With so much growth opportunity but so much global hyper-competition in B2B Fintech, startups and scaleups in this space often struggle with basic brand-building strategies.
So if you’re looking to get up to speed on crucial branding factors that can take your business to the next level, consider that the table-stakes, or minimum requirements, needed for branding success have changed quite dramatically over the past ten years -- and were accelerated even more so during the pandemic.
Today, many founders and entrepreneurs still think of branding as their logo, fonts, and brand colors (hexadecimal numbers). However, in a digitally-transformed world, your brand is the marketplace says about you when you're not in the room.
Your brand is what drives your differentiation and competitive positioning.
And your brand can either accelerate positive, digital word-of-mouth through social proof and review websites. Or your brand can bring your digital word-of-mouth to a grinding halt if your most important stakeholders discover negative social proof and poor online reviews.
Many companies, especially B2B Fintech startups and scaleups, chronically underinvest in branding because it's so much more challenging to measure than traditional demand generation metrics such as leads, marketing qualified leads (MQLs), and opportunities.
Exacerbating this challenge, most marketing technology platforms and digital ad platforms are designed to make it easy for you to measure and attribute success to non-branded factors that many would categorize, at best, as perhaps leading indicators -- but many times are more like vanity metrics.
Building a brand is challenging. But at the end of the day, as the marketplace becomes more consumed by commoditization, technology, and globalization, your company's brand is your most important asset for driving current and future business growth.
What kinds of brand-building strategies have you invested in to drive the growth of your B2B fintech startup or scaleup? Let me know in the comments.