Branding for a tech company goes much deeper than appearance and requires a business to commit to one message from the company culture to customer interactions.

Branding for a tech company goes much deeper than appearance. Tech businesses have to commit to one message from the company culture to customer interactions.

When tech businesses have a strong branding strategy, B2B buyers perceive the business as a trustworthy authority with high values. That unified message encourages buyers to spend more and remain loyal to the brand.

Learn the three pillars of branding and seven tips to create a tech brand strategy.

Key Takeaways:

• Branding builds awareness, equity, and sentiment around a brand to attract more B2B customers
• Define a branding strategy's purpose and audience to ensure the brand lines up with company goals
• Use a variety of channels to promote branding, including marketing content, company culture, design, and personal interactions

Pillars of Branding for a Tech Company

The three main components of a technology branding strategy are:

• Awareness: Does the ideal audience know about the brand?
• Equity: Does the brand have value? Do buyers want to purchase the brand’s products?
• Sentiment: How do buyers feel about the brand?

If you notice, logo and brand colors aren't on that list. While logos and slogans are a key part of branding, those elements are ways to achieve the above three pillars of branding and aren't branding in and of themselves. Other ways to achieve branding include content marketing, advertising, and tech webinars.

7 Tips To Build the Perfect Branding Strategy for Tech Companies

Use these seven tips to build on those three pillars and create a branding strategy that will increase brand awareness and value in the tech industry.

1. Define the Branding Strategy's Purpose

Establishing a strategy goal helps marketers know when a branding strategy is successful. A branding strategy can boost awareness, equity, and sentiment around a brand. Each branding strategy should focus on a different pillar of branding.

For instance, for the awareness pillar, marketers should determine what good brand awareness is. Brand awareness for a large tech company like Amazon includes recognition from a broad audience compared to tech companies focusing on a small market niche.

2. Choose a Narrow Tech Audience

Branding connects tech companies to a B2B audience, which makes relatability a crucial element of branding. The branding should reflect the audience the business markets to and resonate with that audience by addressing needs and pain points.

NVIDIA is a great example of a tech company with good branding for specific audiences. NVIDIA has a dropdown menu titled "For You," where website visitors from each tech niche can navigate directly to niche-focused content.

By building a brand for a target audience, marketers are more likely to attract prospective buyers. For instance, marketers might present at a webinar specifically for professionals in a tech niche. During the webinar, the presenter connects with a corner of the tech market that's most interested in that tech business's products. That way, the leads the business collects are more likely to become loyal customers.

3. Know Your Value Proposition

A value proposition is a statement that makes a product or company valuable to customers and becomes a focal element of many branding campaigns. To know what to include in a tech value proposition, IT brands must understand what makes the tech brand different.

Tech companies can look at vertical differentiation and horizontal differentiation factors:

• Vertical differentiation: How is a brand superior to other brands to warrant the higher prices?
• Horizontal differentiation: What does a brand have that competitors lack that makes the brand more appealing than similar companies?

The most valuable source of brand differentiation factors in what customers say about a business. Companies can look at customer reviews to find common characteristics that customers compliment or call out as a reason the customer chose that specific brand.

Some key areas in which tech brands differentiate themselves include quality, product options, support, tech niche, industry expertise, and available resources. Those differentiation factors become a statement of value that makes the tech brand stand out from the competition.

4. Define the Brand by More Than Products

Companies today brand themselves by more than just products. Instead, brands are values, causes, and benefits that appeal to a target audience.

A famous tech company known for its cause branding is Panasonic. This brand defines its products and company by environmental criteria like sustainable energy usage and community outreach. Panasonic prioritizes the company's environmental aspect from the about page to the blog content.

Salesforce is another excellent example of defining the brand by solutions instead of products. For example, the following ad for Salesforce Customer 360 doesn't list a single feature or tech spec. However, the ad is clear about the benefit to businesses.

Image from Salesforce

5. Highlight the Brand's Mission

A brand's mission is why a company exists. The mission guides company behaviors and attracts buyers with a similar goal.

For instance, Google's mission statement is "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

That mission statement tells consumers why Google provides search engines, online storage, and file management platforms. This mission is a part of Google's branding, including ad messages and content. The statement attracts buyers interested in universally accessible solutions to information management.

6. Build a Brand Story

A brand story puts together all the previous elements into a tale about the creation and running of the business. Companies communicate their core values, mission, and goals through brand stories. In addition, the narrative makes a brand personable, which helps build a connection between a tech brand and B2B customers.

Marketers use storytelling to tell about a brand and about customers who successfully used the brand's products. DataRobot shows how to use customer stories in branding. DataRobot’s main website homepage features customer testimonials in the form of case studies specific to each industry niche.

Image from DataRobot

Storytelling causes an emotional response, which builds on the last pillar of branding: sentiment. However, in B2B tech marketing, sentiment doesn't mean making customers cry like in Super Bowl Budweiser commercials. Instead, readers have feelings of trust, motivation, or other emotions that customer testimonials communicate, motivating B2B tech buyers to try the brand's products.

7. Create an Authentic Brand

Authenticity is the last element of successful branding, and according to 88% of buyers, authenticity is also one of the most crucial elements when deciding what brands to support. Whatever a company paints in the brand image should also be a core part of the company culture and behavior. A company that portrays one image but acts differently will hurt customer trust.

A business can back up branding claims through supporting research and transparency. For instance, companies might share annual financial reports or environmental impact reports that show company action backs the branding message.

Building an authentic brand requires the cooperation of all employees. Workers within the organization should uphold the company values and create a culture that reflects the external brand that customers see and experience.

Brand More of Your Content Marketing

How does your content marketing strategy reflect your brand? At ActualTech Media, we help tech marketers create digital assets that align with company values, missions, and products to ensure a consistent brand message across all marketing channels.

Contact us to start designing your next Tech content marketing and branding campaign.