Grant Marketing Blog

Why Your Sales Team Needs to Be Your Most Authentic Brand Advocate

Are your sales and marketing functions copacetic? Or are they more like two ships that, if you’re lucky, pass in the night? Aligning your company’s marketing and business development functions:

• Unifies your team
• Builds strategic cohesion
• Keeps the sales pipeline flowing

The Significant Influence of Employee-Owned Certifications

Is Your B2B Brand Strategy on Target?

Branding is about much more than defining your company and developing products or services. In fact, a recent survey from BuzzStream found out that nearly half of consumers stated they will quickly unfollow a brand that engages in too much self-promotion. It translates to all business relationships—even in B2B, people are interested in what they get from the relationship, not what you are offering. Companies often get caught up in their own B2B branding strategies and goals, which leads to shameless self-promotion and a real disconnect with the target audience.

Powerful Brands Gain Loyalty through Passion and Performance

Everyone knows that loyal customers are the backbone of any successful B2B company. B2B brand loyalty is important—but how passionate are your customers? When you think of people who are passionate about a product, consumables typically come to mind. Picture the hordes of people who wait anxiously and are willing to stand endlessly in long lines for products with an apple on them, or those who won’t (or can’t!) start their day without their favorite branded coffee.

5 Simple Steps to Take Your Brand Development Process to the Next Level

Branding is native to a company's marketing department, but the brand development process doesn't and shouldn't end there. It isn't the product or the pricing that truly sets your company apart from your competitor's, it's the branding. And, who speaks for what the company stands for better than its own employees? Branding is the reason one chooses Trader Joe's over any other grocery store or a Starbucks' latte instead of another brand's coffee, even though that same beverage is most likely available elsewhere (anywhere!) at a cheaper price. 

Do You Understand Your Company’s Brand Essence?

Striving for balance in life leads to feeling centered: strong, even-keeled, and in control of your destiny. Achieving this in your personal life can be accomplished in a variety of ways—people do yoga, meditate, run, hike, travel—whatever serves as an enjoyable counterbalance to the demands of everyday life.

Connect with Consumers Through Your Brand Essence

Social media plays an important role in how consumers discover, research, and share information about industrial manufacturing brands. If social media is not a part of your brand development strategy, learn to embrace Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and the likes because it will only lead to heightened company success. According to Nielsen, Sixty percent of consumers researching products learned about a specific brand through social networking sites. Additionally, Nielsen found that 53% of social networkers follow brands. It is cycle that feeds itself—and it’s evident that a social media presence is critical for communicating your brand essence. If you haven’t adopted a social media strategy, the time is now to do so.

Because Your B2B Brand Strategy May Still Need Fixin’

We hear all too often the strains of, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” reasoning for not updating brand messaging or revising outdated websites. What you aren’t doing, in reality, is adhering to a consistent and congruent brand development strategy. But do you really know how many opportunities you may be missing out on by not making these changes? What is your gauge for broken? If you don’t remain relevant and contemporary, prospects may be passing you by because you look “broke” to them. Your assumptions may be shortsighted and costly. 

Have a Healthy, Heart-Hitting Company Brand

Why is Walt Disney World® magical? Why are Volvos safe? Why are Jeeps® adventurous? Each of these answers boils down to one thing: brand essence. It is the emotion your brand conveys. In other words, it is the emotional heart—some would say, soul—of your brand. So, Disney World, Volvos, and Jeeps evoke feelings of magic, safety, and adventure, respectively, among their customers. Better yet, these characteristics are associated with these companies even by people who don’t buy Jeeps, Volvos, or go to Disney. Well done.

The Connection between Brand and the Bottom Line

Long ago, Peter Drucker said, “Because the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer, the business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”