Happy August! I hope you are enjoying summer, whether the season is a busy or slow one for your business entity. If taking a vacation is on your wish list, I hope that it has, or will, achieve its purpose, and allow you to see new sights or return to familiar places, have fun, recharge your energy, and lower your stress level. I also hope that you’re finding time to read at least one business book that’s helping you to sharpen your business acumen.

September and the fourth quarter will soon arrive and now is the time to consider how you can successfully position your organization to achieve a strong year-end finish. Selling a product or service is usually a challenge, especially for Freelance professionals and small business owners. B2B marketplaces are nearly always crowded, typically consisting of a handful of market leaders that are trailed by a passel of “me, too” offerings. Unless your company has a sizeable marketing budget, it can be a struggle to build and sustain marketing or branding campaigns that will heighten the perception of your value and make your product or service appear more appealing to prospects. In short, today you can begin thinking about how to identify for your business a new competitive advantage.

The time is now to assess potential strategies that can position your entity to generate higher sales revenue in the coming months and it’s entirely possible that your preferred strategy can be carried out at a comparatively modest expense. Listed below are strategy possibilities that are accessible to Freelancers and SMB owners. Keep in mind that your promotional messaging must address urgent buyer pain points. You must do more than merely being clever as a way to get attention. The purpose of whatever new strategy you implement now is to leverage the competitive advantages you plan to highlight will result in customer roster that has a higher value, increased sales revenue and an enhanced customer lifetime value.

Read on and consider what you might have the means to do to fulfill the important goal of optimizing your brand visibility and image and maximizing sales revenue and profit as we look forward to the waning days of 2026.

I. Dare to be different

How can you clearly communicate to current and potential customers that your product or service will effectively address worrisome pain points and solve problems, enable them to achieve mission-critical goals without expressing those very important strengths in boring and predictable text? Useful information should not be ignored but…brands that are competing for the same target customer group can all sound alike. Target eyeballs cannot help but glaze over. The curse of commodification can creep in as prospects wade through sound-alike sales funnels that echo chamber repeat the same sales pitch. Isn’t it time for you to dare to be different and take a brave step forward?

Caution must be exercised and controversy is to be avoided for sure. You cannot afford to turn off the potential or current customers. But by choosing the right product attribute to showcase and then creating a cheeky tagline—or short video, or catchy image—that cleverly and succinctly describes your lead attribute, you can steal the thunder of competitors and propel your brand to the head of the class. If the Boston Red Sox can win 15 games in a row during July and escape an early death that had fans and sports announcers talking about “next year” sometime around Memorial Day, you can claim the spotlight for your brand and leap to the front of the pack. The suggestions below can stir up your creativity. Just do it.

• Use humor to reframe the perception of your offering and your entity and escape the constraints of commodification
• Align with a cause, such as climate change or animal rights (but avoid getting preach-y)  
• Choose a unique visual branding style. Think 1950s retro, or find inspiration in the work of well-known artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Peter Max, or Yayoi Kusama.

II. B2B influencer marketing

Another strategy that has the potential to help you separate your entity from the congested marketplace is to align with a B2B Influencer. While originally a strategy used by your B2C counterparts, competition for billable hours in the B2B sector has stimulated the acceptance of influencer marketing by those in the B2B sector, including Freelancers.

B2B influencer marketing is not a means to showcase your services or products—that’s a B2C strategy. Freelancers and SMB owners work with B2B influencer marketing specialists to increase the stature of their brand and use that professional capital to build credibility that facilitates trust and relationship-building with potential customers who, if all goes according to plan, will become paying customers. The goal of B2B influencer marketing strategies is to align your organization with recognized and respected industry thought leaders—the influencers— whose industry knowledge, reputation and loyal followers can be leveraged in your target market sectors.

The most effective B2B influencers are well-known and respected experts and regarded as thought leaders in their field. B2B influencers aren’t celebrities, but they are trusted members of influential online communities. They are also respected speakers who are regularly on podiums at industry conferences and other business events. The knowledge and experience they’ve acquired gives the influencers great authority and credibility that’s enabled them to build a sizeable, loyal and often activist following.

Based on that authority and credibility, the best B2B influencers are able to build trust and enthusiasm for brands within their community of followers. They are also known to make endorsements that can stimulate purchases made by decision-makers within the community. A brand endorsement can result in a significant number of positive reviews posted on social media platforms that are capable of creating a word-of-mouth campaign that can spread to the general public and stimulate still more purchases of your brand’s services or products.

The influencer phenomenon is a growing trend in B2B marketing. Apparently fueled by the entry of Millennial and Generation Z into stakeholder and decision-making positions, prospective buyers are increasingly more trusting of the recommendations of independent thought leaders, that is, influencers, than in the marketing content you provide. Millennials and Gen-Z are comfortable with influencers and that preference is starting to impact purchasing.

• Increase brand awareness. By aligning with a B2B influencer with a large following in your target market, your brand will have access to a new audience of highly-engaged prospects.
• Enhance credibility. B2B decision-makers increasingly trust industry thought leaders, sometimes more than marketing content. This trend is becoming more common as Millennial and Gen Z buyers move into stakeholder and decision-maker positions that impact purchases. Millennial and Gen-Z stakeholders and decision committee members are comfortable with influencers
• Increase leadgen and sales. Selecting an influencer who is closely aligned with your brand values can help you reach specific groups of prospects who are highly likely to become your customers.

III. Get strategic about social media

You may not have the bandwidth to undertake a major overhaul of your presence on social media platforms, but if you take just three steps, your social media ROI will become more significant for your business.

•  Define prospects: Successful B2B social media speaks to specific customer personae and post content that addresses their specific pain points and how your service or product will solve the problem or help achieve the goals. Enhance your leadgen and site engagement by posting content that helps decision-makers for your service or product. Make your marketing content speak to their pain points, goals
• Meaningful messages: Create content that speaks to the value that prospective customers are looking for. Clarify your understanding of why prospects feel they need your product or service? How does your offering make their life easier?
• .Create a content calendar. This will solve two problems for you: 1.) If there are specific times of the year that you want to post, you’ll remember to do so; and 2.) You will post consistently and give your audience fresh content that drives engagement.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: Stock AI image