If you don’t work out your brand story first, you tend to go to the pointy end of the sales funnel too soon. In other words, you go for the sale and the “20% off” kind of language before you’ve even established a relationship.
I often see campaigns starting with incentive-led marketing - trying to get people to respond - before the potential customers have even realised they had a problem needing a solution. In the first instance, we should be talking to people to find out what the problem is – if any.
There’s little point wasting cash extolling the virtues of your brand over another brand, if people don’t even know what it is you both do or why they might need you. We might be better trying to raise category awareness first.
Ah, but in B2B we don’t usually have the budget for all that sort of stuff, Richard, I hear you cry. And I would agree that large-scale awareness ad campaigns are usually beyond the dreams of avarice. But I would argue that you don’t need to reach everyone to raise awareness; you just need to reach the right person.
