Episode#10: "How to build and scale your B2B Brand" - Alison Murdock - ex CMO of Social Chorus

Hi my name is Alison Murdock, and I am the Chief Marketing Officer at SocialChorus. We’re a work force communications platform that helps organizations connect and engage everyone in their work force and I am based in San Francisco, California. I've worked in Silicon Valley and here in Europe with many startups over the last 20 years, helping them find their super powers and winning.

Having worked a long time in Silicon Valley, I often get asked about the “bro culture” and “How do you manage that?”. With the exception of my own business which I've had for 7 years, I'm often the single woman on the executive team. It's not the most comfortable thing, but I work to be direct and not put up with bullshit. Because bullshit really sucks.

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But, I'm really here today to talk to you about how to build and scale your B2B brand.

(...) Building a B2B brand it’s just as important, and the key difference is that you're appealing to a business person or group that is looking for you to solve a problem; they don't actually make snap decisions and actually they're happy to take a free trial. So, this poses a real challenge to build a brand that is differentiated. What is the same with consumer brands is how you look, and how your product works, and whether you're meeting the promise that you've offered to your customers. This is just as important for B2B companies. Customers want to believe that you can deliver. It's never too early to think about your B2B brand, because you own it, and you can cultivate it, and scale it, and win.

There are three things you need to do to build your B2B brand and it feels like B2C... But remember, we're all buyers who are biased: we make judgments, and we feel an emotional connection to the brand. Just like in our everyday lives with any consumer product we use.

1/ The first thing I would suggest is “write your narrative”. (...)

2/ The next thing to think about is the experience: you have to design the experience. (...)

3/ You get to design this, and you also get to talk about what you believe, this is the third thing. Be vocal. (...)

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Now, how do you scale? It comes down to taking your brand to market and their three strategic ways to scale that B2B companies can do really easily.

1/ One is content marketing. How do you promote your narrative and your beliefs to your target audience? Your company has a story you can craft an editorial calendar and build thought leadership around what you do. (...) 

2/ You can also use PR. PR simply amplifies everything you've done in content marketing and your research might be interesting to a journalist, you never know. (...)

3/ Finally, sales and marketing, so bringing your ethos to prospective customers. They've read about you and now they want to meet you, so your sales people need to be trained about how to talk about your company and what to say. (...)

(...) Marketing also needs to align with your brand. I know first hand how much there is to do in marketing, every single day, and it's really hard. Things can really go off brand; especially in all of the channels and all of the formats that you're producing. But it's up to your entire team in your entire company to: promote the brand, scale it, and be consistent. If it stops working, then, everyone's on board to make the change.

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