Ep. 201: How to Build a Winning Strategy for Your B2B Brand

How to Build a Winning Strategy for Your B2B Brand

In a fast-paced business environment, marketers, agencies, and consultants must proactively help clients differentiate their brands in the marketplace. One way of doing this is by analyzing the strategy, messaging, and brand positioning, both for their own brands and key competitors. So how can teams conduct this kind of brand research and competitive analysis in a way that’s insightful, efficient, and actionable for planning the next steps?

Tune in as the B2B Marketers on Mission Podcast presents the Marketing DEMO Lab Series, where we sit down with Clay Ostrom (Founder, Map & Fire) and his SmokeLadder platform designed for brand research, messaging and positioning analysis, and competitive benchmarking. In this episode, Clay explained the platform’s origins and features, emphasizing its role in analyzing brand positioning, core messaging, and competitive landscapes. He also stressed the importance of clear, consistent brand positioning and messaging, and how standardized make it easier to compare brands across multiple business values. Clay also highlighted the value of objective, data-driven analysis to identify brand strengths, weaknesses, and gaps, and how tools like SmokeLadder can save significant time in gathering insights to build trust with clients. He provided practical steps for generating, refining, and exporting brand messaging and analysis for internal or client-facing use. Finally, Clay also discussed how action items and recommendations generated from analysis can immediately support smart brand strategy decisions and expedite trust-building with clients.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4_o1PzF1Kk

Topics discussed in episode:

[1:31] The purpose behind building SmokeLadder and why it matters for B2B teams

[12:00] A walkthrough of the SmokeLadder platform and how it works

[14:51] SmokeLadder’s core features

[17:48] How positioning scores and category rankings are calculated

[35:36] How differentiation and competitors are analyzed inside SmokeLadder

[44:07] How SmokeLadder builds messaging and generates targeted personas

[50:24] The key benefits and unique capabilities that set SmokeLadder apart

Companies and links:

• Clay Ostrom
• Map & Fire
• SmokeLadder

Transcript

Christian Klepp  00:00

In an increasingly competitive B2B landscape, marketers, agencies and consultants, need to proactively find ways to help their clients stand out amidst the digital noise. One way of doing this is by analyzing the strategy, messaging and positioning of their own brands and those of their competitors. So how can they do this in a way that’s insightful, efficient and effective? Welcome to this first episode of the B2B Marketers in the Mission podcast Demo Lab Series, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today, I’ll be talking to Clay Ostrom about this topic. He’s the owner and founder of the branding agency Map and Fire, and the creator of the platform Smoke Ladder that we’ll be talking about today. So let’s dive in.

Christian Klepp  00:42

All right, and I’m gonna say Clay Ostrom. Welcome to this first episode of the Demo Lab Series.

Clay Ostrom  00:50

I am super excited and very honored to be the first guest on this new series. It’s awesome.

Christian Klepp  00:56

We are honored to have you here. And you know, let’s sit tight, or batten down the hatches and buckle up, and whatever other analogy you want to throw in there, because we are going to unpack a lot of interesting features and discuss interesting topics around the platform that you’ve built. And I think a good place to start, perhaps Clay before we start doing a walk through of the platform is, but let’s start at the very beginning. What motivated you to create this platform called Smoke Ladder.

Clay Ostrom  01:31

So we should go all the way back to my childhood. I always dreamed of, you know, working on brand and positioning. You know, that was something I&#