The senses are a near-universal way to connect with people. They are anchors for memory, and that is the goal of marketing—to get ideas related to your company to live in people’s brains.

We know that brand equity is potent. When you have brand equity, you go from selling a product to selling a feeling. But brand equity is intangible, so it is difficult to study. Luckily, we have David Aaker. Aaker developed a model with five essential parameters to measure brand equity.

I was recently shopping for polo shirts and was surprised at the options. The Old Navy pique polo shirts top out at about $14. Ok, that’s acceptable. The Ralph Lauren pique polo shirts cost up to $90. Wow. Logo + “Thermovent” + “hint of stretch” = $76? The answer to why one is so much more expensive lies in each company’s brand positioning.

The term ‘branding’ is lobbed around like a volleyball these days. You’ll hear statements from all corners of the marketing world:

"We need to build brand-awareness.”
“This campaign launch has to be ‘on-brand’.”
“I want to develop a sub-brand for this new product launch.”

The word ‘brand’ has become synonymous with ‘identity.' In reality, a brand and its identity are two separate things.

Picture this: It’s your first week at a new company, and you’re ready to meet with your agency to develop some new marketing initiatives. As you dig into your organization’s branding materials, you gasp in horror. What decade is this logo from? Who approved this color usage? Is there even a web-friendly version of the corporate font available?

 For some marketers, leading a branding—or rebranding—initiative is the holy grail. 

Think about the ads that appear on the side of web pages. If I am in operations, researching technology providers, I don’t want to see what I was researching on the sidebar and header of every page I look at. It’s unsettling, and makes me want to delete my cookies more than to go back to the page I was looking at. 

How do you present yourself when you meet a client, or even a date? Imagine if you never made eye contact with them or didn’t offer a handshake. They probably wouldn’t want to deal with you, even if your product was impeccable or you were incredibly good looking. 

The most important part of your interaction is taking the small risk to engage. The same rules apply to your B2B marketing strategy. The market is saturated with content—heartless, cookie-cutter content. Make your campaign stand out by making it human. Here are three ideas to consider in that process.

If marketing automation isn’t part of your b2b marketing strategy, you might want to invest in it this  year. In fact, according to a 2015 survey by Ascend2, 42% of businesses are now using marketing automation, which is a significant jump up from previous years. Here are a few ways marketing automation can impact your marketing strategy in 2016.

“Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than interrupting strangers who don’t.” –Seth Godin

In this new content marketing age, companies need to consider many factors when creating their buyer persona. In fact, the only way to learn more about your Buyer Persona is to identify comprehensive information from the get go before they go through the Buyer’s Journey. From there you can strategically target the ideal audience with a plethora of data that supports your approach and gain the right results.

If you are still trying to figure out how your company will stand out amongst your competitors online, you need to revisit the Inbound Marketing method. This method will allow you to identify the right kind of prospects online and turn them into satisfied customers and brand loyalists.