Your brand embodies everything your company stands for and is the basis for every experience your company delivers to customers. Communicating your brand to your target audiences through digital branding campaigns forges and strengthens brand relationships, helping you develop meaningful long-term customer connections.
But to get there, you have to first create something worth connecting with. In digital branding, that could be everything from videos to social media to influencer communications.
Here are three B2B companies that have created successful digital branding campaigns to achieve specific goals.
Take your digital branding to the next level.
Here are each company’s challenges, solutions, results and key takeaways.
C&I Engineering is an employee-owned engineering, procurement and construction management firm offering a wide range of services for refineries, chemical plants, utility facilities and more. Its customer base is largely engineers.
Due to the complex nature of its solutions, C&I Engineering was struggling to convey its brand message to prospective clients. It needed to explain its high-tech products without oversimplifying their impact. C&I’s goal was to help customers understand how this brand looks at highly technical, complex problems in a holistic way to provide big-picture solutions.
Based on research, the company found that it needed to communicate its concept of delivering “big-picture” solutions to its customers. The company decided it needed messaging that showed its personality and told people “we love what we do.” It then explored how to establish this story with customers. The result was a video-based campaign that focused on extrapolating the story behind the brand and humanizing the company to make it more relatable and inspiring.
The first video started the messaging with a bang — it began showing the traditional, straight-forward idea of what people expect engineers to be like, but quickly broke the mold by transitioning into a story about the company’s culture, community and aspirations. It featured a big idea divided into multiple small steps on the path that was symbolic of the “big-picture engineering” message that C&I Engineering wants to portray. Subsequent videos continued this groundbreaking messaging.
Telling its story through video versus just text made a deeper and more engaging impact on its target audience. Today, in a highly competitive industry, C&I Engineering tops the list of engineering firms in Louisville, KY.
Top Takeaway
To maximize video branding campaigns, find your company’s essential story, let the storytelling drive the video messaging and tie the messaging closely to customers’ real-world experiences.
IBM is one of the world’s largest technology companies, providing hardware, software, cloud-based services and cognitive computing to a wide range of businesses.
While other B2B companies took their time to embrace social media, IBM was an early adopter — and developed a powerful social media presence over the years. In 2007, the company foresaw how much of an impact social media was having on the world and dove in, not only using social media but also developing products to leverage social media programs. By the mid-2010s, many more B2B companies had joined the social media revolution and IBM needed to maintain its edge in an increasingly competitive environment.
To maintain its role as a leader in social media, IBM employs a mix of high-quality photography, videos, employee profiles, trending hashtags and more. Every campaign is designed to showcase its brand values and mission. It builds its social community by emphasizing shared values and togetherness. The campaigns are always highly unique, engaging and reflective of the company’s mission.
The company’s social strategy stands out because it connects each post with its brand values and mission, strives to tailor its content around current events and other trending topics, showcases the people and processes that make up the company, and creates a compelling brand identity that encourages users to join the community. For example, unlike many companies, IBM shares interviews with its employees, which adds a human element to its brand, a feat not always easy in the B2B sphere.
IBM has successfully maintained its leadership position in the social media sphere. Keeping employees involved has helped with its successful strategy.
Top Takeaway
IBM’s social strategy works because it’s timely and relevant, values-based and brand consistent.
Bosch Power Tools provides power and measuring tools to tradespeople, such as plumbers, electricians, HVAC engineers, carpenters, joiners and general builders.
Bosch aims for its brand to stand for engineering excellence and an innovative approach. As part of this objective, it regularly adds new technologies to its product line. But it needed a powerful way to introduce its innovations to its target audience because tradespeople are generally wary of new ways of performing their craft. Plus, competitors had started to introduce similar technologies, so the race was on to claim Bosch’s place as an innovative leader. In addition, wider brand research showed that Bosch needed to be more of a loved brand because it was seen as a bit cold.
Bosch decided that the best way to reach its target audience and encourage them to upgrade their tools was by engaging with micro-influencers. A digital branding strategy was designed to raise the message above product features and benefits to include real-world experiences of tradespeople using new tools. Bosch provided tradespeople with tools to test drive and then to share their experience via product review videos. This would allow Bosch to leverage the power of peer recommendations. The videos would be posted on YouTube and linked via social media with a #builtwithBosch tagline. They would also be shared in trade publications via bloggers and other influencers.
During the campaign, eight tradespeople posted product review videos. Boosted by Facebook posts and ads, as well as public relations, the videos were widely shared. As a result, Bosch got everyone talking about its products on a shoestring budget, and encouraged the next generation of Bosch users to try new technologies. The campaign positioned Bosch as a pioneer in a new era of tool evolution.
Top Takeaway
When it comes to B2B influencer marketing selection, it’s more important to collaborate with micro-influencers who are the most relevant to and trusted by the target audience versus those with the biggest following.
Along with these three campaigns, many B2B organizations are leveraging the power of digital branding to build stronger brands and achieve digital marketing goals. Video, social media and influencer marketing are just three examples of the many kinds of digital branding campaigns you can launch to build your brand, make stronger connections to your target audiences and achieve your business-building goals.
