3 ways to strengthen your digital B2B brand

The pillars of a B2B brand are trust, expertise and reputation – and these have to be communicated from the outset on your homepage

Take for example, the relaunched site of Dörken, a German chemicals manufacturer of pigments and membranes, which manages to be both exciting and authoritative. On the home page, what we don’t get is that man in a lab coat (staring intently at a test tube. Instead, Dörken startles and excites us with a huge D (for Dörken) filled with changing imagery of the pigments and membranes it manufactures. Up close, chemistry is beautiful. The slogan at once tempers and reinforces the excitement: Discover Expertise. Nothing on the homepage detracts us from that brand message.

Dorken's homepage

Your brand message has to be controlled and reinforced across all channels where your customers will interact with it – through content that resonates (and is useful), through a customer journey that builds a relationship of trust, and through functionalities that solve problems for your customers.

Those are the building blocks of a B2B brand; let’s look at all three in some more detail.

1.) Content

While your brand should stable and consistent rather than agile, content agility allows you to react very quickly to the market, positioning you as a leader in your sector. The ease with which a digital experience platform (DXP) handles content not only makes life easier for your site editors and marketers, but also creates opportunities to strengthen your brand.

A manufacturer that leverages the power and flexibility of its DXP to amplify its brand is Essilor, the world’s largest manufacturer of ophthalmic lenses. One of the key objectives of the group’s digital transformation was to communicate its branding and health message more clearly to the millions of people who wear its products. Essilor’s relaunched European sites kill two birds with one stone: they inform the visitor about the lens-type and Essilor product line that could be most beneficial to them, and include a convenient and up-to-date locator for the nearest optician stocking that brand. This is a win for the end-customer who is making a more informed choice, and a win for the opticians who, as a result of the new Essilor site, are attracting more customers.

Essilor's homepage

2.) Customer experience (CX)

Jeff Bezos summed it up: “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room”, meaning that your brand is not what you believe it is, but how your customers experience it, so you need to think about what your customers expect to experience when buying from you and how to deliver on it.

The challenge for B2B sites is that there is not just one customer experience, but many, as various stakeholders intersect with the buying process at different stages of that journey.

For all the different stakeholders, in every sales channel across all devices, the brand experience has to be consistent yet relevant. This is where segmentation and personalization come in – optimizing the customer experience by delivering the most relevant content or recommendations to your target audience in real time.

A great example of this is DELABIE, the French manufacturer of taps and sanitaryware. Ibexa DXP delivers relevant content to discrete groups of DELABIE customers. One such segment consists of the architects and design agencies that recommend DELABIE as part of their own projects. They can easily find and collate 3D files, personalized catalogs, technical specifications, and DELABIE installation instructions, and integrate them effortlessly to be part of their own project dossiers, making life irresistibly easy for the customer. By merging the caliber of its products with the quality of the customer experience, DELABIE elevates the perception of its brand.

3.) Digital commerce

A natural extension to content and CX is the ability to transact online. This matters for your brand as buyers want a seamless experience from having selected a product to evaluating and configuring it, and eventually buying it. The easier you make that for them, the more loyalty you will generate.

The B2B landscape is different from B2C because the products and pricing are usually much more complex. If you plan on digital commerce, having a DXP with commerce capabilities will be of huge value. The key advantage of a consolidated technology platform is that it can integrate seamlessly with your business systems.

Can your DXP integrate with your other systems such as ERP, PIM or CRM? Can you price differently per region, per audience or dynamically? Can you configure prices and quotes? Can you combine professional services with products?

Such are the requirements you need to successfully transform your traditional sales processes with frictionless digital commerce – and your audiences will remember it and stick with your brand.

Conclusion

Your brand is about much more than the product or service you sell, and the work of building your brand begins well before the sale – and continues long after it.

Bringing together all the functionalities you need to capture the essence of your brand, Ibexa DXP helps you get your message out, and through the power and agility of its delivery, amplifies that message.