Brand Connection builds relationships by delivering value to the customer

Brand Connection is the process of building a profitable relationship between your brand and your customers and stakeholders. Call it the marketing stage of the Brand Activation process.

Top consumer marketing companies already understand how this works. Look at any communication from Apple, BMW or Disney, from advertising to package design, and you can see the brand’s promise to the customer shining through. Customers respond by staying highly involved with these brands, ensuring their growth and success.

There are exceptions, but B2B companies aren’t generally as successful in creating a robust brand following among customers. There are several reasons for this:

1. The company hasn’t gone through a Brand Exploration or Brand Coaching process and doesn’t have a strong brand to deliver.
2. The company lacks the organizational resources and skills to build brand relationships.
3. Company leaders simply don’t understand why they should bother – they can’t see a business case for investing in brand communications.

B2B is no different from B2C in one important respect: you don’t become an industry leader by selling commodities that compete on price alone. There’s always a value proposition or promise – a brand, in other words – that convinces customers to step up and buy. This can only happen where there is a relationship of understanding and trust between brand and customer.

Building brand relationships with content marketing

Creating brand relationships is a marketing function but not in the traditional sense of pushing marketing messages out to customers. Instead, it concentrates on drawing customers into the brand and building trust over time.

This is the mission of content marketing. Also called inbound marketing or custom publishing or a variety of other names, content marketing can be defined this way:

Content marketing is the creation and distribution of compelling, high-value content to attract or retain customers and prospects.

Content marketing builds trust in a direct and tangible way. Its starting point is not “what do we want to say to our customers”, but “what information can we provide that will give our customer what they expect from us”. This may take the form of valuable industry intelligence, or technical assistance, or advice on business practices (case studies, for example). The point is that the content must be something the customer is eager to engage with, or might even be willing to pay for.

By providing genuine value to the customer, the brand accomplishes several things:

1. The brand establishes itself as a credible expert – a partner who can be trusted.
2. By giving something of value, the brand creates a sense of gratitude, and if all goes well, an inclination to reciprocate.
3. The brand invites a response from the customer – a critical step in building a relationship.

Delivering value to the customer brings rewards in return

This value-to-customer orientation is a discipline that you can apply to all out-bound communications, not just classical content marketing. All messages in any media, from product literature to press releases to promotions, can be crafted so that they inform, educate or even entertain the customer in ways that build your brand.

You can multiply the effectiveness of this approach by harnessing the power of online technologies. Social media, video and image sharing media, online publications and blogs – even plain old email – all help you expand your reach while focusing your message on individual needs and opening channels for two-way dialogue.

For B2B, it’s especially useful to integrate these two-way communications with the sales process. There should be a seamless transition between communications between content delivered by the brand and direct contact from a sales representative.