One of the toughest shifts in comms is taking a brand from the B2C world to be competitive in B2B, where the buying criteria and audience personas are very different. (In fact I’d argue it’s harder than travelling in the other direction – but that’s a post for another time!)
It’s a process the Delphi team have worked on a few times in our careers, for brands like Meta and Dropbox among others. Through those experiences we learnt that three steps are essential to comms that re-positions consumer brands for the B2B world:
🔒 Credibility – B2C is dominated by the fear of missing out but B2B is all about the fear of messing up (copyright Rory Sutherland). So you have to show you get the demands and expectations of more cautious enterprise buyers, where making the wrong choice could potentially damage their career. You need to talk about topics like ROI, security, compliance and controls. The things that reassure B2B buyers and make your product credible.
🔥 Salience – Now you know the right things to talk about, you have to say them in the right places. In other words, you’ve got to walk, talk and smell like a B2B brand, as fast as possible. Get on the radar of analysts. Show up at the right trade events. Appear on industry podcasts. Talk about technical issues and business themes (without losing your humanity).
🎯 Relevance – All of this can be turbocharged with content that aligns the brand to the right topic. For Meta, we created an award-winning campaign about how its tools help connect frontline workers and HQ managers. That let us lead a B2B-focused conversation on workplace productivity and culture that was perfect for the brand.
If you’re looking to move a B2C tech brand into the B2B market, we might be able to help. Drop us a line to continue the conversation.
