A brand strategy is a guiding document that helps brands and businesses build an entity that connects with their audience. According to Local Brand Advisor, the right brand strategy can help businesses improve their bottom line.
Developing the right brand strategy often involves identifying the business’s core objectives and focus, determining the audience and identifying what they respond to, and developing a clear strategy that connects the business to the audience.
While developing a brand strategy may appear easy, it often involves a lot of research and data-backed decisions. You’re in the right place if you don’t already have a brand strategy or you’re looking to improve your existing strategy for better results.
How to Create a Brand Strategy
The first step to a successful brand strategy is recognizing the need for one. So, you’re on the right path to driving more sales, engagement, and revenue for your business. It is important to note that this task cannot be rushed through. You must understand each step and make data-backed decisions to ensure its success.
Follow the steps below to create your actionable brand strategy.
Step 1: Build An Internal Brand
You can only build a brand strategy for an existing brand. So, if you don’t already have a brand, now is the time to get started.
To build a successful brand, you must consider important components like your brand’s purpose, mission, vision, and core values. Your brand’s purpose will help you identify your unique selling propositions (USPs) and determine your audience. Your mission and vision will also help tailor your brand, while the core values will shape the entire internal and external communication and relationships.
Step 2: Define Your Audience
With your unique selling point identified, you want to build on the target audience you have identified as part of the internal building process in Step 1.
Expand on the identified target audience and discover the “what, where, how, why, and when” of their pain points. For example, if you’re a plumber, then your target audience will be residential, commercial, or industrial buildings. What? Your audience needs plumbing services; When? They need it as fast as possible, and How? You have a service truck that takes you to them.
Knowing all the important information about your audience, their pain points, and how you can help can make all the difference.
Step 3: Discover Your Competition
Surely, there’ll be existing businesses already doing what you intend to do. A good way to dominate the market is to understand what the existing competition is doing and how you can improve on it.
For example, you could propose a realistic 5-minute response time if existing businesses take 10 minutes to arrive at the customer’s property for emergency plumbing calls.
You must, however, ensure that you are offering only realistic solutions to customers.
Step 4: Discover Your Unique Position
Brand positioning is an important part of your strategy. Ask the following questions to discover the sweet spot to position yourself;
- What are customers complaining about from dealing with existing competitors?
- What are the things customers want more or less of?
- Do customers want a better way of doing things? How?
- How can my business save customers money, stress, and time?
- Is there a better way of achieving the desired result?
Step 5: Build Your Brand Personality
Customers love brands they can relate with. Determining the right brand personality can go a long way in pushing your brand and customer loyalty. Here is another avenue to make data-backed decisions by scouring the market for existing competition and how you can better relate with customers.
You should also aim to build the right tone of voice and messaging strategy at this point. The right tone of voice can help you reel in more customers, while an excellent messaging strategy focuses more on what customers can get from you.
Step 6: Develop Your Brand Identity And Story
With everything shaping up, now’s the best time to craft a creative brand name, identity, and tagline. Think of something that’ll resonate with your target audience. You can also go on to build a brand story around the name and tagline. Ensure that the story is clear, and concise, and helps customers feel closer to your brand. Remember, you’ll need to trademark your brand name and any logos you’re using, so make sure to read this essential guide to trademark services if you’re serious about protecting your brand.
With the name, tagline, and story developed you can proceed to develop your brand identity. The identity should take into consideration the right colors, textures, and patterns. You should also focus on iconography, graphics, media type and styles, typography, etc.
Step 6: Define Awareness Strategy And Brand Collateral
All set and ready to launch? Consider developing your brand collateral and how customers or clients will share your message with others. In addition, craft an awareness message that not only resonates but sticks with your audience.
Having a message that your audience can randomly remember ingrains your brand into their subconscious memory and builds brand loyalty.
Step 7: Launch Your Brand
With all other steps completed, your brand is ready for launch. It is important to pay attention to audience reaction post-launch, as this will ultimately inform further decisions on areas of improvement.
How to Build a Community Around Your Brand and Why Its Important
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