Building a Brand Strategy That Will Last [Definitive Guide]

In our modern, always-connected world, the brand discourse grows broader and ambiguous with each passing day. It’s no longer just about branding. Product branding, corporate branding, personal branding, and even service branding are all examples of branding. Branding is integrated into every area of our life, whether you’re a corporate leader, a marketing specialist, or just an ordinary Joe purchasing a cup of coffee before a long day of work.

Business owners often believe that building a branding strategy entails selecting a logo design, font families, and color palette for their website and packaging. Many business owners do not take the time to develop and develop a branding strategy because these responsibilities are frequently outsourced to freelancing graphic designers or media businesses.

In actuality, there’s a lot more to designing and applying innovative branding ideas to create an online presence that will attract your target audience.

What Is a Brand Strategy?

A brand strategy is a long-term plan to achieve a set of long-term objectives and establish a strong brand.

Your brand strategy can be thought of as a 360-degree economic blueprint. Your brand strategy should ideally define the primary features that distinguish your company, as well as your mission and goals and how you plan to achieve them.

A well-crafted brand strategy considers all aspects of your market, specialty, product or service offerings, competitors, and customers.

You’ll have to take some risks initially — it’s inescapable when you’re starting from scratch. However, with each new visitor, follower, or customer, you’ll have more amazing data to use to design accurate plans that genuinely work. Your firm’s brand expresses what your company stands for, how you want to accomplish, and what you can provide to your target market.

The visual part of your branding includes your logo, all visuals, and the colors associated with your organization. Your company’s voice is formed by the language it uses and the causes it supports. Even the things you sell reveal a great deal about your business. All of these factors come together to form your company’s overall branding.

Brand strategy is the continual endeavor to shape the perceptions of your target audiences (clients, customers, employees, etc.). It’s a strategy and process that entails the measures you take to give your product and company purpose. Branding aims to create a distinct and noticeable place in the market, becoming a crucial part of your customer retention strategy.

Why is Having a Brand Strategy So Important?

Your business suffers when you don’t know who you are, what you believe in, why you exist, or what you’re attempting to accomplish. A lack of brand strategy generates challenges at each level of an organization, from customer conversations to employee retention.

Don’t you think it’s true that products are never just products?

Adidas isn’t all about sporting goods. Starbucks is not just about coffee. Ford is not only a vehicle manufacturer. The New York Times is more than a newspaper.

Interacting with these items provides us with experiences, and we purchase them for that reason. Even better, the corporations that design and advertise them understand precisely what kind of experience they need you to have when you buy (or consider buying). It is for this reason that they build a brand.

Companies that establish powerful brands understand that their brand must live everywhere, from the phrasing in their social media captions and Instagram story ideas to the color palette on their current billboard to the product used in their packaging. They are well aware that their names go well beyond the label.

What’s the result? These brands are well-known, well-liked, and have been chosen from a vast list of alternatives, some of them starting their rise on product discovery platforms.

Small and mid-sized businesses and business-to-business companies, on the other hand, can benefit from brands just as much as big behemoths. Particularly in this era of specialty marketing. Even B2B firms that aren’t well-known outside their respective industry have found great success with strong names.

When you don’t have a brand plan in place…

• Employees will find it difficult to feel involved and interested since your team is riven by confusion, discord, and conflict.
  
• Because you can’t precisely explain your brand, you won’t be able to carve out a distinct niche in the market.
  

In other words, you lose if you don’t have a brand plan.

What Goes Into A Successful Brand Strategy?

Your audience’s perception of your brand is only a notion. It’s what people think and feel about your vision, product, and customer experience—all of the elements that make up your business or organization.

To build a powerful brand, companies must make deliberate, informed decisions about their visual design and brand story. The best part is that developing a brand strategy does not have to be costly.

A well-thought-out brand strategy can provide you with a significant competitive edge and pay itself several times over.

When determining whether your firm is likely to flourish, investors and lenders, for example, will pay close attention to how your business model approaches brand strategy. Your prospective partners will also want to know if your brand strategy explains how you plan to build a successful company.

Key elements such as the brand objective, brand positioning, target audience, advertising strategy, and brand identity play a key role in creating a successful brand strategy.

To be consistent in the ever-changing streamlined business world, having a brand strategy should be one of the first elements in your prioritization process. So, let’s look at how you can develop a successful branding plan for your company.

Knowing Your Brand Objective and Communicating it Clearly

To know and understand your brand objective, start with the simple question, What do you want your brand to be?

The objectives you have towards your brand are known as branding objectives. By defining clearly understood, measurable performance standards, clear branding objectives guide you and your team.

They also push you to critically look at your existing practices to see where you can improve and grow. They can also assist you in comparing your firm to competitors in a way that allows you to capitalize on your competitive advantages.

Understanding what interests your target audience is the first step in determining brand objectives. Goals must also strike the correct mix between being realistic and aspirational.

When communicating to your customers what your products and services stand for, branding your store or business is crucial. It’s also critical to keep your brand relevant to influence a customer’s purchasing choice. To top it off, many consumers now lack faith in brands, so creating an authentic brand that also follows current digital and web design trends is a problem for any business.

How you convey your brand to the general public impacts its efficacy and determines whether a customer recognizes or ignores your business message.

Understanding Your Ideal Customer

Every business owner should be laser-focused on their potential customers. All entrepreneurial effort should revolve around the ability to identify a customer, sell your service or product to that customer, and satisfy that consumer so that he purchases from you again. Your promotional strategies will be more targeted and effective if you have more clarity about your ideal customer.

In some manner, everyone is in the profession of client happiness. Any entrepreneur’s most crucial task is to identify the absolute best clients for their service or product and then concentrate all marketing, advertising, and sales efforts on them.

The business’s success will be determined by your ability to accurately define and identify the best consumer for your service or product. What methods could you use to place more ideal buyers for your product? What strategies could you use to attract new clients to your product? Define your unique value proposition and express it to your customers at every opportunity.

The majority of business owners are unsure of who their ideal consumer is. As a result, they wither a lot of time and effort attempting to promote their product to those with excellent prospects.

Your ability to properly define and target the clients who can acquire your service or product the quickest will be critical to your company’s success.

Identifying Your Competition

A successful marketing plan is built on competitive research. After all, if you can’t recognize your rivals and their marketing strategies, you’ll find it challenging to set yourself and the product apart from the competition.

But how would marketers figure out who their main competitors are and what their plans are?

Finding your competitors doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming. The first stage in identifying your competitors is to determine whether they are direct or indirect competitors.

You must be aware of both your indirect and direct competition when you write a business plan or develop your marketing plan.

When it comes to identifying direct competitors for your firm, you should start with your product. To place your direct competition, you must have a firm understanding of the product and the value it gives to your market or customers.

Your indirect competitors would have as much influence as your direct competitors on your selling process. Because your indirect competitors frequently create material that competes with yours, they have an even higher impact on potential buyers early in the buying cycle.

You’ll want to identify marketing possibilities after you’ve placed your competition so you can start surpassing them. Moreover, to uncover and leverage the skills of your team for building a strong brand, you can use HR platforms like FactoHR.

It is critical to approach market research strategically when it comes to company’s sales and competitiveness.

Showing Passion

If you want consumers to care about your brand, you must connect with them emotionally to become a passionate brand.

Every brand wants to be loved by customers because they understand that brand love leads to higher revenue and growth. Brand enthusiasm, on the other hand, does not happen by accident.

Why do so many people adore Ferrari? What is the fascination with Tesla? Why are consumers willing to pay a premium for Amazon? Because each has created its brand from the ground up, recognizing what its customers want and the unique value proposition and delivering on it, to become a passionate brand genuinely.

When striving hard to build a passionate brand, the firm must know its value to customers. Brands must consider why they are significant to their target market. It’s about encouraging the consumer to become deeply invested in the brand to become a part of their lifestyle rather than merely talking about its benefits and features.

On the other hand, don’t pretend to be someone you aren’t. Don’t try to represent yourself as a healthy food brand if you’re a fast-food chain. Instead, build a background that revolves around the product’s enjoyable consumption experience. Consumers can tell when a company is attempting to deceive them.

Having a Memorable Slogan

A brand slogan is a short advertising phrase that expresses the spirit of a company in the most concise way possible. You’re expected to comprehend your brand’s vibe in just a few words.

A slogan is more than just a catchphrase created by advertisements; it’s a tactical game; in the long term, clever slogans play with the consumer’s mind, convincing them that your product is trustworthy. As a result, businesses continue to try until they find the right piece.

McDonald’s is a great example: they continuously revising their slogans until 2003, when they came up with “I’m lovin’ it,” a terrific tagline. According to the organization, this was a great depiction of their brand because they want every client to have the same experience after utilizing their service. As a result, it was a terrific seller and an ideal reminder of McDonald’s service!

McDonald’s customers are pleased by the slogans, and they are thrilled to be out and about with their families. Of course, slogans won’t help you rank higher on search engine results pages, but they will help you rank higher in the minds of your customers, and isn’t that the SE you want your business to be on? Slogans enable your brand to be instantly recognizable, recall, and when it matters most, and they make your company seem more trustworthy.

It takes more than a few words to create a slogan. It needs to put together the perfect phrases that reflect your brand strategy and linger in the reader’s memory. Above all, a memorable slogan drives the reader to buy your product.

Being Consistent

The way a business communicates messages consistent with its fundamental values, customer experience,  brand promise, and brand identity elements is known as brand consistency. It refers to how closely your company’s marketing content adheres to your brand image and requirements.

Your brand’s consistency ensures that it can be recognized across all marketing platforms and touchpoints, from social media posts to telephone customer service. This results in unified brand identity and experience for both current and potential customers.

Your customers will never come to know you if you constantly change how you display your brand to the world. Every touchpoint in your organization must be coordinated and consistent in terms of your identity and its implementation. Some marketers become weary with their brand and want to “mix things up” constantly, but it’s crucial to remember that your audience doesn’t interact with it every day, and they require consistency to connect.

Companies must create trust via brand consistency to cultivate long-term customers. Consumers will recognize your brand if it is consistent, giving them a sense of trustworthiness. This allows buyers to obtain a better understanding of your brand on a more instinctual level.

As per Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman, 95 percent of buying decisions are made subconsciously, indicating that buying is more emotional than a rational decision. Because their emotions drive people, skilled marketers often use emotion-based marketing efforts to sell a feeling rather than a product.

Providing Value

A brand is much more than the goods or services you provide. What you stand for is your brand. While your products, logo, website, and even digital marketing strategies may evolve, one constant must remain your brand values.

Brand values serve as the “north star” on most companies’ compass to market success. Your basic brand principles will remain solid and steadfast despite how you get sidetracked on your path to actual brand affinity.

Finding an explanation to “What are brand values?” requires an examination of your entire brand. A verbal identity, which defines your tone of voice and personality, and a visual identity, which comprises logos, colors, and fonts, are two “external” traits that most brands have.

While both of these parts can help promote brand loyalty by developing feelings of recognition and affinity, it’s the “internal” part of the brand that genuinely alters your consumer connections. Your “brand values,” the amount of your marketing process that guides your mission, personality, and proposal, are that internal ingredient.

You can’t hope to differentiate your business from the competition without the need for a brand value proposition, and as we all know, distinctive brands win the most consumers. Your fine-tuned brand communication strategy, combined with your core brand values, helps shape your business’s culture and community, guaranteeing that you substantially connect with customers.

9 Simple Steps to Build a Memorable Brand

Make no mistake: a well-known and well-loved brand is one of a company’s most important assets.

As per a Nielson poll, 59 percent of customers prefer to purchase new products from well-known companies.

As a new entrepreneur, you may find yourself competing against large corporations with loyal customers and seemingly limitless marketing resources. That’s why you’ll need to figure out how to stand out with your brand-building strategy.

Creating a brand is unquestionably a process that needs a plan. On the other hand, the continued effort will result in the development of long-term relationships with your clients. This can result in consistent growth in leads and sales, as well as referrals and promotion for your goods or services through word-of-mouth.

Use these steps as a blueprint for creating a memorable brand!

1. Select a Niche

A niche market is a subside of a larger market with its demands, interests, or identity that distinguishes it from the rest.

Standing out in a field that appears oversaturated with other firms and rivals can seem impossible at times. Niche marketing, on the other hand, can help you stand out in a crowded market.

When it comes to starting your business, choosing a market niche is the biggest obstacle. And, to be honest, this might be difficult: you could list all of your hobbies and passions and still feel as if you haven’t found the one thing you were meant to accomplish.

Carving out a niche market and presenting yourself as the go-to brand for a specific audience increases your reputation over competing generalists and results in a more targeted business. From your unique selling point to your content marketing, making it easier for the proper customers to say, “This is for me.”

Starting with a niche is an excellent place to start if you’re having trouble coming up with your initial product concept. There are many specializations to choose from, with the option of narrowing your focus even further. The goal is to select a niche business that you can master and has a substantial consumer base.

2. Research Your Target Audience

Launching a new product or service brand involves a significant amount of risk. Analyzing the market landscape will assist you in reducing risk and focusing your brand marketing activities most cost-effectively feasible.

One of the most important aspects of a marketing strategy is determining the correct target demographic for your company. Methods that are too broad, to begin with, are less likely to succeed than those focused on a specific market segment. In case you already have a social presence, you can start from understanding your Instagram follower demographic, or the social media demographic of your direct competitors.

As a result, before you start marketing your business, you must first determine your target audience—the exact set of people who would buy your products or services. It will be made up of both current and potential clients.

This differs from identifying your target market, which includes everybody who might be interested in your goods or services. The target audience is the potential customers you want to direct your brand marketing efforts, whether through a digital marketing strategy, an advertisement, or a social media management. No matter if you are selling electric skateboards or provide accounting services, your brand should be recognizable in every single marketing message your company sends.

Your target audience may be a niche or broad, depending on what you market. For example, if you were selling shoes, your target group would be diverse because men, women, and children all wear shoes. Perhaps, on the other side, you specialize in high-performance sport’s shoes. Then your target market would be more specialized — elite athletes aged 20 to 40 who have expressed interest in running or who have completed a marathon.

3. Choose Your Brand Tone

The tone of voice characterizes how your brand connects with its audience and, as a result, affects how people interpret your message. Put another way, and it specifies how we want to interact with our audience rather than what we want to express.

Your company’s tone of voice reflects the personality and values of your brand. This applies to all of the content you send, including social media posts, website content, email marketing campaigns, and several other formats.

If you’re not cautious, you could wind up with a jumble of voices and tones in the material you produce across your marketing ecosystem, which doesn’t portray your brand consistently or even use the same language. This especially often happens when brands collaborate with influencers they’ve contacted on social media or platforms like Upfluence.

As a company grows, this inconsistent brand experience becomes more typical. It is often exacerbated when external entities such as freelancing and agencies are brought into the content creation mix.

Why is a brand voice vital? Isn’t it more essential to work hard to make your brand appear more human? On the other hand, a brand voice isn’t about creating a voice that isn’t human. It’s all about being consistent with your voice and placing yourself as a readily recognized and authoritative figure in your field. Similarly, adopting localized content and adaptive content strategies effectively requires a consistent brand voice and lexicon.

4. Develop Brand Personality

A set of human traits that are assigned to a firm is referred to as brand personality. It aids in the shaping of public perceptions about a company’s product, service, or aim.

Like a natural person’s, a company personality should pique your consumers’ interest, be relevant and meaningful to them, make them feel at ease, and provide them with something to strive towards. Customers’ emotional responses to a company’s personality can develop lasting, beautiful connections.

These emotional ties have a direct bearing on sales and profits. As per Harvard Business School, 95 percent of buying decisions are based on emotions rather than reasoning.

People prefer companies that appeal to their subconscious or “gut,” therefore, brands that portray themselves in a human and personal manner outperform brands that rely on data or logic. To put it another way, having a fantastic product or service isn’t enough; you also need a tremendous brand personality to go with it.

While tactics, techniques, and even personalities differ significantly from one firm to the next, the overall aims of brand personality are the same for everyone.

5. Align Your Brand Values With Your Customers

Using your online presence to portray your brand and corporate culture authentically can help you develop trust with consumers and acquire talent who shares your values.

Embracing your brand by focusing content efforts on demonstrating who your people are and what your corporate culture is like will give your content a fresh, relatable dimension and help leads and future employees understand your beliefs.

One way to do so is to use your social media accounts. Social media platforms are fantastic for marketing blogs and articles. Still, they can also help you develop two-way communication with your audience by providing visual content like Slides, videos, and photographs that highlight your company’s culture and fundamental values. You can also use them to gather customer feedback about your brand.

Your company values are an essential part of your organization, and using them effectively can help you raise brand awareness significantly. As the technological landscape grows more congested, acquiring products and services via the Internet becomes more accessible and crowded, building high brand awareness is more crucial than ever.

For long-term success and growth, it’s critical to consider how your brand values can assist and align with your clientele.

6. Pick a Color Scheme

Understanding the influence of color on consumer behavior will help your brand become a success.

According to research, up to 85 percent of consumers say color is an essential component in deciding which product to buy, and 92 percent believe visual appeal is the most influential marketing factor overall.

Emotions are strong, and they influence our decision-making. You want to build a strong emotional relationship with customers as a brand. The difficulty is that you can’t express your company’s complete narrative in a logo or retail shop branding; colors provide you a direct line to your customers’ hearts.

Furthermore, using the same hue repeatedly can help to raise brand awareness. After enough exposure, colors relate to a brand; therefore, you want to promote this link by utilizing your brand colors frequently.

It’s also crucial to look at what your competitors are doing in your industry before deciding on a strategy. Are you attempting to compete directly or to differentiate yourself? Depending on your sector, your product, and your plan, you may want to stick to specific corporate standard colors, or you may want to go for a unique palette to stand out.

Finally, having a color palette that attracts your ideal customers and elicits emotions closely related to your brand attributes is critical to developing a compelling and memorable brand identity.

7. Design a Memorable Logo

Customer recognition is one of the essential factors in developing a brand entity in a specific industry. A logo can express a thousand words when it comes to intelligent branding.

People frequently confuse their logo with their “branding,” yet your logo is simply one component of your overall branding approach. It’s a symbol that can give customers fast and robust brand identification of your company and the services or products you supply.

Before you start the way of developing a logo, make sure you’ve created your brand strategy. Your logo is like a short advertisement for your firm. A logo can send the wrong message if it isn’t designed with a process in mind. As a result, rather than enforcing your plan, you may find yourself weakening it. To aid boost consumer recognition, you’ll want to maintain your brand message constant.

Your logo’s purpose is to represent your company’s values and aims. Before you go looking for a logo designer, make sure you have these things figured out. Make a clear statement about the idea you want your business to send so that your logo can reflect it. There must be a solid link between your brand and your logo. Remember that it’s just one part of your overall branding approach.

No matter how small your company is, your logo should indicate professionalism and progress. If you’re saving money by developing your logo in-house, make sure you market-test it first before going live. If you have a limited budget, DesignEvo logo maker would be an excellent alternative to creating a professional-looking logo.

8. Identify Your Brand Marketing Goals and Strategies

Brand marketing is a strategy for promoting your service or product by emphasizing your brand as a whole. Simply put, it tells the story of your service or product by highlighting your entire brand.

Brand development is the art of creating and improving your business services brand. When supporting firms with brand creation, the process can be separated into three parts.

• The first step is to make sure your brand strategy is right and aligned with your company’s objectives.
  
• The second stage is to design all materials you’ll need to communicate your brands, such as a logo, tagline, and build a website.
  
• Finally, you’ll want to polish up your newly developed or amended brand.
  

Your brand development approach will decide how you go about achieving these tasks.

CONSIDER YOUR GENERAL BUSINESS PLAN

If you have a strong, identifiable brand, expanding your business will be much easier. But, specifically, what type of firm are you searching for? Is it your goal to grow your audience organically? Start with your entire business strategy as the framework for your brand expansion strategy. If you are clear about the next step for your firm, the brand will help you achieve your objectives.

COME UP WITH A BRAND POSITIONING STRATEGY

You’re now ready to determine your firm’s place in the professional services industry. What distinguishes your business from the competitors, and why should potential customers in your target market choose to work with you?

A brand message, which is usually three to five words long, captures the essence of your brand positioning. It must be based on facts because you will be held accountable for your promises. It should also be aspirational, giving you something to strive for. Take your time to brainstorm with the team about your brand message. You can organize meetings with the whole team or different departments, take notes of the ideas, think about them and then use the meeting notes to develop your final message.

Other brand marketing goals and strategies to think about

• Determine who you wish to address.
  
• Thorough demographic research.
  
• Develop a messaging strategy.
  
• Create a catchy name for your company, as well as a logo and a tagline.
  
• Make a content marketing plan that is effective for you.
  
• Improve the look of your website.

9. Highlight What Makes You Different

With hundreds, if not thousands, of businesses vying for attention, having a unique brand has become critical for businesses to set themselves apart from their rivals.

If you’re developing your first brand identity for a customer or your own company, it’s critical first to grasp what a brand is and what it requires to establish one. Unfortunately, naming the company and plastering it all over the place isn’t as simple as it sounds.

According to Purely Branded, a brand “lives and evolves in the minds and hearts” of consumers as the embodiment of practically everything your company is and does. As a result, the company’s identity is critical to its long-term success.

So, if your unique brand is more than simply a logo, how can you follow in the footsteps of Coca-Cola and tap into these other aspects of your company’s identity? Here are five elements of a well-crafted distinct brand identity:

• The “Face” of Your Company.
  
• Credibility and trustworthiness.
  
• Impressions in advertising.
  
• The Purpose of Your Business.
  
• Getting New Customers and Keeping Existing Customers Happy.
  

Successful Brand Examples

The way you stand out from the competition and how people perceive and interact with your firm is referred to as brand positioning. It’s made up of your company’s most essential characteristics and ideals.

Your brand’s positioning informs customers why they should select you over your rivals and is one of the few features of your business that you can entirely control. Competitors may have features and components of your good or service that are similar to yours. Your competitors may be able to provide similar services, but they will never be able to match your brand.

Here are four companies with well-known and influential brands:

 

Apple

Apple is a textbook example of a successful brand. They’re the first example in Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle structure, asking why, then how, and finally what.

Apple develops stunning, inventive computers that are unlike anything you’ve ever seen before and then promotes them to appeal to their customers.

Apple’s brand emphasizes the same traits in their customers as they do in their products: being an Apple user means being original, creative, and imaginative.

Like other prominent brands, Apple does not include pricing in their branding and instead emphasizes the value of their products and the relationship they have with its customers.

Netflix

Netflix’s Specialty: Marc Randolph (Co-founder of Netflix) decided to sell something via the internet in the late 1990s after seeing the dot-com boom and the rise of e-commerce sites like Amazon. He was seeking a product that would be comparable to Amazon’s books –

Netflix’s central values are to provide entertainment and happiness to its users. But how might those fundamental beliefs be translated into value propositions? Understanding the customer’s wants and aspirations and the jobs they were trying to do is the key.

Netflix’s first positioning strategy was evident from the following research insights: a “comprehensive selection of niche or unpopular movies at remarkable convenience with customizable experience” at a reasonable price.

Nike

Nike began by emphasizing performance and innovation in their goods. They designed the waffle shoe and targeted serious athletes with their brand. Their product line has expanded beyond shoes to include athletic apparel that improves performance.

From their catchphrase “Just Do It” to their namesake, the Ancient Goddess of Victory, their branding and marketing emphasize empowerment. Their models and athletes aren’t smiling and laughing; instead, they’re engaged in physical activity while wearing game faces.

Nike’s brand is built on the idea of innovation for dedicated athletes, so you can always perform at your best.

Starbucks

Starbucks is among the world’s most well-known brands. Their brand recognition has soared to new heights because of the quality of their branding and their commitment to maintaining brand consistency.

Because not everyone has multimillion-dollar marketing budgets, recreating Starbucks’ marketing strategies on a similar scale.

According to a study report published in April 2017, Starbucks’ target demographic is women and men in the middle and upper classes who can purchase Starbucks’ higher-priced beverages regularly.

Starbucks, being an internationally recognized brand, must maintain brand consistency at all times. Every message they deliver, every bit of branded collateral they produce, and every facet of their in-store style and experience are all part of this.

Conclusion

The name, logo, color palette, tone, and imagery of your company are all branding examples. It’s also more than that. When your clients contact your brand, they get an ethereal sense. You know, the experience we mentioned at the start.

That’s how the most successful brands distinguish themselves from the others. A beautiful logo, a creative tagline, a genuine manifesto, and a distinct brand voice all help, but truly powerful brands thrive when they concentrate on the larger picture of their brand. If you can get to the heart and soul of the target audience and your company, you’ll have a successful brand.

You have a story to tell. We want to help.

Let’s create memorable content and reach tens of thousands of people.