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Password security is one of the most crucial aspects of every business or organization.

Your password is your first line of defense when it comes to protecting your sensitive data, systems, and applications against hacking attempts.

And with cyber threats becoming more sophisticated and prevalent, adopting effective password management tools and practices is the need of the hour. 

According to the latest Data Breach Investigations Report by Verizon, around 50% of data breaches occur due to stolen passwords.

Even worse, a single data breach can cost $4.35 million dollars to organizations.

That’s why it’s critical for organizations to keep their passwords secure and protect against rising cybercrimes around the world. After all, one of the tried and tested ways an organization can protect itself from rising cyber attacks is password management.

In this article, we will discuss the importance and best practices for password management to stay one step ahead of hackers & cyber criminals.

What is Password Management?

Password management refers to the set of sustainable practices for securely storing, organizing, and controlling access to passwords used to access various online accounts and services. 

It involves using tools and techniques to create and manage strong, unique passwords for each account, as well as strategies for safely sharing and changing passwords as needed. 

With proper password management, individuals and organizations can safeguard their credentials and keep hackers from gaining unauthorized access. 

Importance of Password Management

Effective password management helps to create a protective barrier between your data and hackers and oftentimes is the only thing stopping a cybercriminal.

Proper password management can not only help in protecting sensitive data but also prevent potential security breaches. 

On the other hand, poor password management can jeopardize all other cybersecurity efforts even if you’re using comprehensive cybersecurity solutions like CSPM in your organization.

Specifically, here are the top five reasons why password management is important in cybersecurity:

• Simplifies Password Management — With the increasing number of online accounts and services, it can be difficult to keep track of all the passwords. Password management tools can help simplify this process by storing passwords securely in one place and helping to generate strong passwords for new accounts.
• Avoids Password Reuse — Many individuals use the same password for multiple accounts, which can be a serious security risk. But, password management can help them generate and store unique passwords for each account.
• Prevents Identity Theft — Identity theft is a common cybersecurity risk in today’s digital age. By using strong passwords and regularly changing them, individuals can help protect their personal information from being stolen.
• Protects Against Hacking and Data Breaches — Strong passwords are essential to protect private & sensitive information and prevent cybercriminals from gaining unauthorized access. If a password is weak or easily guessable, a hacker can easily gain access to personal or corporate data. But, password management helps to ensure that every password that is created is strong enough and cannot be easily cracked.
• Enhances Overall Security — Good password management is an important part of an overall security strategy. By implementing strong passwords, regularly changing them, and avoiding common mistakes, individuals and organizations can enhance their overall security posture and protect themselves from cyber threats.

Password Security Best Practices

Now that you have learned about the importance of proper password management, let’s discuss the five best practices to enhance password security that every organization should implement.

Create Complex & Lengthy Passwords

Creating complex and lengthy passwords is one of the first steps you can take to prevent hackers from stealing your passwords & obtaining unauthorized access.

This is because long passwords are not just difficult to guess or crack. Ideally, every password must be at least 12 characters long, consisting of a combination of upper and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols. 

This will make it extremely tough for hackers to crack the password and break into your organization’s systems. However, make sure to avoid using common words or phrases because hackers can easily figure them out using brute force attacks or other hacker password-cracking algorithms. 

Instead, use a combination of random words or phrases that are easy to remember but difficult for hackers to guess.

Use Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

When it comes to password security, even the most complex and lengthiest passwords can get cracked by hackers. That’s why using multi-factor authentication is highly recommended.

It helps to add an additional protection layer apart from your credentials. Usually, the additional layer of security is either an OTP or a mobile app that requests authentication confirmation to ensure that it is really you who is trying to log in to the system.

So, even if a hacker figures out or cracks your complex password, it will not be enough to gain access to your system or account.

Create Unique Passwords for Each Account

When it comes to creating passwords, many people make the mistake of using the same password for every account without realizing that it can easily lead to a domino effect if even just one account is compromised. 

To elaborate, if a hacker cracks your password for one account and figures out that you’ve used the same password as your other accounts as well, they’re highly likely to use that password to gain access to your other accounts as well. This, in turn, can increase the chances of a successful data breach.

Therefore, it’s essential to use a unique password for each account you have. Using a password manager can help you create and store unique passwords for each account.

Change Passwords Whenever an Employee is Relieved

If an employee has access to your company’s accounts or systems and is relieved of their duties, it’s essential to change all passwords associated with those accounts or systems. 

This ensures that the former employee no longer has access to sensitive information, reducing the risk of data breaches.

Use a Password Manager

Password managers like 1Password or LastPass are an effective and efficient way to store, organize, and manage your passwords.

For the uninitiated, a password manager is a tool that helps you create, store, and manage all of your passwords in one secure location. It can generate complex and unique passwords for each account and store them in an encrypted database, eliminating the need to remember all your passwords. 

And you just need to remember one password, as your password manager will store your different account passwords, allowing you to sign in quickly. That means whenever you visit a website where you’ve created an account, you just need to pull up your password manager, copy the password, and you’re signed in.

Besides this, a password manager can even help in identifying weak passwords and notify you of any potential security risks.

Wrapping Up

Passwords are an essential part of our daily lives, and it’s crucial to take the necessary steps to ensure they are secure. 

By following the above-mentioned password security best practices, you can reduce the risk of data breaches and protect your sensitive information in your organization. 

Always remember, a little effort in creating complex & unique passwords can go a long way in keeping your organization safe from potential hacking attempts and other forms of cyber attacks.

Featured image by regularguy.eth on Unsplash

The post The Importance of Password Management and Best Practices for Password Security appeared first on noupe.

Subscribing to your favorite YouTube channel and watching their videos regularly can make you feel happy and help you beat stress. While watching your favorite videos, whether it is a song, a gaming video, sports, educational courses, a motivational speech, or something else, you have probably seen ads running before or during the YouTube video.

If you are running a business, it is very likely that the thought of creating a YouTube ad to promote your business has crossed your mind. There could be a few reasons why you would have held yourself back. Perhaps you think to yourself that it might be a complex process – but if that’s what’s keeping you from advertising on YouTube, the answer is “No”. On the contrary, making an ad is a simple process. You can make use of YouTube’s free tools and resources and create a video right on your smartphone, and then set up a YouTube ad campaign through your Google ads account. If you are still unsure, you can find a YouTube advertising partner to work with.

YouTube sees approximately 122 million users per day, which means your ad could be seen by a large number of people. It is very likely that within those millions of users, some will find your products or services to be useful and may even consider purchasing them.

Even though it is easy to create a YouTube video ad right on your smartphone, you may have reservations about its impact. Will YouTube advertising work for your business? There are several benefits of using YouTube ads for brands and businesses.

YouTube Advertising Guide to Scaling Video Ads

There are several benefits of creating YouTube video ads for your business. However, it is important to understand that you will not achieve the desired results by just creating a single YouTube video ad campaign and calling it quits. Advertisers should expand their campaigns to convert their target audiences into customers. Scaling YouTube ads is essential for amplifying the results.

Creating a campaign may be easy, but scaling it can be tricky and challenging. Here are some strategies that you can implement to scale your YouTube video ad campaigns.

Test Various Ad Campaigns and Ad Elements

As far as YouTube ads are concerned, some work really well, and some don’t work at all. That’s why it is important to test as many ads as possible if you want to scale your business. By creating more ads, you are giving more input and data to the system that helps Google to deliver the right message to the right people through its algorithm.

If you have just one ad, you will be able to scale it only to a certain point, which may not help you fetch positive results in the long run. Remember, machine learning stores the details of people who have already responded to your ads. Based on these details, the algorithm will know in advance which ad should be shown to which people. Therefore, you should create more ads and provide more data to the algorithm to test and help it find more winning ones.

Remember, in order to achieve the desired results, you should have multiple ads that work. Create good content! We know this sounds obvious, but make sure your video ads are things that people might want to see.

Set Up Retargeting Campaigns

Sometimes, good things take time and may not happen overnight. You should be patient and not rush the process. When your ad creates a good impression on your potential customers, it doesn’t mean that they will purchase your product or accept your services right away. It could be that they are not in the right headspace to buy at that point in time or maybe they are waiting for a better time to buy – for instance, during the holiday season or whenever their payday is.

This is where retargeting strategy comes into play, where you target those consumers who are already aware of your brand. The more you display your services and products before them, the more likely they become to visit your website and consider purchasing them.

Targeting new customers is good, but retargeting ones who have shown interest in your products is an effective strategy, as they are more likely to buy than new customers. By doing this, you increase the value of your leads and maximize the revenue generated from each one of your leads.

Utilize YouTube Discovery

Have you ever noticed videos with a yellow ad tag appearing with the rest of the video search results? These are YouTube discovery ads, also known as TrueView video discovery ads.

YouTube discovery is an excellent resource and a boon for business owners who want to advertise their products and display them in front of the right people.

YouTube discovery places your product or services alongside YouTube content that is likely to be viewed by your target audience. You can also find these ads placed in related search results as “watch next” content and in the YouTube home feed.

TrueView discovery ads do not interrupt viewers’ video views, unlike in-stream ads. Therefore, choosing this option will help you reach more people as many viewers prefer watching such videos where there is no interruption.

YouTube discovery is also an advertiser-friendly feature as you will only have to pay when a consumer clicks on your ad, thereby helping you get a free brand impression for your business.

Some Incredible Benefits of Using YouTube Ads for Your Business

Here are some benefits of advertising your business on YouTube:

Massive Reach

• It is a known fact that the human brain processes videos and images faster than text. According to Google research, almost 55% of consumers refer to online videos to research the products that they want to buy. If you think this is not a strong enough reason to consider YouTube video ads, then there is more.
• YouTube has more than two billion monthly active users who consume over one billion hours of videos on a daily basis, which equates to about five billion videos. These massive numbers are more than enough to demonstrate value to anyone wondering about creating YouTube video ads for their business.

Video Ad Targeting Features

• Your brand may appeal to a certain audience depending on the age group, gender, demographics, content, and so on. It is always important to take the necessary steps to reach your target audience as they are your potential customers. YouTube’s video ad targeting features allow you to reach out to your target audience.
• Demographic targeting is one such feature that allows you to target potential customers based on age, gender, and location where they reside. Some other important video ads targeting criteria include In-market audiences, video remarketing, and more.

Affordable and Easy to Track and Measure

• Small business owners, or people who have recently started a business, assume that advertising on YouTube requires them to shell out a fortune since it is a big platform with a big reach. While this assumption sounds practical, it is far from true.
• A typical YouTube video ad impression will cost you $0.01-$0.03 depending on the ad format, video quality, industry, targeting, and so on. In fact, YouTube video ads are advertiser-friendly as they offer five seconds of free advertising, which means YouTube doesn’t charge advertisers for those viewers who skip the ads before the 5-second mark.
• YouTube allows advertisers to track and measure their ads to see which ones are working and which ones are not. This allows advertisers to stop wasting money on ads that are not striking a chord with the audience. Alternatively, the advertisers can also tweak and adjust the ads to improve their effectiveness.

Final Thoughts

YouTube is the second most popular search engine. It is worth investing in and is one of the best platforms that brands can leverage for their branding and marketing activities. YouTube is a highly effective platform that has a vast and unique reach. If you aren’t using YouTube to market, consider grabbing your smartphone right away to create YouTube ads and use this unique opportunity to present highly-engaging video ad content to your audience. However, you should explore all your options, consider all the possibilities, and choose wisely before you go all-in with YouTube ads.

Featured image by Brands&People on Unsplash

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Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be able to observe your entire application infrastructure?

This concept is referred to as observability.

Various companies utilize application performance management or APM tools to optimize their applications after observing them.

This is because these tools benefit teams to gain insights into application deployment environments to guarantee performance levels will never fall below certain thresholds.

Cloud Observability- An Overview

Cloud observability is a new technology that has taken the world of application performance monitoring and management by storm.

It’s an artificial intelligence-based approach to understanding your applications’ performance in the cloud.

The goal is to enable you to not only see what is going on but also understand why it’s happening, so you can take action and improve the performance of your applications.

AI Observability requires a unified view of all the components that an application has, such as the following:

• Underlying hardware and software components (such as virtual machines),
• Middleware (such as databases)
• End-user applications

Importance Of Cloud Observability for Application Performance Management

Organizations can use cloud observability tools to gain insight into their cloud infrastructures by collecting data from multiple sources across diverse environments such as:

• Physical servers
• Virtual machines
• Containers
• Databases
• Networks
• User experience management systems (UXMs)
• Hypervisors/virtualization platforms
• Storage arrays
• Operating systems
• Applications 

This data can be analyzed using data visualization tools that help users understand trends in their cloud infrastructure over time.

Cloud observability tools typically focus on three main areas:

• Performance management
• Application audit trails
• Event data correlation

Performance management helps you track down slowdowns or errors by providing metrics about how well your apps perform over time.

Audit trails provide detailed information about changes made to your infrastructure over time so you can see which actions caused problems or helped fix them later.

Understanding Application Performance Management 

Application performance management (APM) tools are crucial to any DevOps toolchain.

They collect and analyze metrics from across your entire application infrastructure, giving you the visibility to identify and diagnose performance issues early.

APM tools help identify many different types of problems, including:

• Performance bottlenecks in your code or infrastructure
• Slow or unresponsive web pages
• Errors or exceptions that occur during processing
• Slow database queries that cause long-running processes
• Service outages or other unexpected behavior

Benefits of Application Performance Management

APM has become more than just a tool for monitoring application performance.

It’s also critical to ensure that the cloud infrastructure is performing optimally.

Cloud Observability for APM can be improved by adding new capabilities such as:

• Monitoring application infrastructure
• Tracing service dependencies
• Collecting telemetry from user devices

With cloud APM, you can:

• Get real-time insights into application performance, availability, and user experience
• Proactively identify performance bottlenecks before users are impacted
• Identify the root cause of issues faster with rich analytics capabilities, including automated root cause analysis
• Automate response actions so you can fix problems before they impact customers 

How  Can Cloud Observability Enhance APM?

Cloud observability enables application performance monitoring because it provides visibility into application performance from end-to-end, that is, from the user requesting an application to its delivery by the underlying cloud infrastructure.

Cloud observability also helps you understand how your application behaves as it scales and responds to load changes.

Cloud observability enhances APM in several ways:

• Provides deeper visibility into application performance across multiple environments, including physical servers, virtual machines (VMs), containers, and more
• Integrates with other types of monitoring tools such as logs, tracing, and metrics so you can see how they all work together to understand what’s happening in your application environment
• Helps you manage performance for hybrid applications that combine traditional on-premise applications with cloud-based software components such as databases or message queues

Leveraging Cloud Observability for Better APM

Cloud Observability provides a real-time view of your application’s cloud infrastructure and end-user experience. It also offers advanced analytics capabilities that give you greater visibility into the health of your application.

This helps you identify and troubleshoot problems faster to resolve them before they cause any user impact.

Steps to leverage cloud observability for better APM:

Setting Up Cloud Observability Tools

Cloud observability tools offer deep visibility into cloud-based applications, enabling you to monitor critical metrics like:

• Latency
• Error rates
• Throughput to detect potential problems early on

To set up these tools, you need a monitoring agent installed in your application or infrastructure stack that sends data back to a collector in the cloud.

The collector stores all the information that is then analyzed by the tool’s analytics engine to give you insights into your application’s overall health status.

Monitoring Application Performance Metrics

Once the tool is set up, you can monitor your application’s performance metrics and log real-time events.

You can use these metrics to measure various aspects of your application’s behavior, including:

• Throughput (number of requests per second)
• Latency (time taken for a request)
• Error rate (percentage of failed requests)

Analyzing And Troubleshooting Performance Issues

Cloud observability tools provide insight into how applications are performing in production environments.

These tools can identify bottlenecks and performance issues and determine where resources are utilized or wasted.

The first function is executed by gathering and analyzing metrics from various sources, such as:

• Logs
• Traces
• Network traffic

The second function involves troubleshooting these metrics, which can be done manually or automatically with the help of machine learning algorithms.

Using Data Insights for Continuous Improvement

The good news is that there are plenty of ways to use data insights for constant improvement in your APM strategy.

By leveraging cloud observability features like log monitoring and metrics, you can ensure that all your apps perform at their peak potential. You can reduce IT costs and downtime by optimizing resource utilization.

Examples of How Cloud Observability Can Improve APM

It can help you better monitor, detect and troubleshoot issues that affect application performance.

For example, you can:

• Correlate events across multiple infrastructure layers, including application logs, network data, and server metrics. This helps you quickly identify the root cause of an issue and then take action to remediate it
• Monitor metrics from other systems that aren’t natively available via APM tools, such as security alarms or storage metrics
• Analyze historical data for proactive problem detection and troubleshooting instead of waiting for incidents to occur before investigating them

Here are some more examples of how cloud observability can improve APM:

Monitoring

Cloud observability provides insight into application performance from every possible angle, including:

• Network
• Server
• Database
• User experience

Alerts

Cloud observability alerts can be set up for specific events or activities so you can proactively identify and resolve issues before they impact users or your business.

Debugging

With cloud observability, you don’t have to wait until something goes wrong before investigating an issue. With this level of insight into your applications’ behavior, you’ll know exactly where problems exist before they affect end users or business operations.

Wrapping Up

The operational insights available via monitoring in a cloud environment are thus invaluable to the operations teams of today and tomorrow.

And as more organizations move their workloads to and from the cloud, they’ll need a new way to think about APM.

As we noted above, it may not be enough anymore to monitor an application’s latency as organizations will also need a way to accurately monitor cloud latency to attribute issues to underlying infrastructure problems.

With this additional visibility into cloud environments, such as performance and cost metrics, hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures can address issues before they impact applications.

Featured image by Danist Soh on Unsplash

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Accessibility must be a default feature of product designs. As the world evolves to be more inclusive of all people, regardless of race, gender, and disabilities, so too does the digital world. Many web developers and product designers are now giving importance to how accessible their products are to all kinds of users, including people with disabilities.

So how can you make sure that people with unique needs can easily access your website? Hiring product designers is a foolproof way to ensure universal accessibility. Limeup is a qualified web developer who can help your business website have a better ranking. Product designers at Limeup can tailor-fit a product design that is most suited to your brand, requirements, and preferences.  

What is Accessible Product Design?

To have an accessible product design means allowing all users to navigate through the software comfortably and without any hassle. Anyone must easily access your website, regardless of their disabilities, generation, and condition. It must be user-friendly, especially for people with temporary or permanent impairments like visual, auditory, cognitive, physical, and speech disabilities. 

The accessibility of a website means disadvantaged individuals can scroll and move through your website without any difficulty. For instance, to be accessible to a visually impaired individual requires your website to incorporate good color contrast and readable text. You may also include a text-to-speech function for people who can hardly see and read. 

Another example in the case of a temporary disability is when a parent visits your website while holding a baby in one arm. The user must easily read the content, view graphics, and move through web pages using only the user’s workable arm.

Importance of Accessibility?

Accessibility is not only an issue in the tech or digital world. More importantly, it is a human rights issue that must be addressed in all aspects of life, offline or online. We’ve enumerated reasons why accessibility is important for your product design.

Better User Experience (UX)

Website accessibility is consequential to users’ experience. Because an accessible product design means ease of access, use, and navigation, users are likely to enjoy their time and experience on your website. Accessibility will also benefit not just users with disabilities; Those who don’t will also enjoy a seamless user experience.  

Compliance with Website Accessibility Laws

Countries like the United States have rules and regulations on the inclusivity of websites and applications. According to website accessibility laws, software and digital technology must be inclusive for all people with impairments, regardless of their disabilities. Thus, you could face legal charges if you fail to ensure universal accessibility of your product designs.

Higher Lead Generation and Conversion

Since a highly accessible website provides users with a better experience, more people are likely to visit your website. Improved traffic also means a better probability of lead generation and conversion. Users, including those with disabilities, are potential customers that you can persuade into buying your product or engaging with your brand through improved accessibility and user experience.

Inclusive and Non-discriminate Branding

Brand image and reputation say a lot about a business or company. What do you think people will say about your brand if you treat people with disabilities differently? To avoid being labeled as discriminatory, you must develop an all-accessible product design, prioritizing the needs of disadvantaged users.

How to Ensure Product Design Accessibility?

A basic understanding of product design accessibility is not enough to guarantee accessibility. Even product designers can overlook the accessibility features of their digital content, thus failing to achieve a universally accessible product design. You need a team of highly experienced product designers with technical expertise to ensure ease of access for people with unique needs.

Use Proper Colors and Themes

The themes and color combination of your website are vital accessibility elements. They are key to the readability and clarity of your web content. Thus, you must use appropriate color contrast for the text and background of your website. This way, users, especially visually challenged individuals, will not have a hard time reading and understanding your website.

Think about your Texts

A large part of your website consists of texts and paragraphs which are integral for the accessibility of people with dyslexia and visual impairments. You must conduct research to ensure that your texts are easy to read for people with visual problems. For instance, you must know the correct font style, size, effect, and character spacing to use to aid people in reading and decoding the information on your website. 

Consider Touch Targets for Mobile Users

Essentially, touch targets or touch zones in mobile phones are parts of the screen that are easily reachable by the human thumb. The touch target is normally at the bottom of the screen because single-handed users can easily reach this part using their thumb. You can consider this information when designing your product to ensure that mobile users can easily navigate through your website or app.

Perform User Testing

One best practice of professional web developers and product designers is conducting user testing. If you want to ensure universal accessibility of your application or website, you must perform these tests with a wide variety of users, including those with special needs and impairments. This will allow developers and designers to identify design elements and features that must be edited to suit the needs of different users.

Why Do You Need Accessibility Testing?

Accessibility testing is an imperative step in ensuring that you have an all-inclusive digital product. Sometimes, no matter how meticulous you are in designing a product, you will still fail to see gaps and accessibility issues in your web design. Thus, performing accessibility testing will help determine these shortcomings, so you can revise your website to be a more inclusive product. 

Product design accessibility is key to inclusivity. Web developers and designers now realize the importance of universal access in generating traffic and better lead conversion. Through an accessible product design, you’ll be able to penetrate your market effectively such that more users, with or without disabilities, are able to access your website.

Featured image by Stefan Schweihofer from Pixabay

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If you own a B2B business and are working under the impression that brand identity is essential only for B2C companies, you are in for a surprise.

With more saturation in the digital marketplace, 77% of B2B leaders believe that branding is vital for their company’s growth. To break through the noise, you must develop a brand identity that humanizes your business, engages your target audience, fosters customer loyalty, and ultimately scales your organization.

The secret ingredient to that is a powerful B2B brand strategy.  

Dissecting the term: Brand Strategy

A brand strategy is a holistic approach that defines who you are, who you serve, what you do, and what you value. It encompasses different brand elements such as brand identity, voice, narrative, vision, mission statements, and business goals and objectives.

Every B2B business that strives to build a successful company needs to prioritize strong B2B brand-building strategies.

After setting key goals, business owners can take steps toward their achievement and track their progress. A B2B brand awareness strategy further ensures every team in the company is working in the right direction and supports consistent branding. It is important to note that a consistent brand image is essential to establish credibility, build trust, and boost brand awareness.

Step-by-Step Guide to Developing a B2B Brand Strategy

Let’s see what it takes to build a brand:

Spell Out Your Goals and Purpose 

Every brand has a set of basic principles and beliefs it carries through its existence in the market to deliver a cohesive and consistent experience. It ensures further that your brand is easily and swiftly recognizable across all marketing channels.

Taking this into account, you can’t establish a B2B brand awareness strategy without clarifying what your brand is aiming to achieve and why your brand exists. Your goals can be qualitative such as establishing a reputation as a prominent advertising agency, or quantitative, like driving $5Million in revenue.

Your purpose, on the other side, is your distinct reason for being. What kind of impact does your brand wish to create in the world?

In today’s time, according to a study by Ipsos, consumers of B2B or B2C industries are looking for a brand that is driven by purpose and more precisely, is aligned with their values. 

Define the Persona of the Ideal Audience 

Defining the ideal audience persona is one of the essential steps in B2B brand-building strategies. This makes it easier for you to tailor brand content, messaging, and even product development, as well as marketing campaigns, to meet the specific behaviors, concerns, and needs of the members of your target audience.

In B2B, the ideal persona will be the stakeholder who is authorized to make purchase decisions in the organization or institution you wish to do business with.

Since there is always more than one stakeholder involved in the buying committee of B2B businesses, including the CEO, financial advisor, and director, your focus must be understanding each profile. It is important to uncover detailed and relevant information about each decision-maker, including their role in the buying committee, needs, wants, and concerns.

Build a Brand Personality your Audience will Connect With 

Great brands, whether B2C or B2B, have a distinct personality that injects humanity into your business and fosters deeper customer relationships.

Simply put, your brand personality is the human characteristics associated with your business.

A great starting point to establish a strong personality is to ask yourself how your brand would be defined as a person. Will they be serious and sincere, or are they adventurous and bold?

As such, consider the audience persona when defining brand personality. Think about the kind of brand your audience will be excited to engage with. Will they be attracted to a classy and sophisticated brand or something on the playful side?

B2B brand personality is defined by the visual appearance of your brand, comprising logo, colors, fonts, and photography in conjunction with the voice and tone used in marketing communications.

Create a Compelling Brand Narrative 

A brand narrative is a critical building block for creating a powerful and endearing brand image. It is a concise, lucid, and streamlined story that serves as groundwork for a B2B company’s marketing and communications.

Don’t consider it to be some kind of script that needs to be played on a loop with every communication effort, but rather a messaging framework that your marketing team interprets and communicates, as required.

Most significantly, the story must be framed keeping in mind your target audience: helping them to visualize themselves in the narrative. This will build affinity in your target audience and cultivate a memorable brand image.

Look at Mailchimp, which has a huge section committed to reflecting customer stories in articles, podcasts, and films that are further reinforced with the founder’s story. Collectively, they exhibit that the company is passionate about small businesses and has developed a tool that aids them in competition against the big names in the market.

Strategically Position Your Brand in the Market 

B2B brand positioning is the process of positioning your business in the mind of the consumers. 

Interestingly, many brands have a positioning summary that outlines what their company does and what values it brings to the market or customers. 

When positioning your brand, part of the process also includes differentiating your business from the direct competition. This helps your audience to think of you as the better option than other businesses in your niche.

Some ways to position your brand in the market are

• Quality of Service: Highlight the quality of your service, especially if it is priced high, to inform clients that it’s justified by the high level of care you offer in return.
• Convenience: With this B2B brand positioning, you can demonstrate why your business is more convenient than others, whether it is because of the product’s design, ease of use, or any other features.
• Problem and Solution: Does your product solve a specific problem? In that case, position your B2B brand as a powerful solution provider so that your image immediately appears in the audience’s mind regarding that particular problem.

Wrapping it Up

A great brand identity lays the groundwork for successful branding and marketing. It ensures every aspect involved in your business development and growth is working towards common goals and setting success for the long term. The rewards of a well-defined B2B brand strategy, on the other hand, are many, and if executed right, will build a positive brand image and lasting relationships that withstand the test of time!

Featured image by Leeloo Thefirst

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