Build your B2B brand bible: the complete guide
By Afton Brazzoni
You know it takes more than “showing up on social media” to drive results with B2B marketing. It takes a strong brand to establish trust with your audience — and trust is integral to both attracting and retaining customers. In fact, 46% of U.S. buyers will pay more for a product or service from a brand they trust. But to have a strong brand, you first need a brand bible.
In this B2B branding guide, we’ll cover:
What a brand bible is and why you need one
6 key elements of a B2B brand bible
7 examples of smart B2B branding
What is a brand bible?
Whether you call it a brand bible, brand book, brand-opedia, or something else entirely, this marketing document outlines your brand identity and how it should be presented. It’s the foundation of your B2B brand strategy.
The purpose? To ensure consistency in your marketing — but more importantly, to establish an enduring emotional connection with your audience through the power of branding. The kind of connection that creates loyal customers.
Why you need a brand bible
According to HubSpot’s 2024 State of Marketing Report, 19% of marketers who had an effective B2B brand strategy in 2023 say that increasing brand awareness is one of their top goals in 2024. This objective is second only to boosting revenue and sales.
It’s no surprise that brand marketing comes in so high on the list of priorities for top marketers — after all, the purpose of branding isn’t simply to make your B2B company recognizable, but to make it an undeniable choice for your buyers.
A strong, well-defined brand is also the foundation of your content marketing efforts, regardless of your B2B company’s size or industry. Building a brand that embodies the unique value your organization delivers, and that resonates with your target audience, will help guide strategy for your business for years to come. This is much easier to accomplish with a documented brand bible than a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants approach.
Considering that it takes 50 milliseconds (0.05 seconds) for your website visitors to form an opinion about your site, it pays for B2B brands to make a good first impression. The same holds true for all of your marketing channels.
When you think of a brand, the first things that often come to mind are logos, fonts and colours. While a strong visual identity is essential, B2B branding extends to the way you communicate across all of your marketing channels. Your messaging should reflect your company’s values and purpose, and be delivered in an authentic, compelling brand voice. This is what a brand bible can help you accomplish.
6 key elements of a B2B brand bible
Before we get started, understand that you need to know your customers to build a brand that they’ll want to support. Everything starts with who you serve. What are they struggling with? Dreaming about? Working toward? Without knowing the answers, you can’t truly have clarity on how your products and services provide value to your market.
Defining and understanding your customer segments will help guide your visuals and key messages through the brand building process — not to mention all of your marketing content down the road. Once you’ve done this, you’re ready to dive into the core components of a brand bible or guiding document for B2B brands.
1. Clear mission, vision and values
We all know that in too many organizations, mission and vision statements are exercises in ego stroking. These statements see the light of day once — in the beginning of the brand building phase — then collect dust on a virtual shelf.
Your B2B company’s mission and vision should be powerful living and guiding statements that help establish trust with your customers. While a mission statement communicates your purpose today, a vision statement outlines the impact you want to make in the world tomorrow.
When you get to know someone well, you learn what they stand for and you become aware of what you can expect from them. The relationship between your organization and your customers plays out similarly through your brand.
Your company’s values also guide how you express yourself in everything from the way you interact with employees to the way you show up more broadly to prospects and customers. For example, at Scribe National, our core values are excellence, dedication, curiosity and originality. We’re committed to living those values on a daily basis. This is an essential part of brand marketing.
2. Defined brand personality, voice and tone
Your mission, vision and values help shape your brand personality. This refers to the characteristics of your brand and the emotions it aims to evoke. These traits will depend on the kind of company you are and the type of customers you serve. Choose a few characteristics that represent your B2B company to help inform your next step: voice and tone.
To develop your brand voice, think about how you want your messages to land when people read them. What does the copy sound like? Is your company a trusted advisor? A helpful friend? An industry disruptor?
Keep in mind that voice and tone are different. When it comes to brand voice vs. tone, the voice your organization uses should be consistent, but the tone should change depending on where you’re communicating — your website vs. LinkedIn, for example — and depending on the context of the conversation.
3. Compelling brand story
A brand story is a recount of why and how your organization came to exist, and the factors that continue to drive your mission. It offers an opportunity to make your company memorable in your market’s mind, and show them why they should care about your business. It also humanizes your B2B company and makes your message relatable, building an emotional bridge between your business and your audience. As such, it’s one of the most important brand identity elements you’ll develop.
When crafting a brand story, use your narrative to evoke emotion. Don’t just tell your audience why your products and services should matter to them, show them using tangible, real-life references. Illustrate how you do things differently than your competitors, and use storytelling as a compass to guide your marketing strategy, which can maximize your visibility, profit and impact.
Your brand story can be shared in many formats. You can tell it on the “About” page of your website, create a short version for your social media profiles and press releases (also known as a boilerplate), or communicate it through video. Captivate your audience with reasons they should buy from you, but also be sure to nurture your relationship in an open, authentic way. When you combine this with quality products and services, plus targeted marketing efforts, sales will naturally follow.
4. Key messages that speak to your audience
Key messages help convey the core value propositions, unique selling points and brand identity of your B2B company. These carefully crafted statements distinguish your brand from competitors and create a consistent, compelling narrative for your organization. Key messages are intended to guide all of your marketing, fostering brand recognition, trust and differentiation.
Effective key messages speak to your audience at all stages of the buyers’ journey from awareness through retention. They articulate how your products and services provide solutions and help your customers get results. Whether in sales presentations or blog posts on your company’s website, consistent messaging reinforces your brand identity. This consistency is vital for building credibility with B2B customers, who often engage in extensive research and decision-making processes before committing to partnerships.
5. Striking visual identity
Every company needs a compelling visual identity to bring its brand to life in a consistent way. This can include your brand colours, logo, signature imagery, fonts and other stylistic design elements that serve as an expression of your brand’s personality.
Like all of your marketing, a visual identity should be crafted with your audience in mind. According to Oberlo, “Choosing brand colors wisely can impact how people perceive your brand. In fact, using a signature color can increase brand recognition by 80 percent (Reboot, 2018).”
6. Useful style guide
Creating a visual and editorial style guide is an excellent way to outline standards for how your brand should be represented in your marketing, including how to use your logo and the type of language to use in your content.
Establishing style-related standards is essential for consistency (yes, we said it again!) and professionalism in your communications, which ultimately increases the impact of your messages.
7 examples of smart B2B branding
Brand building sets the foundation for how your company will show up in the market. It’s also an opportunity for you and your team to flex your creative muscles and have some fun. Here are a few examples of smart B2B branding to get you inspired.
1. Asana
Why do you do what you do? Your brand mission or purpose should be short, sweet and describe how your business impacts others. For example, the task management app Asana aims “to help humanity thrive by enabling all teams to work together effortlessly.” Sounds like the beginning of a rich story to us!
2. Slack
Many people know Slack for its team chat software, but the brand goes beyond a simple messaging system. Slack’s casual and down-to-earth voice brings a level of realness to its brand that positions the company’s software as an easy solution to your problems.
One of Slack’s taglines, “You can get buried in email. Or you could get real work done in Slack,” calls out a relatable problem and provides a straightforward solution, almost like the light at the end of the tunnel. Slack knows its customers, their pain points and gets the importance of branding as a way to reel them in.
3. TouchBistro
Showcasing your expertise is important when building a brand, and TouchBistro does exactly that. The company has an approachable brand voice, a robust content marketing program and a valuable repository of knowledge to help its audience — restaurant owners looking for technology to streamline their operations.
TouchBistro knows who its brand and software solutions are for, and makes that abundantly clear in its messaging. The organization backs up its restaurant industry expertise by producing content that reflects and supports the culture of hustle and heart that anyone who has worked in a restaurant has experienced.
4. FreshBooks
FreshBooks takes a clear and simple approach to one of the most complicated business practices — bookkeeping. Everything from its website navigation to its logo, images and fonts exudes a clean and organized vibe, like a breath of fresh air.
FreshBooks has positioned its brand as the supportive business mentor ready to make customers’ lives easier by being a resource that helps them thrive. This accounting software company is providing useful information to its audience while building trust.
5. Microsoft
Your brand values guide how you show up as a company. Don’t be unpredictable. Let your audience know what they can expect from you, and make it evident in your brand marketing by incorporating your values.
Microsoft does a great job of showcasing its values through content marketing in the form of blog posts. With a mission to “empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more,” the company’s posts include commitment to sustainability, creating workplace accessibility and empowering inclusivity, all while tying the subject to its mainstay: technology. This is an excellent brand story example.
6. Unbounce
B2B companies often have complex products and services to market, which requires highly specific knowledge of your customers and the various reasons they may make a purchase from you (also known as use cases).
Your branding process must determine what roles your customers work in and what they need to accomplish, as well as any roadblocks they may face that your products and services can help them overcome. To streamline your brand development, document these use cases and ensure everyone in your organization knows them better than the plot line of the latest Marvel movie.
For example, the landing page platform Unbounce is explicitly clear on its customers’ use cases. This tech company uncovered users’ pain points and addressed them through dedicated sales pages, helping potential buyers easily find the right information instead of leaving them to figure out Unbounce’s offerings on their own.
7. Trello
An emotionally charged marketing strategy can be over 50% more effective than non-emotionally targeted tactics like rattling off a list of software features. B2C brands have long excelled at this aspect of branding 101, and the B2B brands that follow suit also reap the rewards.
At first glance, marketing something like project management software may seem like a mundane task, but hold your yawns. Trello, which already had 50 million users by 2019, made the concept of a flexible lifestyle, i.e. remote work, front and centre in its marketing. The focus isn’t on Trello’s project management software; it’s on how the users feel when the software enables them to achieve a significant lifestyle goal.
Bonus: Whatsapp
While Whatsapp is a B2C company, it offers another winning brand story example. At the age of 16, founder Jan Koum immigrated to the U.S. from Ukraine. During those early days, he lived on food stamps. In 2014, he successfully sold the company to Facebook for a staggering $19 billion, according to ABC News.
The lesson here? When it comes to telling your story, don’t just rattle off the date your company was founded. Personalize your origin story. Keep in mind that everyone loves to root for an underdog, but only if the struggle is factual. How did your company overcome challenges to get where you are today? Highlight reels are nice occasionally, but your market wants to know what your experiences — positive and negative — have been to make sure you’re the real deal.
Team up with a B2B branding agency
Brand development is the foundation of your marketing efforts. It helps set the tone for your B2B company’s future product marketing, content marketing and growth marketing initiatives. Savvy marketers are well aware that potential customers need to know, like and trust your company before they’ll buy from you, and your brand plays a critical role in building these relationships.
Whether you’re starting from scratch or revamping your company’s brand, Scribe National can provide strategic guidance. Our boutique B2B branding agency will take care of the details so you can get to work doing what you do best — making an impact. Explore our B2B Content Foundations package to find out how we can help develop your brand voice, story, messaging and more.
