Following the success of our From the Experts webinar series, we wanted to provide you with this content through another channel to make it easily accessible and digestible for our audience.

Here you will find a summary of our latest webinar, “From the Experts: What’s in a Brand: Managing your Brand’s Reputation” with Kevin Mulrane, VP, Head of Sales, US at ProQuo AI.

What Makes Up Peoples Relationships with Brands

The first step for any brand, be it B2B or B2C, is to build a relationship with their consumers to understand the feelings associated with the brand, and to be able to segment those feelings into different groups and categories. Understanding all of the different factors deriving from feelings allows you to make smarter marketing decisions to be able to really drive commercial success.

As Kevin Mulrane, VP, Head of Sales, US at Proquo AI puts it, “There are over 25 million decisions a marketer can make that drives a brand forward. With so many things to consider, how do you know what’s right for the brand to move forward? By being able to put all of these correlating factors together of how people feel about your brand, what you do well, what you don’t do well, and then how you take the actions to improve it, it all means wiser decision making and more thoughtful efforts.”

A lot of these decisions are based on hope and intuition, as well as intent vs. impact. Brands put together campaigns or make certain marketing decisions with the intent to see a certain result, and sometimes, they just miss the mark. The actual impact doesn’t always fall in line with the desired intent. Being able to really understand how people feel, and the relationship they have with your brand allows you to be much more strategic and effective with your marketing actions. 

Flip the Switch on Your Brand’s Relationship

The early days of setting up your brand require testing. You might be looking more at what drives the category forward and those are things that change very drastically, and that vary from category to category. As the world evolves around us, and consumer behaviors and thoughts change, it’s becoming more and more important for brands to be transparent and empathetic to be able to provide what they need to their consumers. 

As Kevin says, “I think what’s really interesting about this is that it’s not just a ‘get a glimpse, operate, and move on.’ It needs to be this ‘always on’ approach of understanding how things are changing in the marketplace, and then being able to proactively and quickly take those optimizations, those changes, so you don’t go too far down a rabbit hole to make a really bad lasting negative impression”.

Brands drawing on the emotion behind their vision and mission, such as supporting certain charities or donating to different causes, are drawing more and more people in. If you are on top of these efforts, you can proactively see how consumer behavior is shifting and you can start making correlations on how that impacts customer loyalty, recruiting hires, and growing your customer base. Understanding how the value of the brand directly impacts the commercial success of the business.

The Role of Social Media in Your Brand’s Reputation

The impact of Covid-19 is not lost on any of us. While we are all feeling a sense of getting back to normal, there are certainly lasting effects it has had on businesses across all industries and verticals. With that, brands all over the world have been trying to find new channels to get their message across. 

Leveraging mediums like social media, and more specifically tactics like social selling, allows you to reinforce your brand to get the message out there in a meaningful way. Colin Day, Managing Director EMEA & APAC here at Oktopost says “Statistically, the collective reach of a company’s employees is at least 10 times that of the brand itself when it comes to social media. So if you look at the collective reach of the brand over all of its social channels, its employees outrun it by 10%”.

Social is a huge part of all of our lives these days. If we look at how often we’re connected to our mobile devices, and how often we check our social feeds, it’s no wonder it plays such a significant role in our brand’s strategy. Harnessing the power of your employees to help enhance your brand and turn them into ambassadors allows you to enforce best practices, to coach and educate them on what it means to be brand ambassadors, and what it means to be responsible to the brand they are representing and the brand equity you’ve taken so much careful thought into developing.

How and What B2B Marketers Can Learn from B2C 

There is a big emphasis on B2B organizations building relationships with their customers because something that’s becoming more and more prevalent is this sense of community or tribes. Revenue from new business can be directly associated with a former customer who left their previous company and started at a new one and brought the technology they know and love with them.

As Kevin puts it “It’s becoming a bigger and bigger opportunity for brands to really invest in customer loyalty and it all starts with that relationship and understanding. What do my customers like? What do they deem important? It’s the understanding that building the relationship creates that snowball effect within your user base”. 

At the end of the day, it’s all about being radically transparent. You can’t have transparency without every department and every individual working together for a common goal. It’s the company-wide teamwork rather than just working with your departments that will drive the organization to success and to build better relationships with customers, prospects, and even employees.