Brand building has never been B2B marketers’ forte. Kavita Singh spoke with Kate Roe, Hive expert in brand and content, about how marketers can improve their brand building along with why now is the time to do it.

1. During Covid-19 and remote work, it’s more doable

With Covid-19, there was a sense of panic at first.

Kate says: “I have noticed a lot more interest in brand building since the start of the whole Covid-19 episode and I think, in a way, people fall back on trying to find a solution to their problems. There you are, year after year with your marketing and content programmes. You’re busy working out your martech stack, talking about sales and marketing alignment – all those aspects. But for years, there hasn’t been any strategy.”

Kate acknowledges that many marketers are more focused on their tactics rather than the actual long-term strategy.

She continues: “It’s no surprise that, when Covid-19 happened, suddenly, your plans went out the window. Secondly, so has your audience. They’re all scrambling around, everyone is in the same boat, they’ve stopped being engaged. They’ve stopped going to events. You can’t get a hold of them and everyone is in a panic. So there goes your plan and you can’t even replace it with something else because no one is listening.”

Those that didn’t have a plan had to re-shift their focus, but because there wasn’t a long-term strategy and brand purpose established, marketers might’ve felt a bit lost. For those whose brand strategy revolved around tactics, such as content, they might have felt brand building would be the solution to their problems.

And Kate agrees that now is the time to focus on brand building because, once everyone is back to normal, it’ll simply be more difficult to do with limited time.

She says: “Now is probably the best time for marketers to go through the brand building exercise as everyone is forced to push the reset button.

This is the optimum time to also sit down with your best customers (those that are profitable and already aligned with your brand) and really work with them to understand what makes the relationship – and how else you can work together. They’ll thank you for it 

and 

you’ll have a lot of the answers to the strategy questions.”

The fact that you’re even getting feedback from them in the first place will be a differentiating factor from your competitors as well.