Building a great brand strategy is one of the best ways to build any business. In fact, if there’s one thing we’ve learned from over a decade of helping brands tell their story, it’s that a successful business can’t survive if it doesn’t have a strong brand strategy.
Without a unified identity, everything from your content, to your culture, to your core business can suffer. But there’s a reason this problem is so pervasive: Building a strong brand strategy takes time, effort, and commitment. And that’s where many people (including ourselves) can get stuck.
Brand Strategy Services That Build Customer Trust and Loyalty
Your brand can attract the wrong customers when you don’t get it right in brand strategy. Brand strategy helps you ensure you ever fall into the trap of making both your customers and leads confused about what your brand represents. Our brand strategy services ensure you never worry about this at all.
Our brand strategy services combine different aspects of brand position, brand promise, and brand story, offering your customers and prospects a good understanding of your offers immediately they encounter your brand. This way, you easily convert your leads to customers without spending so much on marketing.
If you’re not persuaded, you can keep reading to discover how brand strategy is vital for your brand. However, if this is exactly what you need, we can get our team to fill you in with the process that will show you the plan to give you a strong brand reputation.
Just book a free consultation session with our team and you will see how our brand strategy services can boost your brand.
What is a Brand?
“Brand” has millions of definitions. Usually when people speak of “brand” they mean the physical brand (or logo) printed on something to identify the company that made the product.
But the brand is not just a physical logo. It is an emotional marker, more specifically, an emotional experience that is reinforced or weakened by each interaction with the company.
We define a brand as the way people think, feel and evaluate your business. (This is different from marketing. Marketing is your evaluation of your business).
What is a brand strategy?
As brand master Marty Neumeier said, brand strategy is “a plan to develop a brand system consistent with business strategy.” The brand strategy can help you understand yourself and serve as a role model to help you communicate.
Similarly, a brand strategy is a plan that contains specific long-term goals that can be achieved through the evolution of a successful brand, combined with the characteristics of your company to make it identifiable.
A clearly defined and implemented brand strategy will affect all aspects of the company and is directly related to consumer needs, emotions and the competitive environment.
First, let us clear up the biggest misunderstanding of brand strategy: Your brand is not your product, your logo, your website, or your name.
In fact, your brand isn’t just something that feels intangible. But it’s this top-down sentiment that sets powerful brands apart from mediocre ones.
Generally, branding strategy process is divided into three different parts.
In the end, you will have a complete branding strategy, summarized as a new brand guide to help you bring your brand to life.
Why do we need a brand strategy?
When you don’t know who you are, why you exist, what you believe or what you want to achieve, your business will be affected. From customer communication issues to employee retention, the lack of a branding strategy can cause problems at all levels of the organization.
By working with hundreds of clients in the last decade, we have learned to spot clear signs of a brand in crisis, which is usually due to a lack of strategy. (Some of these questions may sound familiar. Before documenting our brand strategy, we also suffered for them)
When you do not have a brand strategy, you do not understand your purpose, vision, mission, or values, so the business and marketing decisions you make do not conform to them. You don’t have a written marketing plan, but you want everything you do to work.
Your team is fragmented due to disunity, chaos and conflict, making it difficult for employees to feel engaged and interested. You don’t have consistent brand information, so your content is inconsistent on the good side, and contradictory on the bad side.
Therefore, it is difficult to attract people (customers, employees, etc.) With the same values as yours. You cannot clearly express your brand, so you cannot open a recognizable position in the market. In short, without a brand strategy, you lose.
Building a Great Brand Strategy
To be able to build a great and top-notch brand strategy, there’re two things you must take note of. First ask yourself, who you’re for and who are you not for?
Who are you for?
Here, find out who you need to satisfy and how to satisfy them. Understanding of who you’re selling to will help you connect with your customers easily.
Who are you not for?
Who is sharing your space with you? With whom will you be vying for attention? What are their chances of outshining you?
This is crucial information for determining who you are and aren’t, how you fit in or stand out, and how you can convey your differences through your brand strategy.
Once you have answer these two questions correctly, follow the following steps below and you will see yourself building a great brand strategy that will help you share your story impactfully and effectively at every touchpoint.
1. Discover Your Brand Heart
Every company has a core set of principles that guide all they do. These values are referred to as the “heart” of your brand. Because these principles are a powerful force that can actively support or disrupt your business, you must grasp what they are and why they are vital.
You can successfully bring people together, establish communities, and create the future you want when your brand’s business and principles are matched. When you don’t believe in anything (or your views are destructive), it’s easy to alienate staff and customers, damage your culture, and make decisions that aren’t in line with your long-term objectives.
Note, your Brand Heart (Purpose, Vision, Mission and Values) must comprise four elements. These elements help to give you a clear understanding of what you do and why.
2. Differentiate and Position your brand
Once you have discovered and defined your brand heart, the next step is to differentiate and position your brand. Differentiating you can help you stand out from the competition. In order to make your brand stand out.
This involves creating unique advantages in the minds of consumers, rather than simply attracting attention to the colors or logos, or other surface elements of brand building. Once you come up with a unique value proposition, you need to use a good brand strategy to position your brand to help consumers see and appreciate the higher value of your brand than competitors in the market.
Some businesses make the mistake of moving straight to their visual identity immediately after they’ve discovered their brand heart, skipping this second step, which is wrong.
Yes, designing your visual identity such as your logo, colors, and topography are vital, but they’re a visual translation of your brand’s essence and messaging. If you don’t take time to differentiate your product and know exactly what you’re communicating, you would find it difficult creating a good and right visual identity.
3. Build Your Brand Essence
In building your brand essence, you must consider three things:
- Your Voice
- Your Personality
- Your Tones
Brand Voice has to do with the sound of your brand. Your brand voice must be unique and authentic. Your personality has to do with a reflection of your Brand Heart, determined by your demonstration in your behaviors. Having a clear understanding of your personality will help you understand your customer service process as well as your product descriptions.
On the other hand, your tone has to do with your general attitude,
4. Have a Unique Visual Identity
The next step to take when building a great brand strategy is to create a unique visual identity. Taking time to design a unique visual identity; Logo, Typography, color and Imagery purposefully will make your brand stand out. Note, your visual identity must be flexible, comprehensive and intuitive.
Flexible in the sense that it should be able to grow your brand. For it to be comprehensive, it should be able to provide your designers with the tools they need to properly handle their job. And furthermore, it should be intuitively designed and well-constructed.
5. Personalize Your Brand
If you want your brand building activity or brand promotion to be successful, you need to customize it. It is important to give your brand an identity.
Let consumers fully see and experience your brand personality. Think of your brand as something consumers want to recognize in the same way as their favorite car, mobile phone or computer.
While participating in brand building, customers should also be invited to become co-creators of brand value, so that they can feel that they also own and are related to it. The best brands encourage consumer brand interaction through customized products to meet consumer needs and preferences. When you personalize your brand, you give consumers a reason to engage and participate in your brand for life.
6. Have Brand Guidelines
Your brand guide can serve as an introductory guide on how to use your brand, especially in the content and communications you create. Maintaining quality and consistency can be challenging, especially when you work as a freelancer or an external agency.
Therefore, your brand guidelines must contain sufficient directions to authorize any creator to produce works that strengthen rather than destroy the brand. To ensure that your brand guidelines are complete, please include instructions about your visual and verbal logos.
7. Review Your Brand
Your brand can never be static. It goes through various movements in a lifetime. Based on your brand strategy, your brand will grow stronger, stay dormant, or retire over time. New events, changes and situations in the brand cycle capture challenges and opportunities that can add value or reestablish the brand.
All of these possibilities are the driving force behind brand building activities. As the brand name grows, so does the responsibility and expectation to continue building the brand. The best way to ensure brand growth is to review activity and assess success using metrics such as brand awareness and participation level.
You can check back regularly to seize and take advantage of new opportunities while maintaining your promise to adhere to your vision and brand strategy. It also helps guide the brand in the right direction and maintain relevance as it moves into the future.
Why You Need Socialander Brand Strategy Services?
As you can see, building a brand is not transient. Brands need to be defined, differentiated, presented, and the brand frequently confirms its meaning.
It is very important to be clear about your branding strategy and how to implement it. You must also adopt brand strategies that provide added value to consumers and will help consumers develop the right feel and meaning for your company.
Our stellar brand strategy services ensure you never get worried about your brand message, position, and much more. Just book a free consultation session and we’ll help you build a great brand.
