We’re delving into how to develop a brand strategy to provide you with a framework for creating your dream brand. Founders, CEOs, aspiring entrepreneurs, marketing enthusiasts, and branding nerds, this one is for you.
Throughout this blog, we would like you to think of your company as a person. What would it wear? How would it talk? What would it stand for? Let’s get into it…
What is brand strategy?
A strategy is a long-term plan that enables you to achieve specific goals. For a brand, these goals will be focused on how well your business, service offering or product is received by your target audience.
An example of some goals for a brand strategy include:
- Brand awareness
- Positive brand association
- Brand loyalty
- Perceived quality
- Brand preference
- Brand experience
Why is a brand strategy important?
Your strategy serves as your overall roadmap that guides actions and decisions. A well-crafted brand strategy enables emotional connection with your brand through the development of trust by effective communication of value, consistency and clarity in messaging, differentiation in the market, and cultivating a positive and memorable brand reputation.
The areas that make up a brand strategy include:
- Brand purpose
- Identification of target audience
- Competitor analysis
- Brand positioning
- Brand voice
- Brand messaging
- Brand visual identity
How to define brand purpose
So let’s start with number 1. Why does your brand exist? Brand purpose refers to the underlying reason for a brand’s existence beyond just making a profit. It goes beyond product features and benefits and encompasses a brand’s core beliefs, values, and the positive impact it aspires to create in the world.
- Your purpose is your north star, it’s your guiding principle for:
- Company actions, decisions & interactions
- Shaping culture
- Developing strategies
- Overall communications.
The stronger the purpose, the stronger connection you build with customers who share the same values, ultimately contributing to the brand’s long-term success through loyalty.
Identifying your target audience
Understanding the needs, desires, and values of your target audience is key. If you don’t know who you’re talking to, how can you communicate effectively?
Customer personas are a great way to represent your ideal customer based on research on common characteristics. You should create your persona based on these factors:
- Demographics: age, gender, location
- Psychographics: interests, values, lifestyle
- Behaviour patterns: shopping habits, decision-making process
Free Tool: Make my Persona by Hubspot
Once you have defined your audience it’s important to remember their wants and needs will change over time. Make sure you have the means to gather feedback and data to refine your understanding and make adjustments as necessary to ensure your company can continue to perform well.
Assessing your competition
By assessing your competition thoroughly, you can gain valuable insights into the market dynamics, identify areas for differentiation, and develop strategies to position your brand effectively in the marketplace.
But how? Well, start by identifying direct competitors who offer similar products or services in your industry. Look for both established players and emerging businesses that may pose a threat.
Explore their:
- Websites
- Social media profiles
- Marketing materials
- Online presence
Then, pay attention to their:
- Offerings
- Pricing
- Target audience
- Brand positioning
- Messaging
- Overall strategies
Once you have collected enough information and gained a good understanding of your competitors, conduct a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) for each of your key competitors. This analysis will help you understand their positioning relative to your brand and identify areas of opportunity for your own business.
Developing brand positioning
Brand positioning guides all aspects of brand communication and marketing strategies, including:
- Brand messaging
- Visual identity
- Product/service offerings
- Pricing
- Customer experience
It helps shape the brand’s identity and reputation, influences consumer perceptions and purchasing decisions, and creates a competitive advantage in the market.
Exploring brand personality is a key factor in your positioning. Just as people have different personalities, brands can exhibit various personality traits such as being playful, sophisticated, trustworthy, adventurous, or innovative.
Brand personality traits influence the way a brand communicates, behaves, and interacts with its audience across various touch points. Think Monzo vs Lloyds Bank, same industry different personalities and therefore different target audiences.
Choosing your brand voice
Brand voice refers to the consistent and distinctive tone, style, and manner in which a brand communicates with its audience. Whether a brand voice is authoritative, conversational, playful, informative, or any other style, consistency is key.
Brand voice influences the language, vocabulary, and overall tone used in brand communications, including:
- Marketing materials
- Social media posts
- Website content
- Customer support interactions
- Advertising campaigns
This is also interlinked with the personality defined in your brand positioning so make sure you consider if your brand were a person how would they speak?
Creating brand messaging
Effective brand messaging aims to articulate the brand’s unique selling points, benefits, and values in a captivating yet relatable manner. It helps shape the perception of the brand and influences how it is understood and remembered by consumers.
Brand messaging typically includes:
- Mission
- Vision
- Value proposition
- Key messages
- Taglines
Designing brand visual identity
Brand visual identity refers to the visual elements and design components such as:
- Logo
- Typography
- Colour palette
- Imagery
- Graphic elements
- Overall design style.
These elements work together to create a cohesive and consistent visual representation of the brand. A strong visual identity helps differentiate the brand from competitors, evoke specific emotions or associations, and enhance brand recognition and recall.
If you consider a supermarket aisle with shelves stacked full of branded goods, is your hand reaching for a brand you recognise?
Formulating your marketing strategy
Now you have a cohesive brand framework, how and where are you going to shout about your brand?
You will need to start with raising brand awareness and planning marketing activities that will help you achieve this. Your plan could include:
- Advertising
- Promotions
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Events
- New product development, and more…
Don’t forget all of the hard work that’s been done, the channels chosen still need to align with your values and target audience to achieve success.
Monitoring and adapting
Finally, monitoring brand awareness is essential to understand how well your brand is known and recognized by your target audience.
This can be a tricky area to measure as some elements of brand awareness are not tangible. Methods you could use to measure awareness could include:
- Social media monitoring
- Website analytics
- Brand tracking studies
- Customer feedback & surveys
- Brand sentiment analysis
Keep in mind that monitoring brand awareness is an ongoing process. It’s important to track changes and trends over time to identify trends within data to identify areas for improvement that will drive future marketing and brand-building strategies.
Make a start
We hope this blog has given you some good insight into how to develop a brand strategy. But if you’re still feeling overwhelmed on where to start, we have created some useful templates in relation to each section of this blog to help you get started. Download our free brand strategy templates.
If you need any help along the way, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We’re always happy to collaborate with brands that are looking to make a difference.