How important is brand marketing to your client’s marketing strategy? According to a report by Transmission, 61% of CEOs and board members say that branding is a strategic business priority. What does that mean? Marketers are now more accountable for the organization’s brand success. Are you and your marketing contact living up to the CEO’s expectations for digital brand marketing?

Why Brand Marketing is Important

So, why are the majority of CEOs and board members so focused on brand marketing? Both traditional and digital brand marketing help brands gain the trust, respect and advocacy of consumers, says Transmission. “Consumers in B2B and B2C demand a lot more from the brands they engage with. Emotional expectations and moral standards are a lot higher. Beliefs and opinions on brands travel faster and further.”

As such, 78% of marketing leaders in B2B say that traditional and digital brand marketing is very important, if not critical, to the financial value of their company. Another 81% also tie brand marketing directly to their company’s revenue growth.

If you and your client aren’t in charge of their company’s brand marketing, you won’t know whether their brand awareness is positive or negative. Or worse: If no one knows who they are or much about them at all.

The Pillars of a Brand Platform to Market

According to Transmission, there are nine B2B brand platform components your client should at least be mixing and matching from in order to lay good groundwork for brand marketing:

Purpose: Why does your client’s brand exist?
Values: What ideals guide your client’s brand actions?
Promise: What can your client’s customers always expect from them?
Vision: What does your client’s brand want to achieve?
Personality: Is your client’s brand extremely professional? Quirky? Uplifting?
Distinction: What makes them stand out from their competition?
Connectivity: How do they connect with their audience?
Customer Centricity: Is their brand relevant to the needs and priorities of customers?
Employee Centricity: Is their brand relevant to the needs and priorities of their employees?

Once you have the answers to these questions, or at least the ones your client wants included in their brand marketing strategy, you can get to work on content creation.

Transmission says that the top three components that most marketers deliver are brand customer centricity, vision and purpose.

Which Media Types to Use

Should your client focus on traditional or digital brand marketing? That answer completely depends on their target audience. Now, before you start freaking out, there’s an easy way to get that information. Simply look up your client’s target audience’s profile on AudienceSCAN on AdMall by SalesFuel. There, you’ll be able review which types of ad media influenced the highest percentages of your client’s target audience to take action within the last year.

For example, did you know that the top five ad media types that influenced Home Exercise Equipment Shoppers within the last year are:

Social media ads
Sponsored search results
Traditional TV commercials
Mobile ads they either saw on their devices or received via text
Direct mail ads and coupons

Media type isn’t the only hurdle AudienceSCAN can help your client jump.

Brand Marketing Obstacles

Aside from lacking marketing budgets and concerns with in-house marketing being able to cover all the traditional and digital brand marketing bases, a major concern of brand marketers is creativity. Transmission says that 78% of B2B marketing leaders have at least some doubts that their brand differentiation is “brilliant.” But what can you and your client do to fix/prepare for this barrier?

One option is to study your client’s competition. How do they differentiate their brand? Is their brand marketing strategy getting a good response? Your research can provide a solid foundation for a marketing strategy you can put your own twist on for your client.

To know what that twist should be, take another look at AudienceSCAN on AdMall by SalesFuel. In the Demographic section of the target audience’s profile, you can find their primary motivators. What types of purchases do they want to make in the upcoming year? How do they want those purchases to make them feel? What kinds of charities and causes do they care about? You can find all that and more on their profiles. Then all you have to do is plug that information into your traditional and digital brand marketing strategy.

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com