A lot of the marketing conversations I have start with a very specific request: “We need more sales.”
Usually, there is a tactic attached to it: improve the email marketing, run a campaign, invest in content or do more on LinkedIn. The instinct is understandable. If the business needs more opportunities, it makes sense to start thinking about how to create them.
But there is a question I ask before we get anywhere near the tactic: why should someone notice and choose you?
It sounds obvious, but it is surprisingly easy to skip over. We can spend a lot of time thinking about how to get in front of more people without spending enough time thinking about what we want those people to understand when we get there.
That, to me, is where brand strategy starts.
We're often too quick to get to the tactic
Marketing activity feels tangible. You can say, “We need a new website,” “Let's run a campaign,” or “We need more leads,” and everyone immediately understands what the activity is.
Strategy is less comfortable. It asks questions that might force you to rethink the original brief: What are we actually trying to say? What do we want to be known for? Who are we trying to be relevant to? And what makes us a better choice than the alternatives?
The answers to these questions are the foundation for the brand strategy. Because before you can persuade someone to take action, you need to give them a reason to care.
A brand is what people understand, not just what they see
When organisations talk about their brand, the conversation often goes straight to the visual identity. The logo, colours, typography, website, photography.
All of those things matter, but the more fundamental question is what you want your business to mean to the people you want to buy from you.
What do you want to be known for? What space do you want to occupy in their minds? What should they immediately understand about you that they might not understand about your competitors?
That is where brand positioning becomes commercially useful. You are not simply deciding how you want the business to look. You are deciding what you want people to remember and why you want them to choose you.
Most businesses aren't as different as they think
This is where things get slightly more difficult in B2B space.
Most businesses are not completely unique. In many B2B markets, there are several companies offering broadly similar products or services to broadly similar customers.
They may have different expertise, different experience, a different methodology or a slightly different way of working. But from the outside, those differences can be surprisingly difficult to see.
Phrases such as “We're innovative.” “We're customer-focused.” “We have a highly experienced team.” “We deliver exceptional results.” might be true. But, if your competitor could copy a sentence from your homepage and publish it as their own, you probably haven't found your differentiation yet.
The difference only matters if the customer cares
The more useful question is, “What do we do differently that actually matters?”
Perhaps you have developed a particular way of solving a problem because you have spent years working in a very specific part of the market. Perhaps your service is built around removing a particular pain point that competitors have accepted as normal. Perhaps you combine expertise that is usually found across several different suppliers. Perhaps your business has a very different philosophy about how the work should be done.
The job of positioning is to connect what is distinctive about the business with something that matters to the people considering it. Get it right, and you establish the value created by that difference as the unique selling point.
Sometimes clarity comes from leaving things out
Clarity often comes from deciding what you don't need to say.
If everything is important, nothing is particularly distinctive. A strong brand does not need to explain everything at once. It needs to make the right things clear.
That might mean making a choice about the market you want to be known in, the problem you want to be associated with solving or the particular value you want to own.
Getting noticed is only useful if people understand why you matter
This is also why I am wary when a business jumps straight from “we need more leads” to “what campaign should we run?”
Of course, lead generation matters. But marketing activity cannot create clarity that the business itself has not established.
You can put a lot more people into the top of the funnel. You can make more calls, send more emails and generate more traffic. But if the proposition is difficult to understand, or if the reason to choose you is no clearer than it was before, you have simply increased the number of people encountering the same problem.
The answer is to put the steps in the right order.
Before we decide how to get more attention, generate more leads or drive more enquiries, we need to know what we want people to notice.
Start with the reason to choose you
I don't think every business needs a six-week strategic exercise before it can do any marketing. Sometimes the fundamentals are already clear and the business genuinely does need help executing the next step.
But I do think one of the most valuable things a marketer can do is question the brief before accepting it.
If someone says, “We need more leads,” I want to know what they are selling, what they want to be known for and why someone should choose them over the alternatives.
If the answers are clear, great. We can get on with the campaign.
If they aren't, that is probably where we should start.
Because getting noticed is not the same as being remembered. And generating leads is not the same as creating demand.
Before you worry about how to get your business in front of more people, ask a simpler question:
What is it about your business that makes it worth choosing?
If you cannot answer that clearly, then we have some work to do.