Did you know you only have seven seconds to make a lasting impression on your target audience?
Yes, seven seconds! This is a tall order for many brands but with an effective brand strategy, you can do it.
A brand strategy is the approach a brand uses to communicate its message to its target audience, develop brand recognition, and customer loyalty.
Oftentimes, companies equate brand strategy to the logo, color palette, website, brand name, and message, but it’s more than that.
Brand strategy is a culmination all such elements. Here’s more about developing branding strategy:
What is a Brand Strategy?
A brand strategy is the approach a brand uses to communicate its purpose, values, and message.
It shows how different brand elements work together to drive a brand’s image across different channels.
A brand strategy is a more holistic plan for achieving a series of long-term goals that ultimately lead customers to identify and prefer your brand over others.
Benefits of Developing a Brand Strategy
A solid brand strategy goes a long way toward building a memorable brand. It connects all the brand components making your brand recognizable in a market. A good brand strategy also:
- Develops consistency and coherence: A brand strategy enables a company to maintain a consistent image in the minds of its target audience. From social media platforms to traditional branding materials, your customers can recognize you every time they see your logo, advertisement, or hear about you
- Provides direction: With a brand strategy it’s easy to provide direction to your team. They understand what they’re working on and how to do it
- Guide business decisions: A brand strategy requires a company to define how to present and market its products to the market. It outlines the tone of voice to use in communication, the content to put on the website, and so on
- Enhances word-of-mouth marketing: A brand strategy makes your brand message, voice, purpose, and values more profound. These elements make a brand recognizable to its target audience, building trust and loyalty. This way loyal customers are inspired to refer your brand to their friends and family
Steps for Developing a Brand Strategy
Now that you have an idea of what a brand strategy entails, we’ll take a closer look at what developing one entails:
01. Define Your Purpose
Defining your purpose is a great starting point for developing a brand strategy.
Having an amazing product is one thing but it’s how you communicate the bigger picture that attracts customers to your brand.
This is your purpose. It’s the reason the business exists. You want to think about the brand’s mission and communicate how it aligns with customers’ needs and preferences.
Keep in mind that people hardly buy the product or service; they buy why you are in that particular business.
02. Define Your Target Audience
Clarity of purpose helps define your target audience easily.
You know the kind of customers you want to purchase your products or services making it easy to tailor the brand strategy to their needs and preferences.
For a more precise definition of your target audience, begin by researching the market. It helps filter through potential customers, identify their needs and preferences, and prioritize them.
Your findings can help tailor the brand’s message and tone of voice to attract new customers and retain current ones.
You can leverage channels your target audience is most likely to use to find out how to price your products and create a compelling digital marketing campaign.
03. Identify Your Unique Selling Proposition
You want your brand to stand out from other companies and the best way to do it is to establish a unique selling proposition and include it in your brand strategy.
A unique selling proposition defines how your product or service is perceived by a target market compared to how they perceive your competitors’. It would help to include the following elements when defining it:
- The brand’s vision and mission statements
- A clear description of how you solve common problems
- The experience you want to create for your target audience
- Core values at the heart of what you do and shared by customers
Capturing these elements in one sentence communicates what makes your brand stand out from the competition.
04. Develop a Compelling Brand Story
This is the narrative used to communicate the brand’s purpose, core beliefs, and story. A brand story develops a strong connection between your business and your customer base.
It’s an opportunity to explain why you exist, what you stand for, and inspires you to keep going. This way your target audience gets to know more about you on a deeper level.
05. Develop a Visual Identity
Next, create a visual identity to make your brand recognizable across all platforms.
This involves selecting visual aspects including the fonts, color palette, and photograph style that reflect your brand’s message.
A great visual identity helps your target audience understand what your brand is all about and evokes an emotional response.
Take the example of female products where brands use warm and bright color palettes which are more attractive to their target audience.
You could leverage design templates and effects to create visuals that capture your brand’s essence.
06. Leverage Social Media Platforms
Your target audience will likely interact with your brand on social media hence the need to implement the strategy across all platforms.
Whether you use Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, or Instagram, you want to maintain a cohesive voice.
This ensures that potential customers are met with the same consistency and reliability they’d expect if they did business with you.
07. Monitor and Refine the Strategy
Brand strategy isn’t a one-size-fit affair. It’s a continuous process that needs constant refinement.
You could start by analyzing your audience’s response to the brand message, story, and visuals regularly to find out what works and doesn’t.
Also, monitor your competitor’s strategy and market trends and adjust yours accordingly.
All such input goes a long way in developing a strong, brand identity that stands out from your competitors.
Develop an Effective Branding Strategy
Branding is critical to creating a good company image and making a lasting impression and having a branding strategy helps you achieve this goal. You develop one by defining your purpose and target audience before going on to identify your unique selling proposition. With these three aspects clear, it’s easy to develop your brand’s story and visual identity which are shared on all platforms your brand is likely to appear. Lastly, monitor the strategy’s performance and refine it regularly to ensure it aligns with the audience’s needs and the company’s goals.
