Building a brand doesn’t start with logos, colours, and fonts. It starts with strategy, direction, and clarity.
Your brand strategy determines how your company will present your brand to consumers and position yourself in the marketplace.
An effective brand strategy will help you to attract the right customers, help your business stand out, and confidently establish yourself in the market.
Brands with a strong mission and values inspire more trust and encourage more purchases from customers than those that don’t. It’s not just the fact they have an inspiring mission and values. Their success lies in the strategy and thinking behind them.
So what does brand strategy involve? Let’s look at three important elements you should consider.
Who are you?
You need to understand the ethos and philosophy behind your business. But you also want to think about the aspects that make your brand more human and bring it to life. Consider the personality traits, little quirks, and everyday behaviours that define your brand.
For example, do you have a quirky sense of humour? Are you obsessive about planning everything to the tiniest detail? Are you very compassionate in how you handle customer feedback?
It’s important to know who you are so you can ensure you communicate this in your visual brand assets, messaging, and marketing communications.
Who do you want to reach?
You need to gain clarity and understand exactly who you want to reach. Are they consumers or businesses? What kind of people are they? Do they reside in a specific geographical location? Are they in a specific industry? What are their interests?
Rather than trying to meet the needs of everyone, focus on what’s important for this specific group and how they will benefit from using your product or service.
Build up a detailed profile of exactly what they look like so that you can ensure all your branding assets and marketing communications will connect with them.
What makes you different?
In today’s interconnected world, it’s inevitable you’ll be faced with competition. Simply being better than your competitors no longer creates a sustainable advantage. It’s too easy for another brand to come along and do it better than you.
Your brand needs to be different. And different in a way that matters to your client. With that in mind, it’s important to identify and communicate what sets you apart so you can communicate this to your customers.
It might be that you have a very high-quality product, top-notch customer service, or speedy delivery.
In conclusion, brand strategy is more than just answering these three questions. Within each, there are different components to explore. And there are more things besides.
If you want to dive deeper into the aspects of strategy and how it connects with other aspects of your brand, join my FREE branding challenge for small businesses, 3 Pivotal Decisions to Build a More Powerful Brand.