Are you ready to make your B2B brand famous?

Well, have I got a treat for you!

Brand expert Ty Heath from LinkedIn's B2B Institute joins me and reveals

how your brand can stand out, stay memorable, and win on LinkedIn.

G'Day everyone.

I am Coach Michelle J Raymond, your trusted guide for building your brand and

your business on LinkedIn and marketers.

This is going to be a super special podcast episode.

Why?

Because I've got the one, the only, Ty Heath, the Director at The B2B

Institute and all round brand expert.

Welcome to the show if you can't tell super fan girl.

Oh my gosh.

I'm so excited to be here, Michelle.

Thanks for having me.

It is my absolute pleasure and this is a conversation that if you want to know

what's working on LinkedIn, I thought there is no one else because you are the

Director of all things research at The B2B Institute and you guy are investing

time, energy, resources into figuring out what works in the B2B marketing space.

We're gonna dive into this one because there are some things that are going

on on LinkedIn that I know you can help marketers with and I love the research.

Ty, there's something that I'm seeing when I'm doing audits with clients.

It's something that I think is the biggest problem.

So we're gonna start with the biggest one first.

Why do you think that so many brands have become lookalike,

copycats, and now, as you call it, blending into the sea of sameness?

What is happening and how can we get out of it?

Yeah, we need to get out of the sea of sameness.

And that's exactly goes back to the heart of the mission.

'cause we're on a mission to build famous B2B brands and the only way

you do that is, is to be memorable.

But if we all have the same colour that's hard to do.

Like it's hard to distinguish and I, if I hear one more person say

B2B Boring, I'm like, come on, this is the opportunity in front of us.

So I, I think that, the fundamental issue is that B2B marketers have been

conditioned to believe that being professional means being boring.

And I don't know that that's exactly what they're thinking.

But for some reason that's how it's manifesting.

And there's this dichotomy where we think we either have to be corporate

or safe or somehow we're not credible.

But the research shows that it's distinctiveness, it's being

remembered that drives growth.

That we say the brand that's remembered is the brand that's bought.

And you cannot be distinctive if you sound like everyone else.

Or to your point, Michelle, if you have just a slightly different

shade of blue in your branding.

You know, someone might mistake your brand for someone else's.

But, you know, I think if I were to unpack this like in a therapy

session with you right now for everyone listening who, who might be

stumbling here a little bit, there are a couple things that are happening.

So one, we tend to prioritize functional messaging over emotional

and distinctive approaches.

So we do this thing of like listing all the features and benefits.

We have this trend that we talk about at The B2B Institute

called the Product Delusion.

It's this idea of like, what would B2B marketers sound like if they were

to market like a Coca-Cola beverage, and it would be like, we have a

brown fizzy beverage it's delicious.

It's 96% likely to quench your thirst.

That is insane.

And Coca-Cola knows not to do that.

That's why they use, they have a red can, a white stripe.

They've got polar bears.

Essentially they're using distinctive brand assets.

They're building memorable brand experiences, so

that's where we need to go.

I think there's this other belief that B2B buyers are purely like rational

robots that are making decisions purely based on the facts and that are not

responsive to creativity and motion.

That could not be further from the truth.

It's an, it can be a very emotional decision for people.

So we wanna mitigate risk and be memorable in doing that.

And then there's the approval process nightmare.

So I will say that this is something that's distinct from B2C because in

B2B we're playing a different game.

I think that's what makes, it's part of the fun.

But you've got your CMO.

You've got your sales director, you've got product team, legal, CEO, procurement.

What tends to happen is that each stakeholder can like water down the

creative more and more until you're left with something that offends

no one, but it also excites no one.

So it's like the boldness gets commiteed to death.

Like, if you add all those things up, it equals to why we are where we are.

This the mimicry, people looking at competitors and copying what seems safe.

If you choose to go in the other direction, it's the distinctiveness

that builds the mental shortcuts within people's minds.

And then when they encounter a buying situation, the what people

do, the first search engine they search is the one in their mind, and

that distinctive brand is the one that's most likely to get recalled.

And it's not necessarily about being better, it's about being different enough

to be remembered when it actually matters.

There's this moment, Ty, that when I have conversations with the B2B marketers

that I work with and I'm doing an audit, say of their company page or their

activities on LinkedIn, there's this genuine fear that if we try something

different, if we have some fun, if we go a little bit left of center, we

are gonna blow up the whole brand and it's all gonna come crashing down.

We're on LinkedIn.

And on LinkedIn you have to be professional and you have to be safe.

And we are dealing with CEOs and corporates and there's no way, Michelle,

that we could ever do anything fun.

And I'm like, yeah, okay.

So you're just like everybody else.

And like you said, no one can recall who it was or what they do.

And I have seen examples, like I said, of two brands.

Basically being the two main players in the industry.

Looking identical.

Sounding identical.

And don't even start me on stock images because honestly

that's a whole other thing.

I'm not even gonna open that can of worms.

You and I can just, roll our eyes and just go, please no more but I

don't wanna talk about that all day 'cause we have so much to cover.

So I appreciate the whole point of what we're trying to do is stand out.

Create distinct memories and so that people can recall our brands.

This is how we win at LinkedIn, so get out of the Sea of Sameness.

There's a great paper on The B2B Institute's website if you

wanna know more about this.

There's a great paper and video, which I'll be sharing as well.

Okay, Ty, before we go into my question, which is on my favourite

subject, I just wanna share a quick word about some of the new features

from our podcast sponsors, Metricool.

Moving on to my favourite subject, which I asked you specifically, could I cover

this topic because it's a hot topic on LinkedIn, especially for my audience.

Organic company page reach is way down when it comes to LinkedIn

compared to posts that maybe employees can do on their personal profiles.

And the general advice out there of which I do not subscribe to

at no surprises, is that brands shouldn't even bother investing

in building their company page up.

That all of the effort should just go into supporting employees to

create the content over there.

What would you say to this?

Is there any purpose to building a company brand on LinkedIn if the reach

doesn't compare to your individual humans?

That is.

Wow.

Okay, so let's correct this one.

Let's get this one straightened out.

I invite people to think about like all the different touch points that

you have to build your brand and the different role they play and.

I think what you're describing is this place where people are getting trapped

in sort of as either or thinking they're saying do one or the other.

But a world exists in which all of these things support your brand

building efforts in different ways.

So let's do a metaphor, because I love metaphors.

We love me.

We're obsessed with mental models at The B2B Institute.

So think about it this way.

Your personal accounts are your front door.

Your company page is your living room.

So you follow.

So everyone's following you so far, right?

So someone first discovers you more than likely through a personal post or

maybe through employee advocacy, they get to know you, get to know your brand.

You're talking about something, you're sharing your expertise.

But where do they go to learn more?

Where are they going to dive more deeply in?

What's the next step?

They, one of the things they can do is visit your company page.

And if that page is generic, outdated, boring, you just wasted all of the

work that your personal content did.

There, right?

So you know, someone sees your CMOs thoughtful post about industry trends.

They click through, learn more about the company.

They find a company page that's thoughtful, distinctive human.

That's the cohesive brand experience that they want and that actually builds trust.

I don't know how many of you who are listening have had the experience.

This is like the nightmare scenario.

Picture same great personal post, but someone clicks through and then

they see what you talked about in the previous question, miss Michelle.

They see like a bunch of generic stock photos, a bunch of corporate jargon,

old press releases, and now you can see how the trust starts to diminish,

so you've just undone all that work.

Someone's knocking on the front door and then they get into a beige

waiting room with like elevator music.

That's O I'm drive here.

I am sitting here trying not to just go.

Yes.

That's what I've been trying to tell people.

I'm a cake and eat it kind of person or my official term is the Power of Two.

We've gotta bring these two things together.

They don't exist in their own separate worlds.

Like one relates to the other.

Absolutely, if you hear me talking about the front door in the lounge room going

on like, yeah I learnt it here first.

Noone wants to be like wait where am I?

Oh look, that is so true and I think in fairness to marketers, and I am never

someone that is jumping on to the podcast trying to bash people up if they're

doing a bad job or doing something wrong.

That is not what I show up week after week to do because I know the pressure

that most B2B marketers are under.

And when I've been reading some of The B2B Institute's research where

we're balancing brand versus demand marketing, the research says, invest

more money in branding 'cause that will deliver better long-term results.

But the people in the day-to-day are going, yeah, that's great, but

I'm measured on demand, which is download my white paper, go to my

website, attend my event, give me your email address so you can go into

my funnel so I can achieve my KPIs.

To those people who are struggling to find the right

balance between brand and demand.

Could you elaborate why this is really important to get that balance

right and how they can shift things a little bit towards building brand as

having a better ROI in the long run?

Absolutely.

I just wanna underscore what you just said, 'cause this

isn't about calling anyone out.

We're all growing here.

But the point is that if you invest in creative, it is the one of the

biggest drivers of growth and memory.

And because the industry is what it is today, there's so much opportunity

for people who choose to be bold.

And that's, I think that's the point we're trying to make at the point is

about the opportunity and that takes us to like the balance between brand

and demand and how to think about it.

And I think it's one of the most critical kind of misunderstandings in B2B that's

been going on for a while, and part of the reason we exist is actually

to address this misunderstanding.

Because we actually have a trend called War on Brand.

Because of what we've seen as the underinvestment in brand and this

positioning of the competition for budget when they're actually independent.

We should be holding hands, right?

Am I right?

Like they should, we should be together.

Like you see so many teams that we're set up where the brand team is not

even talking to the demand team.

That means there's a lot of this potential there.

Let's use another metaphor because demand generation without brand

is like trying to harvest a crop, but you didn't plant anything ever

Love it.

What might happen is like you're gonna, you could get some immediate results.

You're gonna capture any latent demand out there, but essentially what you're doing

is you're borrowing against future growth.

So you're doing lead magnets, you're doing demos, you're doing free trials.

You might hit your quarterly numbers, but what happens when competition

starts outbidding you on things?

What happens when your cost per acquisition keeps going up?

Because there's no brand equity to help pull some of that weight when

your sales team has to work twice as hard to close deals because

prospects haven't heard of you before.

That's why that's a tightrope.

That we have to walk.

That's what makes our job fun, hopefully.

But you don't wanna be a race to the bottom on price because you're

a commodity, because you haven't built the brand side, which is the

mental availability that makes your demand activities more effective.

Going back to the beginning, we want buyers to think of us first

when they're ready to purchase.

You wanna be the first go to for them.

Not one of like many results that they vaguely know about.

And I think, that's where LinkedIn comes in.

I think more specifically, 'cause I think it is a great platform

to do both simultaneously.

A piece of content that has that genuine insight that builds brand equity while

demonstrating your expertise at the same time and have there's a lot of different

ways to do it and a lot of companies that are doing really successfully on LinkedIn.

Do you have any examples of companies that is your go-to 'cause often I think

success leaves clues and instead of people trying to figure this out for

themselves, are there some brands that you've seen that do this pretty well?

I know I'm putting you on the spot, but I'm hoping that there's someone

that jumps out straight away 'cause this is the whole point, right?

That it is a brand that in your mind is taking up that space.

That you can recall quickly, that is standing out compared to the competition.

That is the purpose of all of this.

So who would be your go-to brand that maybe listeners could check out?

So I'll give you two brands to check out.

So one checkout Slack.

I imagine a number of people use Slack.

They created documentary style videos showing companies struggling with

communications before the solution.

So there was like, it was like raw, honest, relatable.

It wasn't like super polished.

So that helps to build brand authority while leading people to wanna learn more.

And then I imagine many folks here have to manage projects.

So you instead of like book a demo of our platform, you could look at monday.com.

They have like bright playful visuals and they focus on this

feeling of being organized rather than like technical capabilities.

So it's the same business goal, but you're building the mental availability

alongside demand at the same time.

I came across the monday.com one recently.

Somebody else at LinkedIn here in Australia, was talking about

it and I went and checked it out.

And I really love how they're using characters as well in their content.

Like they stand out.

They're fun.

And that's something that I've been trying to encourage my clients to embrace that

even if you're not a super huge brand and you don't have a big budget, there are

so many easy ways that you can do this.

I know some office pets are making a comeback in some of my clients'

content 'cause they didn't have the budgets to be able to go and get

big creative done around characters, but they're using what they've got.

And sometimes it could be as little as an emoji that you use all the time.

It could be a little graphic, but just something that makes it stick.

And this is the thing I think you said before, choose to go bold and I

think we should have that on t-shirts.

I think that is going to be the thing that is going to differentiate average

marketers from those that are just crushing it and getting the results

that they want for their businesses, is the ones that are prepared to do things

that other people aren't prepared to do.

Because I acknowledge that telling someone go and do something that makes

your brand stand out into a group of one is petrifying because we're taught,

be part of the herd, go and join in.

Don't be the odd one out.

In Australia, we call it Tall Poppy Syndrome.

If you stand out, we're gonna cut you down at the knees and bring you

back down to everyone else's level.

I've spoken to clients and worked with them in Sweden.

It is like nationally, the thing to do is everyone does same same

like that is culturally what they do and I've had to learn that.

Yes pushing people and saying, this is great for your marketing is actually

really scary for a lot of people.

But the rewards, like your research at The B2B Institute and the Edelman

reports and research that they do, like those two combined, like just

serve it up on a platter that this will give you a reward for efforts.

But I acknowledge that for some people that's gonna be a big step to take that.

That's very real.

And by the way, our research exists for you to help you make the case

for the stakeholders to understand, and prove why you should do that.

I just love it.

I'm there reading it all the time.

I was lucky I got to have Professor Jenni Romaniuk on the

podcaster a while back as well.

And it was the most popular episode of that year.

And people were just drawn to all things, distinctive assets that we

were talking about at that time.

Now, memory building has been at the core of everything that we've been

talking about today, and also I think at the core of the things that maybe

B2B marketers overlook because we're so focused on KPIs and metrics that

maybe drive us in a different direction.

But what practical advice would you give to marketers who want

their LinkedIn content to stick?

How can we actually do that and create these memories?

You'll hear me say this time and time again marketers

are in the memory business.

Memory is absolutely everything.

And I think this is where marketers in B2B, we tend to

work against our own interests.

Like what we'll do, we'll post once and expect magic to happen.

But memory building requires, and this is probably something that, that Jenny

Romaniuk said in her conversation.

It requires consistent, distinctive.

Cues over time.

The other thing you'll hear us say is that great brands wear in and not out.

They wear in.

And if you think about like iconic campaigns, a Diamond is Forever

from De Beers, like they've been using that message for a long time

or even priceless for MasterCard.

Yeah.

More recently the lovely campaign from Workday, the Rockstar

campaign, which is hilarious.

I don't know if people have had a chance to check that out.

I was so psyched the other day to be scrolling through LinkedIn and to see that

they had reinvested in the rockstar story.

'cause in my mind I wondered this was such a fantastic campaign.

It actually won a Lion at Cannes.

And I was like, I wonder if they're gonna continue on.

And they did.

They have.

So, you know, I recommend developing, your brand codes, your stories and we

talked about this before, distinctive colour palette, recurring format.

Maybe it's a point of view or an approach or a way of doing things.

The goal is that someone could see your content with the logo covered

and still know that it belongs to you.

And this goes beyond like logos and colours.

'cause it's like visual style.

To your point, you're seeing like pets and like other characters pop up.

Characters are actually one of the most distinctive brand assets you can use.

But I think a lot of people tend to think they're like whimsical or too, like fluffy

to play with, but they're so memorable.

The key is like, whether you're like the human story brand or you're humorous,

or you're serious and authoritative, to just be consistent across those elements.

In your LinkedIn post, don't try to pull all the weight, like don't have

your posts do everything under the sun.

It can be confusing.

These are some of the things that I think will be helpful for people.

You wanna put every piece of content through that filter.

I always go, would you stop for it?

Is it something that you would find interesting or would you laugh at that?

Or does it have a personality that you are drawn to or repelled by?

Because branding should do both to a degree.

Like it's not just about one thing, and I guess that's what makes it

complicated, but when I'm working with my clients on their company page

content, the first thing is can we just try something a little bit different?

And I've got like a whole how to video coming out on YouTube, which is all the

tools that LinkedIn gives us where we can spy on our competitors, not so we

become a carbon copy of them, which is the danger that I see from a lot of customer

research is that we go to the competitors in our industry and then go, they've

got the biggest number of followers or the most comments or whatever.

Let's just do what they're doing.

Then all of a sudden now you've just become the same as them,

which is the opposite of branding and the whole point of it.

And so we work to, look at that stuff and then figure out

what can you do differently?

And that contrarian idea that The B2B Institute talks about is something

that resonated with me that I was like, yes, I am that person that five

years ago, everyone was hating on LinkedIn Company pages and I'm like no.

You need them.

You know?

And I found my space where I'm not in competition with anybody else,

and that is an amazing place to be.

And the opportunities come, the right fit clients come.

There's so much upside to doing these things.

My little sales heart, I spent 20 years in B2B sales, marketing's like my add-on.

But I just fell in love with marketing as a business owner and branding

because I realized, oh, this is how I get to sell for higher prices.

I get to work with the best clients.

There's so much upside for all of this from a sales perspective that I'm like,

oh, I'm on team branding these days.

Like you won't get anyone else that is like cheering on branding more than me.

I'm conscious that I could talk to you about this all day, and I am

conscious of time and I don't wanna miss out on this last question because

it's practically dealer's choice.

What do you see as the biggest opportunity on LinkedIn today for B2B marketers?

Michelle, I don't know if you're a psychic or something, but I actually

think it goes back to what you just said.

About what you recognized and what you were able to do for your business

by showing up in a distinctive way.

And I think that people are still massively under investing in

thinking about how do I show up?

And I know people overuse the word authentic.

But what I mean by that is like having that realness.

Thinking about, you know, in this professional context, how can I be

most myself, be a person through which I can communicate this

information in support of my community.

To really invest in this idea of what does business storytelling

look like that is also uniquely you.

I think a lot of people are still treating LinkedIn like a press

release distribution channel.

But we have to recognize, and I'm guessing that you and your audience has felt this,

like LinkedIn is fundamentally evolving.

I've been on there forever myself.

It was my favourite platform from the beginning, not just

because I work here now.

But what we see happening, like through the pandemic, that

accelerated people's longing for genuine connection and realness.

There's that tension between the old playbook and the new expectation.

We've got Gen Z rising on the platform and think about what they expect,

transparency, personality, they can spot anything that doesn't, they're

like, I don't know about that.

So that's the things that feel real, that take a stance.

You admit when things are hard, like these are the things.

It doesn't mean being unprofessional.

It means being memorable.

And so that's what I would advise.

That's what we're seeing come to life on the platform today.

We're seeing the B2B creator economy expand on LinkedIn too, more voices.

Um, The expertise being regarded to connect and tap into, to brand messages,

to help teach people how to use products and share the knowledge like you're

doing here, Michelle, with this work.

And using video more on LinkedIn.

So we're seeing that up.

It's 36% up year over year on LinkedIn.

Things are evolving, so we have to embrace that.

But also, think about, and I, and by the way, I know it can be hard to

show up in that way, but to understand when you're doing it in service of a

community, people feel that realness.

You can see when brands are doing this well because the metrics that people

get measured on go through the roof and climb, and so there are results to

doing this work in your own way, and I think it's even more important given

the rise of AI and all of the tools that we've got out there to do it.

It's actually exacerbating the problem.

We are seeing more and more clones of each other show up because these

tools use the average of everything that's out there on the internet.

And then now you've just created something that sounds like everybody else.

So if I had one little thing that I'm begging, clients that I work with

or my listeners that are out there, it's to give things, some personality

to play around, to have some fun.

Can we just put it out there, Ty?

Is it okay to have fun on LinkedIn as a brand?

Can we just put that one out there to wrap the show up?

Can we have fun?

That's the only way I wanna be.

Look, I think that's the best place for us to wrap up this conversation.

It is okay to have fun.

Ty Heath, Director of The B2B Institute, an all round B2B brand expert.

Thank you for everything that you've shared today.

It has been absolutely everything that I wished it would be, so I appreciate you.

Thanks so much for having me and cheers everyone.

Feel free to connect with me and find us at b2binstitute.org.

Absolutely.

Until next week, listeners, cheers.