Building your brand
Are your prospects aware of the solutions you provide?
“No one knows who we are. We need to build our brand!”
I hear this endlessly from marketing departments in tech companies worldwide. Their frustration is obvious: Why does their competition have such a well-known brand, while theirs is still unknown?
The answer: They have not built awareness
Marketing people often skip over awareness (or “top of funnel”) and go straight down into other parts of the funnel where they hope to generate leads. Then they wonder why they still have an empty pipeline. It’s because, without awareness, there IS NO FUNNEL.
You cannot force a potential client to buy your product just because you spent $100,000 on lead gen or ABM software. If they don’t know who you are, or who else is using your product they are unlikely to bite. This is lack of awareness.
You’ve heard the expression: “Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM.” That’s because IBM has a strong brand, a solid reputation. The CEO, CMO and (maybe most importantly) CFO know who it is. Whether it is the right choice or not, it doesn’t matter – because it is deemed “safe.”
Safety is a fundamental human desire, it is programmed into our paleo limbic brains and designed to keep us from harm. When you threaten that with something new and unknown, the immediate response is to retreat to safety.
To appeal and win over the paleo brain, you must build awareness, get your name out there and tell everyone what you are about. Only then will they begin to trust you.
Build awareness first
Many tech companies go straight past building awareness to talking about their gadgets, plumbing, benefits, USPs, KPIs. The danger here is that audience still doesn’t know you or your product, so why should they bother to listen?
Building awareness is not an overnight exercise. When I started building my own brand several years ago, it took me two years of daily blogging, posting and interacting in social media with other people in the business before I got noticed. But it wasn’t just about quantity, it was also the quality of the content. If no one was interested in what I was writing about, I got no engagement.
Awareness is like PR, which used to be integral to a company’s efforts to becoming known. PR people understand that you have to be known as an expert in your field. In other words, why should they listen to YOU? Don’t forget there is already a lot of noise coming from your – more recognizable – competitors.
This is where thought leadership comes in.
Top benefits of awareness:
1. Builds reputation and trust – You have expert knowledge and advice about your marketplace and its issues. Proving that your product can help solve these issues with, for example, real customer use cases, helps to build reputation and trust.
2. Increases visibility – If you are seen regularly commenting on a subject in social media, the press, trade publications you can start to catch the attention of an audience.
3. Differentiates your products – By focusing on the issues and trends that matter your potential end users, you can start to differentiate yourself from the competition.
4. Increases engagement – If you discuss/dissect and theorize about topical issues in the industry issues, potential users will engage more with your company. Guess what this makes them? Leads!
Why should you care about thought leadership?
You build technology that serves a purpose; you found a way to solve a problem that many companies may have. But you are not Apple (yet), with an iconic iPhone to offer. You are not Microsoft (yet), with ubiquitous Windows and Teams and cloud services. These companies have very high brand recognition.
Why? Because they built awareness right from the start, addressing the questions customers always ask. Like, what’s in it for me? Does it make my life easier? Does it save me hours at work so I can spend more time with my family? Does it make travel easier (who doesn’t want THAT!)? Does it save my company wasted resources and money, so we can spend more on R&D?
Real thought leadership is when your potential customers say to themselves: “I have that problem, too! I need to know more about that product.”
That means your potential customers go from not knowing who you are and what you do, to finding out more about you. They have entered the funnel!
How do I get started?
Awareness begins with thought leadership. Here are some basics you need to start with:
Narrow down three to five subjects or trends you believe your company should be identified with that relate to your solution.
o What news stories or trends are your potential customers likely to be following? For example, artificial intelligence is a very hot topic – if overdone - right now. But if your company has something REAL to say about it, then say it.
Find the customer pain points!
o Send out surveys on LinkedIn asking what people’s biggest worries are about in your market at the moment.
o Ask sales, pre-sales people what customers are saying.
o Use the pain points to narrow down your themes.
Identify your thought leaders – is it the CEO? CTO? It does not have to be C-level, although it helps build the CEO’s brand if he/she is identifiable as a thought leader.
o Pre-salespeople know a lot about the customers’ pain points and could be great thought leaders.
o Customer success managers are also very good sources of customer pains and trends.
o Some technology boffins are good at talking about issues in the marketplace that they are trying to solve for.
Get your customers to talk about your product. I cannot emphasize how important this is. If a potential customer can see actual users’ stories or testimonials, they are MUCH more likely to go further down the funnel and end up as qualified leads.
Here are five steps to help you get noticed:
1. Write blogs, white papers, eBooks, social media posts.
2. Organize webinars where the experts address popular, trending pain points.
3. Promote on social media, in-house, at events.
4. Ask (or tell) your employees, your customers, your execs to share widely on LinkedIn and other relevant social accounts.
5. Get some PR: Have the CEO talk about the issues to the press.
The above actions will help you gain awareness in the market, if you are consistent.
While thought leadership and awareness can definitely improve your lead generation, it can also be really fun if you do it right.
If you would like advice on any of this, feel free to reach out to book your free advisory discussion.