Brand awareness in B2B: a true business facilitator

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A true business facilitator, brand awareness is both a vector of trust, a key success factor for lead generation, and a regularly fueled pipeline guarantee. In the first episode of this series dedicated to brand awareness, we invite you to explore:

• The concept and classification of brand awareness ;
• Brand awareness as the company’s main commercial driver;
• Brand awareness as a differentiating factor in increasingly uniform markets;
• Brand awareness is a key factor in lead generation success;
• The enthusiasm of French decision-makers for branding and brand awareness.

Brand awareness: what exactly are we talking about?

The brand awareness of a company refers to the extent to which it can be recognized by its target audience. It is generally measured on three levels:

• “Top of Mind” brand awareness: The brand is mentioned spontaneously and first when its industry is mentioned. For example: Nespresso for coffee, McDonald’s for fast food, Coca-Cola for soft drinks, Salesforce for CRM, etc.
• Spontaneous brand awareness: The brand is mentioned spontaneously but is not necessarily the first one that comes to mind.
• Aided brand awareness: The brand is not mentioned spontaneously, but the respondent recognizes it from a list of companies operating in a certain industry.

Brand awareness is generally correlated with market penetration, sales volume, and the ability to retain customers. It thus influences the overall performance of the company, both in the long term (the 95-5 rule, or even lower) and in the short term (lead generation), as we will see in the following sections.

1.   Brand awareness remains the main commercial driver of your company.

This is the conclusion drawn from a major study conducted jointly by the Ehrenberg Bass Institute and the LinkedIn B2B Institute [i]. This reality applies across various sectors of activity:

• 75% of businesses purchase computer equipment every four years (renewal of equipment and/or purchase of computers to equip new workstations);
• 80% of companies change banking services every five years;
• 90% of consumers (B2C) purchase a new car every 10 years.

This is what is known as the “95-5 rule”. In practice, marketing efforts target a small portion of potential buyers actively seeking a solution in the short term (5%), while the overwhelming majority of accounts or consumers (95%) will only seek to fulfill their needs in the medium to long term.

Working on brand awareness means ensuring that your value proposition and/or brand is firmly anchored in the minds of these potential customers (95%) so that they remember the company when they are ready to buy. In other words, it means ensuring the pipeline is fed over the long term and securing the company’s future revenues.

2.  Working on brand awareness to differentiate from competitors

In both B2B and B2C contexts, companies draw inspiration from each other and adopt best practices. Naturally, the gap between competitors in terms of value proposition tends to narrow, and offers eventually become somewhat similar.

In this context, the brand that has been memorised by the decision-maker (or prescriber), through long-term awareness-building marketing work, will be well ahead of the game when it comes to making a choice.

The “on-market/off-market” concept is more customer-centric than the funnel logic, because :

• Your potential customers will never say: “I’m in the middle of the funnel and heading towards the bottom”;
• But they will probably say to themselves: “I’m going to need a Sales Enablement solution when I go back to school”. And in the autumn, they’ll probably say to themselves: “I’m going to ask for a quote from company Y that I regularly see on my LinkedIn feed”.

3.  Brand awareness is also a key factor for lead generation success

Between two companies offering the same product and launching identical LeadGen campaigns, the company with stronger brand awareness will inevitably generate more leads than its competitor for several reasons:

• Brand awareness is intuitively associated with a presumption of quality and reliability;
• It eliminates the fear of the unknown and reduces the buyer’s stress and responsibility, as they are making the same choice as their peers;
• Decision-makers give more credibility to content pushed by a familiar company: your white papers, webinars, events, and social media posts will logically generate more leads;
• There is less reluctance to provide contact information to a company one knows compared to a brand they are hearing about for the first time;

Brand awareness and branding are generating enthusiasm among French decision-makers.

While branding has long been overshadowed by short-term marketing tactics like LeadGen and direct advertising, decision-makers have realized that the strength of a brand (its image and awareness) is key to long-term performance, even during periods of uncertainty.

As demonstrated by our extensive study on B2B marketing investments, improving brand awareness is at the heart of decision-makers’ priorities in 2024:

• 66% of you are planning actions to strengthen your company’s brand awareness in 2024;
• Medium-sized companies are overrepresented, with 81% of decision-makers in ETIs prioritizing brand awareness in 2024;
• While all sectors are involved, commerce/distribution (80%) and industry (75%) stand out as leading in intentions;

What strategy, levers, and formats should be activated to enhance brand awareness for your commercial performance in 2024? This will be the focus of the second episode in this series.

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[i] https://marketingscience.info/the-955-rule-is-the-new-6040-rule/