A Solid Foundation For Your Online Message—The Power of the B2B Brand Platform

Whether you’re painting a house, making a meal, or building a strong digital B2B presence, the best results start in the early (and decidedly unsexy) steps of preparation. It’s the attention to detail at the outset that really determines how impactful your digital efforts ultimately are. A rigorous, thoughtful process for establishing your company brand platform will make all the difference in what your digital and other marketing efforts deliver.

Developing a brand platform is like picking the colors and sanding all the surfaces of your house before you ever put paint on the brush. It’s all the effort that goes into finding the recipes, buying the best ingredients, and doing the meticulous chop-chop that makes a meal go from meh to magnificent.

Building a solid brand platform strategy will give you a springboard for ensuring that your messaging framework, design, and marketing communications efforts are aligned and driving toward the same impact — a digital connection with your audience that attracts and nurtures the best-fit prospects.

What elements should your brand messaging platform include?

A brand platform doesn’t have to be an overwrought document, but it does require input, thoughtfulness, and commitment to create. Your brand platform is essentially the blueprint for your communications. While not externally-facing copy per se, it captures the key takeaways you want your audience to absorb from any communications, as well as the establishing the direction for your tone and feel.

At Clear Digital, we use the Golden Circle method made famous by Simon Sinek with a few other components added for good measure (think of them as a little more flavoring). By defining your why, how, and what, you have the essential ingredients for focused, meaningful communications. We also include personality attributes and supporting messaging pillars to ensure you have a robust platform that can keep your marketing efforts aligned and driving toward the right audience.

The why is your company’s purpose. It’s the reason you are in business, the greater good to which you aspire. This is sometimes tough for B2B companies because it’s a more emotional component. It can be easy to get stuck small or descriptive. Having a good facilitator for the process can be important to help push you to think bigger and be bolder.

The how is your positioning. This is what differentiates you, your special sauce. For B2B companies, the greatest challenge here is making sure each positioning statement is meaningful to your customers. Once you’ve identified what makes you different, make sure you consider “So what?” from the customer perspective. If your difference isn’t meaningful in some way for your target audience, it’s not powerful enough.

The what is your brand promise. This is the description of the product or service your customers will get from you. Often, B2B companies spend most of their time trying to tell this brand story and getting frustrated when it proves difficult to distinguish themselves from competitors. Your what is important, but it’s just one piece of the story.

At Clear Digital, we add two other components to the brand platform that help companies better tell their story.

Your brand attributes are your personality. These shape your brand voice and your company’s unique look and feel. Your personality should feel both authentic and aspirational. Finding the right balance across your attributes can mean the difference between a unique, compelling brand messaging platform and one that just blends in.

Messaging pillars are the key supporting elements of your brand story. For B2B brands that often have different people developing content, clear core messages that all communications reinforce help create consistency. You’ll also want to consider how this messaging strategy may differ across each target audience.

Our Brand Platform Development Process

Before you start a website redesign, you’ll want to plan time for developing your brand platform. This is a process that takes thoughtfulness and engagement.

Just like laying the foundation of a building, there are no shortcuts. It’s essential that we have the right inputs, engagement from all key stakeholders and decision makers throughout the brand messaging platform development process, as well as a commitment to putting what ends up being developed to work for you.

There’s nothing worse than going through all the exercises and effort only to have your brand platform live only on the pages of a PowerPoint. Integrating your platform into all of your marketing is essential.

At Clear Digital, our process kicks off with either a group session with the full team or individual interviews to gather existing and aspirational perspectives. We’ll also take a look at each key competitor’s messaging strategy to identify segment trends as well as overcrowded positioning statement and messaging approaches.

Building on all of these inputs, we create preliminary drafts of the different platform components as a starting point. We use a workshop-based approach to bring together all of the key brand messaging platform stakeholders in your organization to work through each element, provide feedback, and offer direction for refinement.

Engagement in this process is key to ensuring that the resulting platform captures the essence and uniqueness of your company. From shaping your content to defining the look, feel, and voice that will uniquely represent you in the market, your brand platform is a critical starting point for both your digital and IRL marketing efforts.

Build a Brand Platform For Today and Tomorrow

Your website is one of the first experiences your target audience will have of your brand. Setting the stage for better web results by developing your brand platform first delivers strong strategic value. Clear Digital can help. Our brand platform development process is inclusive, comprehensive, and efficient. If you want to maximize your impact, consider it an essential first step.