising blitz in order to leverage its value for her shareholders.

This scenario illustrates one of the most fascinating differences between B2B and B2C marketing and how smart B2B branding can be both affordable and impactful on a company's business success. The essence of this difference is that my friend's B2B target audience is a bunch of big companies, but if you list them out, even including multiple contacts per organization, they all fit on a spreadsheet without crashing your laptop. At this stage in her development, media buys are much less important than some well-placed endorsements and references at key trade shows and other venues where the prospects all congregate. Combined with some targeted public relations and modest lead generation outreach that leverages the government regulation sea change, she can get in front of all the right people fairly quickly and if her brand promise and product materials are clean and compelling, she's starting to stuff her pipeline.

Let's look at how she can develop her brand strategy to be a key aspect of her product launch effort.