Build Your Brand Strategy with these 7 Steps

A brand strategy is a detailed long-term plan made to accomplish a number of long-term objectives and create a successful brand. A company’s brand covers all internal and customer-facing areas of the business and serves as its defining image. Because of this, developing a compelling and consistent brand strategy might be among the trickiest problems a developing company faces. After all, your brand is essentially the identity of your business; it symbolises how clients, partners, associates, and workers will view you.

Discovery

Discovery is simple if you’re establishing a new company and don’t yet have a visual identity. Nobody knows about your business, and there is nothing to look into.
However, if your company is already established, make sure you don’t neglect this stage. Market analysis is crucial. You must comprehend your current brand identity and unbiasedly consider all elements that affect how your firm presents itself to the public before developing your updated or new brand identity. To do this, you must assess your market, sector, goal, mission, values, brand identity, brand perception, and brand.

 

Define your Vision and Values

To begin, ask yourself what the goals of your company are. Do you want to simplify complicated processes, tackle a specific set of issues for customers, or all three? Instead of being driven by a desire to sell, your company’s true purpose should be anchored in the value it adds to customers or users. This should form the basis of your brand strategy. LinkedIn reports that 85% of purpose-driven businesses exhibit steady company growth, underscoring the importance of this strategy for success.

• Evaluating whether the original vision, mission, and values of an established company are still applicable is a crucial activity. You can ask the following questions to help:
• Are there elements that have emerged in the company’s culture reflected in that vision, mission, and values?
• Are some of the existing elements poorly defined or no longer valid?
• What’s most important to your company?
• Do your existing brand identity and marketing properly communicate your core identity?

Identify your brand values

The next stage is to decide on the values after having clearly defined the goal and vision of your business. What values does your brand promote? What core values underlie each and every facet of the brand? Your brand’s behaviour in the marketplace and the kind of customers you draw will be influenced by the answers to these questions.
To complete this part of your brand strategy, name and define the values you share with your ideal customers. Here are a few examples:

• Empathy and compassion
• Passion and enthusiasm
• Tenacity and stamina
• Trustworthiness and integrity

Determine your Brand Positioning

Careful brand positioning can assist you in differentiating your company from competitors in your sector and attracting the interest of your target market.

• What makes your brand and its products and services unique in your industry?
• What are the specific differentiators, and how do they compare to competitors’ offerings?
• How will consumers who fit your buyer persona perceive and respond to these differentiators?
• What will they believe about your brand and its products and services?

Use answers to the above questions to craft a brand positioning statement: [audience] will choose [product] to experience [benefits and outcomes], because [audience’s beliefs].

Launch your Brand From the Inside Out

Your brand’s principles should be recognised, embraced, and admired inside in addition to being consumed publicly. In addition to helping staff deliver services and support to clients consistently, this will legitimise your brand as a whole. The most important factor in determining employee engagement will be your company’s primary goals, which will motivate team members to be motivated by your mission.

According to LinkedIn, 73% of purpose-driven workers are happy with their careers, which increases labour productivity and produces better corporate results. Employees who are inspired by their employer’s mission are also much more willing to advocate for them.

Develop an Actionable Marketing Plan

No amount of lovely branding will suffice. It needs to be hammered home with constant communications across a variety of channels. And after you’ve gotten them on board, you should keep them on board by advancing your relationship with them and winning their loyalty. In essence, you must continue for the duration of your brand’s existence.
Here are some considerations for the marketing portion of your brand strategy plan:

Sales funnel: A sales funnel, particularly for an e-commerce website, can easily guide visitors to becoming customers who keep coming back for more.

Social media marketing: With the help of websites like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and others, you have access to the entire world, including all of its online shoppers. Try paid strategies like influencer marketing and social media ads in addition to organic publishing.

Content marketing: Technically, content marketing encompasses every product video you generate, social media post you publish, email you send, and blog post you write. It may have a huge impact when you employ content marketing best practises to move customers through your sales funnel.

Email marketing: Another powerful tool for your sales funnel is email marketing. According to one study, email is 40 times more efficient than Twitter or Facebook at helping businesses find new consumers. It’s very potent.

Track, Assess, and Evolve When Needed

The first stage of this approach was research. The process should actually be in a loose infinite loop. To monitor the effectiveness of all of your campaigns and activities, you should always be digging into your Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics, Twitter Analytics, and other platforms.

Google Analytics provides you with a plethora of detailed data about the visitors to your website and exactly what they do there, right down to the last click. Create a Google Analytics account right away if you don’t already have one. Always be looking for methods to get better. And acknowledge that occasionally change must be implemented from scratch, beginning with crucial components of your company’s branding like your tone, your marketing strategies, or even your brand identity.

Conclusion

When developed effectively, your brand strategy gives your company support and direction. It describes the position of your business in the market in relation to your rivals and how it differs from the others. Both your team and potential clients will find your brand more enticing if you use the proper attitude, colours, voice, and activities.