The potential success and the future perspective of any company or service can easily be assessed by its brand strategy. You are running a small business and think you don’t need one? Well, we have to disappoint you because even small businesses require a strong brand strategy to become successful. So what steps are essential? What matters most when building your brand strategy?
These and many other things will be revealed in the article.
What Is a Brand Strategy?
A brand strategy is not just a logo or name of your trademark. It’s a creation of a system of values that will be associated with the product you offer to the customers. A brand strategy is a collection of creative ideas, communication tools, understanding of who you are and who your target audience is, and other factors that may have an impact on your image, reputation, and emotional associations your customers will feel on hearing your brand name or seeing your logo.
Step 1. Define Who You Are
A common problem of small and even some big companies is that they cannot define their goals, mission, values, and vision of who they are in the future. All these aspects matter much because not knowing who you are, leads to making wrong choices in business. By the way, did you know that 89% of customers are loyal to the brands that share their values?
Starting a business without a brand strategy is like letting a blind kitten cross a highway: you don’t know where you are moving and what is waiting ahead.
Ask yourself what your goal is. What are the values of your company? How can you build trust between your company and its customers? Define things you are not going to compromise on. What pushed you to create your own brand? What is your history? Believe it or not but all these things matter for a person and a company that strives for success.
Remember that your brand needs to evoke emotions in your customers. Only then it will get successful.
Step 2. Know Your Client
A company, which says it works for everyone is like a contestant of a beauty pageant advocating world peace. No specifics results in no action. You need to know for sure who you are working for. Only this will allow you to understand how to make these people pay attention to your product. Understanding and addressing your target audience, you ease their process of making a decision.
By creating a portrait of your potential customer, you can understand their behavior and triggers that make them choose your product. The Hootsuite blog can be useful for finding out more about the target audience and ways to learn it.
The best way to hook your target audience is to create an emotional bond with them. This can be done by sending personalized newsletters, special offers, and discounts. Customized content makes about 82% of its readers feel positive in their attitude to the brand. You should analyze what your customers are interested in and give them what they need.
Step 3. Define Your Strong Points and Develop Your Brand Positioning
The market is full of companies providing similar goods or types of service. This means you share the target audience. The task of your brand strategy is to make people choose you. This can be done in two ways:
1. You should analyze your product and the products of your competitors to find your strong points. These may be more eco-friendly production facilities, a wider choice of tastes/forms, live connection with the customer support service, and so on. Make an accent on these in your brand advertising campaign, and the key to success is in your pocket.
2. You should develop your business steadily by providing new services and products. You should widen your offer of goods joined under one brand. This will extend the audience of the potential buyers and help your constant buyers’ retention. Alexa Blog shares some interesting points about the retention of buyers and business strategy development on the whole.
Step 4. Take Care of the Logo, Name, and Tagline
The name, logo, and tagline are the three things that identify your brand personality. When working on the logo, make sure it is simple, intuitive, and totally reflects what your brand wants to say to the customer. The scientists say that a logo has only 10 seconds to make an impression on a person, so it’s not surprising that simplicity is what the experts advise. On the web, you’ll find lots of tools to create your logo.
The name and the tagline are as much important as the logo and require time and creativity. Keep in mind that these will identify your brand for years. Your brand name and tagline should hit your target audience right to the heart. Remember that these are emotions that we remember, not characteristics. Give people the emotion that will make them remember you the next time they hear your brand name.
Step 5. Work out Your Visual Content Marketing Strategy
Strengthening their marketing strategy with visual content is the only right solution for those who want to make their brand successful. Visual content, especially videos, attracts 54% more consumers. Video content helps create an emotional interconnection between the brand and the buyer, which is one of the basics of building a brand strategy. You can learn how to create quality visual content and how to make it work for your goals by reading Movavi Blog.
Your strong point in comparison with the competitors may become a blog. The statistic says that a blog can generate 55% more visits to your website, which means you can promote your brand much more effectively.
Step 6. Bring Your Ideas to Life
Any company can develop an effective brand strategy. However, far not all the ideas written on the paper are brought to life. The problem of many people developing brilliant brand strategies is that they lack the time and persistence to finish what they’ve started. Creating a brand strategy is only the first step of a long process that demands permanent control, analysis, and drawing the right conclusions. The next one is its implementation and correlation in accordance with the results it brings. Only if you manage to cope with both, your brand will get to the top.
