A brand strategy involves targeted marketing and messaging from the founders of a business to their audience.
Over the last five years, an average of 4 million new businesses have started in the US every year.
New business owners may need clarification about the best ways to drive growth and attract customers in today's economy. A fundamental way to ensure your new or existing business is successful is to have a strong brand strategy.
A brand strategy involves targeted marketing and messaging from the founders of a business to their audience. The purpose of marketing and a brand strategy is to build customer loyalty and help a business grow.
For 8 top brand strategy tips to help drive growth, keep reading.
Determine the Purpose of Your Brand
One thing that sets the most successful brands apart is their powerful purpose. This is one of the first steps of brand building, as it will help shape your entire company. There are some questions you can ask yourself to figure out what the purpose of your brand is:
- Why does your company exist?
- What makes it different?
- What problems does it solve?
- Why should your audience care?
Various elements of your branding will be formed around the answers you get. This includes slogans, taglines, messaging, voice, and more.
Establish your values and what you stand for. Many customers will choose you over your competitors if your views align with theirs.
Research Your Competitors
During the brand-building process, you should compare your strategy to your competitors. Be aware of what they're doing well and the areas in which they fail. From this, you can alter your strategy to make it more effective.
When doing this, it's important not to copy what they're doing. You want to find ways to make your strategy different and superior. This will help convince their customers to move over to your brand.
Identify Your Target Audience
For your branding to be effective, you should know who it's aimed at. Making the best brand strategy means tailoring it to your audience, so you first need to know who this is.
You'll want to reach as wide of an audience as possible, but there may be specific demographics that you want to target based on your brand and what your company offers. This means things like age, gender, location, income, and more. Once you know your target audience, you can adapt your branding to make it more suitable.
Establish a Brand Mission and Vision
Your brand vision should be based on what your company is passionate about. Think about what you want your brand to achieve in the future and how you can reach that point.
You can build a roadmap with a statement of commitment, and all work your brand does should align with this mission. Defining this will help you make business decisions moving forward, and it will reflect in all elements of your branding.
Outline the Key Qualities and Benefits of Your Brand
When you build a brand strategy, you want to focus on what makes your brand different. There are always more prominent companies with more money and resources, so if you want to compete, you must let people know why they should choose your brand instead.
Figure out what you offer that other brands don't, and highlight this to your audience. Show them that you can solve a problem more effectively than other companies, giving them a reason to switch to you.
There are various ways that your company may be able to provide more value to customers. Some common examples are lower costs, better products, or superior customer service.
Form a Unique Brand Voice
Once you've determined your mission, your target audience, and the industry you're in, you'll be able to start developing a brand voice. This is how you'll communicate with your audience and affect how they respond. Depending on these factors, your voice could be:
- Professional
- Informative
- Friendly
- Conversational
- Authoritative
- Technical
- Service-oriented
The main goal is to create something that works well with your target audience. It will help you connect with customers and build stronger relationships. This will lead to a stronger community with more brand loyalty.
Promote Your Brand Personality
A company will always make a better impression when different from what already exists. You can do this in various ways, and the overall brand personality is one of the most important. This is similar to how your brand voice will communicate with customers but is more closely related to customer interactions with your brand.
It's essential to be consistent so that your audience can form a sense of your brand personality. Some good things that you can do include telling stories about real experiences and sharing behind-the-scenes content. These can establish an authentic feel which will further build trust in your customers.
Build a Brand Story
Another great way to connect with customers is to tell them who you are. Use your business voice to tell people about yourself on a more human level. This makes it much easier for people to connect with your brand, as they see it as a person rather than a business.
Make sure you're clear and honest when doing this. Connect it to your product, and rather than saying what your product can do, state why it's essential.
The Importance of a Strong Brand Strategy
Without a good brand strategy, you'll struggle to bring in new customers and retain current ones. Both of these are essential if you want your brand to grow, so you should take the time to create an effective brand strategy and make alterations to it over time if needed.
ThoughtLab is a digital agency that helps businesses with design and marketing in various ways. To find out more about how we can help your business, click here to contact us today.
