Why do B2B brands need to conduct market research?
Brands operating within the B2B market are often perceived to be intangible, yet clients/customers come across your brand in many ways.
The businesses that you’re prospecting are made up of people.
These people are your customers who will soon form a perception of your brand. And they will consciously or subconsciously decide to remember you.
When done right, your B2B brand can make your customers feel a certain way — just like a B2C brand.
That feeling can either lead to a potential buying decision or a point of comparison for an alternative product or service.
Knowing where your brand stands will give you a competitive advantage. You will be able to adapt your marketing strategies to adjust perceptions to your liking.
To do this, you need brand research.
B2B brand research will tell you how your prospects and customers perceive your company. It will help you look at the bigger picture – customer experience, loyalty, market positioning, and even help you analyse your competitors.
B2B brand research takes into account perceptions from buyers, referral sources, prospects… and anyone who will interact with your brand in some way.
What is B2B brand research?
B2B brand research aims to study a group of customers from different departments and roles, levels of decision-making power, and perceptions of the brand’s offering.
Research, whether for a B2C or B2B brand, focuses on collecting data that provides businesses with feedback.
The diverse roles within B2B environments often have intersecting goals and interdependencies, resulting in a highly intricate decision-making process.
The stakeholders within a business fall into three primary roles:
- End users – the ones who use your products/services
- Gatekeepers – those who identify your product/service and deploy it in the business for other stakeholders to use
- Decision makers – the ones who make the purchase decision (and often hold the purse strings)
What about small organisations?
In smaller businesses, like start-ups and scale-ups with employees under 30 individuals, there is a higher chance that roles will overlap, making it easier for you to market to a single person / smaller group of stakeholders.
The structure of larger organisations is more complex
Often, your ‘End users’ will be several steps away from your ‘Decision makers’ and will have limited influence on the purchase decision. Similarly, your ‘Gatekeepers’ won’t always know the needs of the ‘End users’ and can be a barrier to your product/service reaching the ‘Decision makers’.
This entire process becomes even more complex when brand perceptions are at play: stakeholders first evaluate your product against their ‘wants’ and ‘needs’ to determine fit. Then, the second stage will be prone to biases that arise due to your brand’s perceptions.
B2B decisions are made after extensive introspection by multiple departments. Diverse viewpoints require consideration due to multiple parties’ involvement.
This complexity of roles, requirements and biases shapes B2B brand research methods and objectives.
Take the below scenario as an example:
If you are a business offering a B2B SaaS company that helps with scheduling content and gives users predictive analytics based on previous engagement figures.
You want to do some research to understand your brand health and inform your positioning strategies.
Stage 1
In this case, the Marketing Manager (your prospect) is your ‘End user’ and the ‘Gatekeeper’.
Unconvinced prospects won’t promote your product’s value internally. If they do find it appealing, then they might share it with their colleagues or investigate on their own.
Stage 2
The next stage is convincing the CMO/Finance department to approve the budget to buy your product. The CMO/Finance department is the ‘Decision maker’ at this stage.
Decision makers often seek alternatives and compare your offerings, trying to be as unbiased as possible. However, if all other options have equal offerings, they decide based on brand perceptions.
In the above example, you can see how your target audience has developed over time, from the marketing manager to the budget approver.
But alas, that is if everything is going in your favour.
You won’t make it through Stage 1 if your prospect is unaware of your brand, and you’re not in the top two or three considerations. Your prospects choose their first option from the list, 71% of the time.
This is why it’s important to gauge where your brand stands compared to others and how you can be the first choice. (Report link)
This is precisely where a ‘Brand Health’ study comes into play. A brand health study gauges your competitive position and proximity to the top three favoured brands.
For this reason, we recommend surveying a broad representation of your category users:
- those that currently buy from you are aware of your product and might consider buying from you
- those who aren’t aware of you / don’t buy from you
This will help you map out a plan to improve your marketing communications by different audience groups.
Knowing all possible customers in your category will help you improve operational performance and brand awareness to stand out as a potential buying option.
For this reason, we recommend that you work with a trusted research partner that specialises in reaching niche B2B audiences.
What different brand research methods are there for your business?
- Brand trackers allow you to keep a pulse on your category consumers and the performance of your brand metrics in the competitive landscape, such as awareness, consideration, purchase, advocacy, NPS etc.
- Brand mapping research investigates how brands within a competitive landscape are perceived and assess which attributes align with each brand. It also identifies whitespace opportunities for new attributes to be claimed as differentiators.
- Pricing analysis research helps discover what customers are willing to pay for a product or service within a specific category. Pricing is an integral part of a brand image, and it is important to determine the optimal price point to maximize profit, revenue, or market share.
- Conjoint analysis applied to brand research can help identify what attributes, products and price points are valued by category consumers to help set future marketing strategies.
- Brand lift studies capture your digital advertisement’s impact on brand metrics by comparing the performance of those exposed to the ad and a control group similar in job role and sector.
We recommend using a combination of these approaches to refine marketing strategies, revise brand messaging and to understand your audience better.
In a nutshell
B2B brand research is essential for understanding market perception, shaping brand strategy and improving competitive positioning.
Effective B2B brand research helps make your brand more relatable to gatekeepers, tangible to decision-makers, and memorable to all stakeholders.
It enables you to craft a unique narrative, showcase expertise and feed your content strategy and pipeline, helping you stand out in a crowded marketplace and climb to the top of consideration lists.
