Takes your own practice as an example to tell the method of building an expert brand of B2B.
mainly revolves around three topics:
, Do B2B companies all need to be expert brands?
. How to do it? I listed two feasible modes.
. Is the expert brand the boss necessary?
In fact, there are some marketing research on expert brands at home and abroad, and everyone pays more and more attention. A report abroad said that influencers’ marketing value is very obvious, including to enhance brand awareness, obtain business opportunities, and improve customer satisfaction.
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TOB Does enterprises have to be expert brands?
TOB companies must become expert brands? Of course it is not certain.
I drew a picture to help everyone better understand what kind of companies need to be an expert brand.
Let me tell you the conclusion first. The more skilled products are needed, the more expert brand is needed.
In the figure, the horizontal axis depends on people, and the vertical axis depends on skills. There are some products and services that require a lot of skills to use, such as live broadcast services and marketing cloud products, which require a lot of knowledge and have a higher demand for expert brands. For example, if you have no skills to talk about, you cannot give birth to a "printer" expert.
This simple quadrant should be able to understand it, in the upper right corner, for example, a consulting company requires both people and skills.
If there is no expert brand, you cannot open a consulting company, so you will find that the bosses of the consulting company basically work hard on the expert brand. Like Liu Run (Runmi Consulting), Xiao Ma Song (Xiao Ma Song Strategy Consulting), and Hua Shan (Huayuhua Marketing Consulting), they are all consulting companies owners.
or above is an analysis of demand, which can clearly determine whether a TOB company needs to build an expert brand.
Next are two models created by expert brands.
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Personal expert brand - Liu Run mode
values:
. Gain the high trust of customers, personal fame has a significant role in business negotiations
I am also working as an expert brand myself. The starting point at that time was that when I first started my business, I went to meet customers and introduced our company to customers for half an hour. Others don’t know how this person and the company are. At this time, a trust problem must be solved.
so it is very important to be an expert brand. After the output of high-quality content and the creation of expert brands in the past two years, if Chen Xiaobu mentioned in the TOB marketing circle, he would at least know this person, or have read my content, and before meeting customers, he could also understand that our professionalism is fine, so he could directly negotiate business details. Whether to cooperate in the end depends on the degree of matching and whether the quotation business is appropriate, but at least the problem of professionalism and trust has been solved.
Teacher Liu Run said in his previous article that he had one or two people at the beginning of his consulting company. In order to make customers believe him, he started to write content constantly and set an iron rule for himself, which is to let customers come to his company to discuss business, rather than to go to the client company to discuss business. He wanted to attract customers to their company to discuss business through his content and reputation. Hua and Hua have also talked about this theory, that is, they do not go to customers to discuss business, nor participate in bidding or contesting drafts. Instead, they attract customers to come to you to discuss business by establishing a strong enough expert brand. Based on their trust in you, it will also have a direct and obvious promoting effect on the business.
. Win a lot of opportunities for free exposure
When corporate brands go to media to expose and promote, they often need to pay a lot of money to the media. However, if personal brands and expert brands do a good job, for example, when they invite Liu Run and Xiao Ma Song to give speeches, they may have to pay him. Like today I am sharing here, including in the circle, so there will be many opportunities for free exposure.
, continuously obtain free traffic
can obtain a steady stream of free traffic through free exposure of various media and multi-platform distribution of content.
. It helps users' private domain operation
Private domain is often talked about, operating private domains has great value. Personally, I believe that the essence of private domains is based on the WeChat ecosystem to operate users, and WeChat is a social relationship chain. The purpose of WeChat's private domain operation is to bring user relationships closer.
But in fact, you will find that it is often difficult for To B companies to do a good job in community, and no one will chat as they do it, because from a relationship perspective, you won’t want to chat with a company on WeChat. It is also difficult for you to have a private relationship with a company. The so-called private relationship must be more likely to have a private relationship with this person.
If you are an expert, you will establish a group with expert characters as the core, and with the linkage between many experts and friends, his private domain operation will definitely be better than that of a company and a community.
. If the personal expert brand is well done, you can also make money directly. I have summarized several ways to make money directly, such as knowledge payment, membership payment, and training payment.
For example, for example, the courses taken by Teacher Liu Run in "The Death" have 500,000 or 600,000 users, and one user charges several hundred yuan, which is about tens of millions of dollars. In addition, Liu Run’s Knowledge Planet and his official account also earn hundreds of millions of dollars. At the same time, Liu Run wrote a lot of books himself.
How to build a personal expert brand? In terms of the implementation model of the personal expert brand, we constantly write, give speeches, share in the industry, and enhance personal influence by outputting high-quality series of content, thereby creating a personal brand. When the influence of personal brand continues to increase, you can obtain a lot of free traffic. After continuous snowball growth, the influence of personal brand will continue to expand, gain the trust of customers and establish cooperation with customers, and ultimately achieve business growth and form a growth flywheel. This is the implementation logic of personal expert brand.
Take Teacher Liu Run as an example. The following picture is Teacher Liu Run’s growth flywheel. In terms of works, Liu Run has a lot of high-quality content, including "5 Minutes Business School", books, offline training, so as to bring reputation, reputation brings customer trust and promotes consulting cooperation, and obtains consulting income. Because it continuously improves personal influence, there will be more consulting customers. Communicating with customers is also an improvement in self-improvement. In this way, the level of the work will continue to improve, and the reputation will become stronger and stronger, thus forming a rolling flywheel. Therefore, the logical closed loop of consulting companies to be expert brands is very clear.
If you pay attention, you will see that Liu Run and Xiao Ma Song are on business trips all year round. They go out for more than 200 days a year, attend various meetings, communicate continuously, and consult with various customers. While improving their knowledge, they also output various works to enhance their reputation. The consultation fee is getting higher and higher, forming a flywheel effect.
So next it is this model. It is very suitable for companies with intellectual services. It is basically a must for some consulting companies that require skills, especially small and medium-sized enterprises may use more, and they must also participate by bosses or shareholders.One thing you need to pay attention to when building an expert brand is that generally speaking, employees cannot be allowed to build personal IP or personal brand, which is often a disaster for the company.
like Tencent , Ping An , Huawei , etc. They are strictly prohibited from employees from building personal expert brands. This is also very easy to understand, because after employees build a little personal brand, others often poach the person and even offer higher salaries, so it is a disaster for employees to build their personal IP. This model relies more on the boss, and will basically be the boss personally involved or the company's shareholders.
So, how to maintain the expert brand for a long time? Basically, it is about writing, speaking and managing connections. Let’s talk about how to do it in detail.
mentioned Liu Run's model earlier, and everyone may have some questions, such as his content output is too large, the official account is updated daily, the video content is also very exquisite, and the professionalism is very high. The official account is often 10W+, and it feels that it is too difficult for us to do it. Xiao Ma Song’s official account also has tens of thousands of views, and they are constantly publishing books, so they think it’s a bit too difficult to make this thing?
I have been a personal expert brand for more than two years and have some superficial practices, which are accumulated step by step. Next, I will use my personal practice as an example, which may make you feel that the difficulty may not be that high.
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Ten steps for personal expert brand creation
I have summarized 10 steps to do the specific method.
. Establish a system for personal brand
. Clarify the target population . For example, if you are consulting, it is divided into different industry consulting, then I personally do To B marketing, and my target population is To B marketers.
. Analyze existing resources . Analyze whether you have strong speaking skills or writing skills. As for myself, what I especially like to do is writing. I am very confident in my writing ability. I am from the Chinese department, so based on my core resource advantages, what I have to do is to keep writing.
. Find your own unique value. I am doing To B marketing myself. For example, I have a lot of case marketing and a lot of content marketing. I write this content. As I write, I know a lot of people and find that there are many experts in the circle. I want to compete with them and definitely can't write the same content. At this time, I have to find my own unique advantages. For example, after comparing with others horizontally, I analyzed that what I may be better at is to popularize and systematic very complex theoretical or professional content, so that everyone will feel more comfortable when reading it and have a stronger readability.
. Clarify a positioning, in one sentence let everyone know what you are doing, give a good name, and take a unified image.
. If your original name is not easy to use, you can give it a pseudonym. My own name [Chen Xiaobu] is a pseudonym. You will find that there are many people whose names are not easy to remember. At this time, you can think of a better name and listen to it and remember it well. For example, Xiao Ma Song also has a pseudonym, and many of them have pseudonyms, which are nice and easy to remember.
There is another one that is conducive to search. In fact, I thought of a lot of names at that time, such as Chen Xiaoshu, and then searched for Chen Xiaoshu, and there were a lot of other celebrity information, and some names found some very famous stars. We want to give a name that doesn’t have much content when searching. When I was giving this name, I searched it and found that there is no one who is very famous for this name. Now, whether it is WeChat or Baidu , I will find that it is basically my content.
This way, based on your positioning and value, has a unique positioning. My positioning is To B brand marketing. To create positioning for a long time so that everyone can remember it, and there is also a unified brand image in terms of vision and color.
. Unify VI tone. Don’t change the avatar after making it. Use it for a long time. is actually the same as when we build a brand. If it lasts for a long time, others will have an impression of you, that is, the brand image.
Like Hua Shan, I once said that the image photos of their brothers will never be changed, such as Teacher Liu Run, Xiao Ma Song, Husband, etc., you will find that their avatars are stable and unchanged all year round.
. Create professional content
. Professional content. For To B, To B is a professional expert brand, which is better positioned in this regard, because when you make To C, there are many special gameplay, such as particularly funny, beautiful, handmade memes, etc., various gameplays, but To B is actually very simple, and you need to do it to reflect your professionalism.
Professional content is ultimately to serve the business, that is, after reading the content to your target customers, you feel that you are very professional and trust you, and finally willing to cooperate with you.
Based on this logic, it can only do professional content. Of course, you can also have your own characteristics, but overall the content must be professional.
. Quality can be greater than speed. For example, there are many articles on my official account, and there are tens of thousands of words. This content cannot be written a few articles a month. Like Teacher Liu Run, the content is of high quality and updated every day. This is beyond the reach of people. At this time, you can not have such high requirements for yourself. Quality is preferred, and don’t pursue too fast speed first.
. Systematic content output, systematic content output is actually very critical. When our content is scattered, it is actually difficult to form a potential energy. When the continuous content forms a system, it will have an resonance effect . That is to say, after a certain accumulation, everyone will have a deep recognition of you in this field.
Sometimes, it will be very painful for us to do content, which is basically no one cares about it in the early stage. Even if the content you do is very professional, if you write ten or eight articles, you often have no sound in the circle. Therefore, the advantage of systematic content is that when you accumulate twenty or thirty articles in the same field and unfold them systematically, potential energy will slowly form. If it is very scattered, it may be that after writing thirty or forty articles, there is no potential.
. Soft the thinking of hot products. It is best to have two to three hot products in a year. This is related to the attributes of the media, because we have too much information now. If you have two particularly exquisite content a year that can attract explosive attention, you can highlight it. Otherwise, sometimes you write dozens of articles a year, but it doesn’t sound like water has not boiled. You must have the idea of popular content, which is easier to attract attention in the circle.
. All-channel distribution, focusing on maintaining several core platforms
regular channels, official accounts, Zhihu , Baijiahao, headline accounts , etc., vertical industry channels, such as advertising gates, Shuying.com, etc., are all things that everyone will pay more attention to.
You may find that there are several channels that are more important. It is enough to focus on maintaining these core platforms, so you will not be that tired. Others may say that all distributions are done through all channels, and then dozens of media will send them. I think it is unbearable to do it personally. Some platforms are not of much value, so it is enough to focus on maintaining several core platforms.
. High-quality input
If there is only output, the input is insufficient, otherwise you will find that there is nothing to write after writing.
At this time, the first point of of course is to read the books and the official account to learn.
The second point is that there is a better way, which is interviews with big names. is an excellent effect. I have also interviewed many big names and experts, and after interviewing them, I have also gained a lot.
Third point, industry exchange. In fact, it is not very easy to learn when attending industry conferences, because there are often many people in industry conferences, each of whom only talks about a small part, and there is no way to talk in depth. Therefore, small-scale and high-quality salon activities are more fully communicated.
Fourth point, company business practice. Our expert brand content must be related to the company's business, so the actual business of the company is actually very valuable. Like the actual business practice of a consulting company, its logic is also very self-consistent. Just when doing consulting, you can constantly communicate with various bosses.
For example, Jingshuo is a marketing person. In terms of marketing, you can communicate with many CMOs. Through actual combat, your knowledge will be continuously improved. Doing live broadcasts with various people is also learning from actual combat. These are all very good ways.
Fifth point: Conversation with excellent customer leaders and achieve a win-win situation. For example, Xiao Ma Song's articles often talk about his customers. Hua and Hua published a case collection. On the one hand, the benefits of doing so are that they have value in publicity to customers, and customers will also find it very meaningful. On the other hand, readers will feel more trust in you when they see that you have practical skills.
We are the To B expert brand in order to help our business. If it is all theoretical research, you may wonder if you have done it. At this time, bring customer cases with customer leaders to talk to them, and often talk about specific practical cases, which will make people feel more trustworthy. Teacher Liu Run also often holds this type of exchange meetings and private board meetings to chat with business owners, which is a higher quality content input.
Therefore, you need high-quality input. One is to recommend reading by yourself, and the other is to communicate frequently with professionals, especially face-to-face communication, which will greatly improve and help your professionalism. If you cannot communicate due to the epidemic, conducting online interviews is also a better way.
. Share, speech, and voice in the industry
When we output a lot of content, we must further spread our influence. We cannot just articles, but we must also speak in the industry. like a relatively high-quality platform in the circle that can share and share, and we will also talk about it when we are invited by others to share.
Take the To B marketing circle as an example. The circle is quite small, such as To B CGO, 6Kr , CMO training camps, marketing companies and manufacturers, etc. These platforms communicate and share, continue to speak up frequently, so that more people in the circle know you, and the effect of amplifier will be formed.
. Private domain operation, connect your users online
Whether it is monetizing the business or converting it, it is best to add their WeChat to have some connection with them on the private domain.
online community is a better way, but the community does not mean that you must build several groups by yourself, because I have built several groups by myself. In fact, I found that it was really exhausting to operate it. A better way is to help friends in the circle. If you join his group, he joins my group, and everyone will help each other and chat together. This is an online connection.
. Offline activity connection user
offline connection I think it is more important for To B.Because To B's trust is very critical, offline meetings are often a magical chemical reaction, because once the relationship and trust between people can be improved rapidly, I have also done a lot of salons and private meetings myself.
chat online for a year, it is better to meet offline. The offline connection is very strong.
Xiao Ma Song’s annual consultation is more than 2 million, and 30,000 meeting consultations. This kind of meeting consultation is actually valuable to both parties. Face-to-face communication can quickly improve relationships and trust.
To B's business meeting is easier to promote conversion. Like Xiao Ma Song, he meets all kinds of people outside for more than 200 days a year. He meets hundreds of people a year, and several clients are converted into his consulting clients, which is tens of millions that year. There are many ways to meet offline. Here I will talk about my experience a little more and try not to visit potential customers alone.
At the beginning, I went to Beijing once and met more than 20 people. Beijing was too big and saw one in the morning and afternoon, and at most three people a day. Finally, I found that it took about a week to meet 10 people, which was very expensive.
When I went to their company to chat, I found that Liu Run's words were very correct. Don't ask customers to ask you to see them, just go and see them. Don't meet potential customers. The first one is that he has not started working with you at all, and he has not paid you. At this time, you go to their company to chat for a long time, which will consume a lot of time.
The better way is to build an expert brand. After continuous high-quality content output, many people add you and let customers come to our company to chat.
So the more efficient way is either to meet, consult and chat like Mr. Ma Song, there is no problem with meeting, consultation and chat, but it costs a fee, and the free ones will simply disappear; or you can organize a small event, and you can meet one by one, which is very inefficient, so you can simply do a salon event, and you can meet 20 people at one time to meet in one place.
In fact, experts meet and chat 1 on 1 is very luxurious, time-consuming, and very inefficient. If you meet more than 10 people at a time and come together to chat, the more than 10 people will also get to know each other, and the efficiency of meeting will be much higher.
To B The more special thing is that meeting is very important, and you should also pay attention to efficiency when meeting.
. Create your brand representative work
For example, what would you think of Liu Run?
Liu Run has many books and many contents, but you can't remember so many things after all, the key is to have a representative work.
Liu Run's representative work was "5 Minutes Business School". Now, the annual speeches are all very good masterpieces, or brand support points, so that people can remember you at once.
In short, you need to have a representative work, preferably online, or one or two books, offline meetings, events, etc.
. Continuously upgrading and evolution, one is to break the circle across the border, and the other is to iterate the media
Want to go to another level, and the first is to break the circle across the border.
For example, Hua and Hua not only talk about brand marketing, but also about Sun Tzu's Art of War, the Four Books and Five Classics, and Zizhi Tongjian .
But how to cross-border specifically to have more additive effects? There are many tricks here, and the whole story is very complicated. Generally speaking, after reaching a certain level, you will find that the To B marketing circle is actually a relatively small circle. No matter which expert in the circle, the number of readings of his official account will be difficult to increase, because this circle is so big. If you want to further expand your influence and become a small head in this subdivided field, if you want to expand your influence, you can only break the circle and cross the boundaries to a larger range.
The second point is the iteration of media . In the past, the official account had very traffic, but now the number of official account readings is constantly declining. For example, after the video account got up, I found that Liu Run started to make video accounts. I admire him very much. Every step is to do a business school for 5 minutes, and it reached its peak. Later, he spent two or three years to make an official account and became a million fans. Last year, the video account became popular, so he started to make a video account. The flag he gave himself was to make a good video account. At the beginning of this year, he made a live broadcast of the "Kaifeng Cuisine" series of video accounts, which had a particularly great influence. TikTok is very popular now, such as Hua and Hua, and have also started to do Douyin live broadcasts.
So when the latest and strongest media continue to appear, we have to follow the iteration of the media. This is quite difficult, because from the text era to the video era, the requirements for people are also very different and need to be continuously evolved.
1. Think about the closed-loop business and achieve flywheel growth
The picture above is a growth flywheel I drew for myself. This flywheel is still slowly promoting. The idea is to have works first, such as series of articles. Now I am writing marketing general knowledge. The book has been written, but it still takes a long time to publish it. This is the output of the series of professional content. It is a work that brings reputation on multiple platforms and speeches, and may also bring some income, such as knowledge payment, training consultation, and the company itself is also doing corporate tob marketing training consultation and corporate services, such as case packaging, content marketing, event marketing, expert brands, helping customer companies grow steadily.
In terms of knowledge, such as offline communication and marketing practice, through continuous communication and learning, improve one's professional ability, and then continuously optimize the works to form a closed loop. This part of the content is to understand the logic of flywheel growth. There must be input and output. If you blindly output, you will often find that the output is very weak later. Therefore, you need high-quality input and high-quality output, and you can continue to monetize and make money in the middle, so that you can continue to be sustainable.
Generally speaking, these 1-10 steps are implemented through Liu Run's model, plus my own learning and practice.
The difficulty of this model:
Liu Run's model is done well and can directly make money, and can also bring business to the company. I myself can make money through professional brands and can also bring business to the company. When I meet customers, the customer has heard of you. It is very helpful for the company's business, the trust of customers, and the business conversion of customers. The model of
sounds very good, but I found that this model really requires high quality and energy, and high-quality and high-frequency updates are too difficult. Moreover, large enterprises do not need to rely on the boss to acquire customers themselves. How can he become an expert brand at this time?
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Institutional expert brand-Research model
Handle TOB business owners do not like to show up in public. At this time, there are two ways. The first way is for other people in the company, such as partners, to build expert brands.
Another way is to do research institutes
Now more and more companies in the industry are working in research institutes. We can understand it as an expert institution, which means that the boss does not come forward. For example, for example, Mingyuan Real Estate Research Institute , its advantage is to turn experts into an expert institution, as long as everyone remembers the real estate research institute.
I also mentioned earlier that employees who are expert brands may easily cause disaster for enterprises, but it would be better if we run a research institute. What we probably remember is this research institute, not some specific people in the research institute.
So, how should an institution brand like the research institute be done?
First of all, we need to have very strong knowledge achievements .
is different from doing it in person. It is not just an article, because articles are often the most basic. They will have a lot of very professional knowledge results such as industry reports, industry books, industry journals, industry monthly reports, industry courses, etc.
Voice channel is generally based on the research institute's own new media platform. The self-media platform is always the core, because the number of fans is in your own hands, and other platforms are only used to spread . The key is your own self-media and new media platform.
In addition, Mingyuan Real Estate Research Institute has published a lot of books, including about 10 professional books in the industry, as well as industry journal reports. There are various reports every month and quarter. A very large team of expert team can be established, and you can do various communication activities , such as forum summits, salon activities, benchmark dialogues, elite dialogue benchmark lists, etc.
The aforementioned dialogues with outstanding customers, dialogue industry elites, and industry interviews can also be done, and various industry activities can be done. This is the benefit of doing research institutes.
In summary, it can be based on a positioning, and can also do various online knowledge achievements, and can also do various offline activities. The new media and public account of Mingyuan Real Estate Research Institute have millions of fans, and its advertising revenue is tens of millions per year. This is a particularly powerful place.
In order to promote the conversion of content into orders, we can carry out corporate training, which is also very common. We do corporate internal training for target customers in the industry. When you are not strong enough in the early stage, you can do training for free, and understand it as just like pre-sales. When you train a large number of customers in the industry, the probability of it being converted into your customers will be higher.
If you are getting stronger and stronger, you can do paid courses and paid training like Mingyuan Real Estate Research Institute. Hua and Hua do the same.
The logic of implementation for brands like the research institute is to form knowledge results through internal and content co-creation, penetrate into your target customer population, and realize your mental position. The transformation of training is also helpful for business conversion.
Another example is Polyway 's live broadcast research institute, other research institutes of the research institute have the same gameplay, output various knowledge results, industry research report , industry white paper, etc., and then establish an industry expert and think tank system, and at the same time, it also cultivates talents. There is also a particularly good way to train
, which is to do talent certification. After many trainings, there will be a certification ceremony or certificate, which may be helpful for the career development of some friends. For some newcomers in the industry, if you have a certification certificate to participate in the training, your subsequent career development will be more helpful. Of course, they can also do internal training in the company.
If you do not reach Level in the early stage, you can help others for free. If you reach a certain influence and level, you can slowly charge for fees. This kind of training and consultation are very helpful for business transformation. The research institute's model also has a great benefit, such as changes in specific personnel will not cause any damage, which is different from the first traffic model, so this is something that many companies can do.
Finally, I have a summary. Expert brand creation. I have shared two feasible models. The first is the Liu Run model, which relies on the boss to build a personal expert brand.
The second type is the research institute model. There is no need for the boss to come forward. Through the research institute, the team will be used to build an expert organization brand. The model will not be greatly affected if the personnel flow occurs. After the research institute was created, the expert brands mentioned above can also be realized, including continuous customer acquisition and customer conversion. At the same time, the research institute can continuously cooperate with various experts in the industry, and this ecosystem can also play a direct role.
Author | Chen Xiaobu TOB brand marketing expert
