Why your marketing won’t succeed without focus on branding.
B2B veterinary marketers, have you ever heard…
“We don’t want to spend resources on brand awareness. We just want leads!”
“We just want demos; we don’t want to spend time creating content.”
“It’s the end of the quarter, quick marketing, help us sell stuff fast!”
We hear these kinds of statements all the time; of course, these are conversations we love to have. As marketers, we work closely with sales, and our job is to let the market know what we have, why we’re awesome, and give our sales partners the support (and leads) they need to achieve revenue goals.
As you already know, savvy little veterinary marketer, there is no magic bullet. There’s no way around doing the work to gain market trust and authority and earn your place in your prospect's consideration set. If you’ve established a relationship with the market, you may be able to quickly activate sales with well-crafted and timed campaigns. Alternatively, if your brand hasn’t put in the long-term work to connect with the market, you may be challenged to deliver demos and revenue on a tight timeline.
In this blog, we’ll explore why your marketing won’t succeed (or at least not as well as it could) without a strong brand.
The Dating Analogy
Perhaps you’ve heard the dating analogy:
Marketing is like asking someone on a date.
Branding is the reason they say yes.
Do some people say yes to the blind date? Sure. The same applies to veterinary marketing. Sure, you’ll always have some innovators, early adopters, and purely curious folks who will say yes to a meeting without knowing who your brand is and what it stands for, but it’s not a sustainable business practice to just ask for the date (or the sales meeting, in this case) without giving them a reason to say yes.
Brand Definition Table
| A brand is a | A brand is not a |
|---|---|
| Personality | Product or service |
| Feeling people get when they think of your company | Logo |
| Long-term investment | Campaign |
Brands are long-term investments in developing an identity in your marketplace. Brands take work and time to build. They’re developed by the decisions you make every day at your company. The way your reps talk to prospects, the way your customer service makes prospects feel, the tone of your external messaging, and the way your visuals are remembered and make people feel. Brands are basically all the things that are difficult to measure tangibly. Just like in the dating analogy, you say yes to the date because of the way the person makes you feel.
We won’t go into the components of a brand in detail, but if you want to nerd out on branding, call us. We’re here for it. Here’s a high-level review of the building blocks for branding:
Purpose.
This is the reason your brand exists. Brand onions are a great way to determine your brand’s purpose. Your products, services, and differentiators play into establishing your deep underlying purpose. This purpose is internal facing but everyone at the company should know what it is so they can live the company’s purpose and use it as a guiding north star.Personality.
You may have heard of brand archetypes, which are where your brand’s personality comes from. Here’s a great post that outlines brand archetypes to help you build your own.Voice.
Is your brand funny? Casual? Sassy? Enthusiastic? Establishing a brand voice lets your brand’s personality come through in marketing communications.Values.
Your brand values dictate the decisions made by the organization. Values act as a sort of moral compass for your brand.
Why won’t your marketing do as well as it could without a strong brand?
Let’s revisit the dating analogy. You walk up to someone on the street who has no idea who you are or what you stand for. They don’t know what you’re like, and you ask them on a date. It's a swing and a miss.
You repeat this 50 times. Maybe you get 1 date because they liked your style and thought, "Sure, why not? It’s just coffee.” That’s a 2% close ratio on your date ask.
Consider if you repeated the same exercise but with a group of people you’ve known for years (I’m not sure why you would ask out 50 people you know, but you get the idea). Your conversion rate would be much higher because people know and trust you.
Your marketing efforts, the asks, need a strong brand supporting them.
What marketing is, and how a strong brand can help…
Marketing vs. Brand
| Marketing is | Your Brand Gives You… |
|---|---|
| Short-term campaigns (lead generation, sales promotions, etc.) | Authority that you’re a subject matter expert on what your campaign is talking about. And your brand makes people want to listen to you because they trust you. |
| Visuals | The foundation of a visual identity, this is your brand book that includes: logos, visual guidelines, approved colors, fonts, and instructions on look and feel. |
| Messaging | The voice and personality that your messages have. |
| To drive immediate results | The long-play that establishes who you are in the marketplace and helps you retain customers. |
Ultimately, the take-home message is simple. Your brand needs marketing, and your marketing needs a brand.
During times of difficulty or uncertainty, it may be the knee-jerk reaction to just focus on quick-win marketing tactics, but don’t put blinders on and miss out on developing a brand that will feed your hungry pipeline for years to come.
Recall our original series of questions:
“We don’t want to spend resources on brand awareness. We just want leads!”
If people don’t know who you are and what you stand for, you’ll find your leads are more expensive and less engaged. Just like the dating analogy, you’ll have to spread your message to a much wider audience and risk getting many more rejections.
“We just want demos; we don’t want to spend time creating content.”
There is no shortcut. Just like building trust in a relationship, you must put in the work. Providing the marketplace with education and helpful tools builds trust, credibility, and permission to ask them for something when you know each other well enough.“It’s the end of the quarter, quick marketing, help us sell stuff fast!”
If you’ve done a good job branding, you can probably make this happen. If all you do is ask your audience for meetings, demos, and sales without ever giving them a reason to move forward with you…then you’ll be kicking yourself for neglecting your brand.