Branding has never been more important, and B2B marketers in particular are perfectly placed to take advantage of it. In the competitive B2B marketplace, your company’s perception is equally as important as your ability to get the work done, if not more so. After all, you need to stand out from the crowd if you want to win over leads and potential customers.
In this post, we’ll be taking a look at the branding lessons on offer from two well-known thought-leaders from the marketing industry, as well as identifying what it is that makes them stand out and how it can be applied to B2B marketing.
Are you ready? Let’s go.
Rand Fishkin
Rand Fishkin is the idiosyncratic founder of Moz.com, one of the world’s most well-known hubs for search engine marketing tips, tricks and information. As if catering to 37,000 customers and 600,000 community members wasn’t enough, Moz also runs an annual conference called Mozcon that brings many of the world’s most successful marketers together.
Fishkin’s personal brand was boosted by the success of his company, of course, but it’s his quirky personality that makes people remember him. His official job title is “Wizard of Moz”, and he’s always been fairly open with the rest of the world, blogging regularly about his thought processes and identifying trends that are happening in the industry. He’s notable for crowd-sourcing a decision on how to wear his facial hair to a conference, attracting over 400 comments from readers.
Fishkin is interesting because while we’re talking about his personal brand, the business that he founded is purely B2B, attracting most of its revenue through inbound marketing. His approach to business is a reminder that it’s important for people to be themselves – and for their businesses to reflect that.
Gary Vaynerchuk
Vaynerchuk started out as a wine expert and entrepreneur, turning his family’s liquor store into a $50 million business through innovative early uses of YouTube and email marketing. He’s gone on to release several marketing books and to regularly deliver keynotes all over the world while simultaneously running VaynerMedia, his full-service digital agency that’s working with clients like Toyota, Unilever, GE and Diageo.
What’s interesting about Vaynerchuk is that he doesn’t pull his punches. He tells it like it is, and he openly admits to making catastrophic mistakes like failing to become an early investor in Uber. But he’s also passionate about what he believes in, which is why he swears so much and why so many people follow him.
Vaynerchuk shows B2B brands that they need to have strong beliefs and to stick to their guns. If there’s an opportunity in the market, they should go for it – and this applies whether we’re talking about marketing, management or product design.
Applying their lessons
The biggest lesson that we can learn from Fishkin and Vaynerchuk is that it’s vital to be true to yourself. This is important in general, but it’s particularly true when it comes to sharing content.
If you want to position your business (or its key executives) as a thought-leader, they need to be like Fishkin and Vaynerchuk. They need to have opinions and to stick with them. They need to go out on a limb and make predictions about the future of your industry.
And sometimes they need to ask people for their feedback on their facial hair.
Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.