Tag: b2b brand strategy

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As An Author, Self-Promotion Is The Hardest Part

As author, self-promotion is the hardest part.

I knew it wouldn’t be easy.

I don’t mean writing a book, though I knew that would be challenging.

Promoting it.  I knew self-promotion would be the most challenging aspect. But the reasons might surprise some people.

“I would not have expected that,” a friend and former colleague told me when I confided in her.  “You’re in marketing, you of all people should find promoting your book easier than someone who knows nothing of how it works.” She’s not wrong.

I do know how to do it.  That’s the irony. I’ve been a marketing professional for over three decades.  I know marketing.

To be fair, not all marketing is the same.  Tactics and variables can vary widely from one market and buyer to another.  Marketing a book is quite different than marketing corporate healthcare. However, the fundamentals remain, and I understand them well.  The book itself is testimony.  That’s not the problem.

It’s not that I don’t know what to do.  It’s that doing it – promoting myself – is something I’ve always been self-conscious about. I come from the show-don’t-tell philosophy. It’s always better when someone else does the telling.

It’s a challenge that has haunted me throughout my professional life as both an owner and consultant.

I discounted the promotion early in the book’s development as I did not expect to do much marketing.  I didn’t write it expecting a best seller and steady royalties.  It’s a business book, a niche one at that.  The goal of writing a book was for market authority and as a positioning anchor. It was conceived as a marketing resource and inbound signal.

Promoting the book makes me feel like I’m on a soapbox extolling my virtues to anyone in range of my social media shouts.  In fact, there have been very few posts.  The limited promotion I have done is via LinkedIn messages to friends and professional connections. But my LinkedIn connections are not representative of my target audience. It did, however, give me a reason to reach out and reconnect. Somehow, the existing relationship makes it a bit easier to share the news.

I need to get over it if I’m to improve my awareness outreach, but it somehow makes me feel cheap and dirty, so I resist, procrastinate, and overthink it.

The real irony is that it has become more stressful.  I’ve wasted time dreading the tactic and dragging my feet rather than focusing and getting it done.  It’s all the baggage with none of the rewards.

I know I need to get over it.  Maybe that’s what led to this story?  Maybe?

This article was originally published on Medium

Ed Youngblood is a B2B brand and marketing strategist. His book, B2B Brand Strategy, provides frameworks and tools for building strategic brands without an agency (and was the inspiration for this commentary). It is available on Amazon and other leading sellers as e-book and paperback to fit your reading preference.

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Every Business Has a Brand. It’s Either by Default or by Design.

Most B2B founders don’t think much about brand or marketing early on. And honestly, that makes sense. When you’re launching a business, you’re focused on the fundamentals: achieving product-market fit, managing costs, and generating revenue. New businesses are in survival mode.

Branding feels like window dressing, approached with an MVP–minimum viable product–mindset. A logo, WordPress template, and generalized value propositions for a generic target audience. The minimal viable brand decision is concurrent with the “we’ll figure the rest out later” decision.

The result? Slide decks that don’t quite match your website or other collateral. Social media posts that lack distinction and consistency. Constant message “tweaks.” Sound familiar? Window dressing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Soon, if not in parallel, the sales pipeline rises atop the priority list, and so does marketing.  While sales is treated like the revenue source it is, marketing is commonly seen as a cost center. Unsurprisingly, it is approached as minimal viable marketing tactics dressed in a minimum viable brand.

Not an ideal first impression. Or second.

MVP brands have a cost

What business leaders don’t consider is that prospects form brand opinions whether you’re intentional or not. By the time you “get around to branding,” perceptions have formed. Reversing confusion is itself confusing to the market. It’s also expensive.

Without strategic direction, brand and marketing become a reactive series of random acts. Email campaigns that don’t align with other messaging. Sales conversations that can’t articulate clear differentiation. Customer touchpoints that feel disconnected.

The compounding cost shows up everywhere: longer sales cycles, lower conversion rates, prospects who don’t notice you or understand what makes you different. Your team lacks a north star for decision-making. Each piece of content starts with whitespace and positioning from scratch.

This isn’t a branding problem. It’s a business problem.

What strategic branding means

A strategic brand isn’t about having a prettier logo or a punchier tagline. It’s about making intentional decisions that guide your market message and how your ideal customers perceive your business. And none of that can effectively happen until you have a deep understanding of your target audience and what they truly need.

Here’s the reality: A strategic brand is less about you than most believe. It’s about your audience.

Strategic brands are laser-focused on a clearly defined target audience and concisely address the three questions every prospect needs answered:

  1. Who are you? Not just your company name, but context signaling relevance.
  2. What do you do? What makes you relevant to my business role and priorities?
  3. Why should I care? What is in it for me? What is the value of engaging with you?

The MVP brand provides the necessary vehicle for market entry. Strategic brands design a vehicle that speaks to and attracts the right buyers.

Creating a strategic brand is a process of evaluation, research, and making intentional decisions. It is design thinking that defines who you are and why it matters to a targeted audience:

  • Clear vision, mission, and promise that guide every decision
  • Deep understanding of your ideal customers’ motivations and challenges
  • Value propositions that resonate with buyer priorities, not just product features
  • Consistent personality, voice, and visual identity across all touchpoints
  • Messages that reinforce your strategic positioning

Strategic Brands Earn the Shortlist

The buying process has fundamentally changed. Today’s B2B buyers are 60-80% through their evaluation before engaging sales.

Bain & Co. research shows 80-90% of buyers create an early shortlist—often before beginning active search. Ninety percent choose from that list. Getting on it isn’t optional. Without early presence, you won’t make the final shortlist.

Your brand earns that spot. Not your sales pitch. Not your follow-up cadence. Consistent presence when buyers aren’t thinking about you yet wins that spot.

This is why strategic positioning compounds. Clear messaging doesn’t just improve marketing efficiency—it shortens sales cycles, enables confident decision-making across your team, and attracts ideal customers while repelling others.

The ROI shows up everywhere: better conversion rates, higher customer lifetime value, faster organizational decisions because your team knows who you serve and why.

Most importantly, you build a foundation that scales without losing what makes you distinct.

The alternative? Continue refining positioning with every campaign. Keep explaining what makes you different in every sales call. Watch prospects choose competitors who communicated clarity earlier in their journey.

Strategic branding isn’t magic. It’s making intentional decisions about who you serve and why it matters to them—then communicating it consistently.

Done right, your brand becomes the multiplier of every effort that follows.

This article was originally published on Medium

Ed Youngblood is a B2B brand and marketing strategist. His book, B2B Brand Strategy, provides frameworks and tools for building strategic brands without an agency.