Steps to building an effective branding strategy
Develop your brand’s principles and beliefs
In this first step, you will need to know the beliefs and principles of your brand. Aligning the business with its principles and beliefs will help bring people together and create a community which will reflect on your brand’s performance.
However, if you don’t have principles or beliefs about your brand, you could easily make decisions that are unsuitable for your brand that will affect it negatively.
Therefore, it is very important to have principles and beliefs that clarify who you are, what you do, and why it matters.
Purpose:
Why does your brand exist?Vision:
Where do you see your brand in the future?Mission:
How do you create that future?Values:
The principles that guide your actions
Define your target audience
You need to understand who your target audience is so that you know who is the segment that you could reach with your brand.
For effective targeting, you will need to first start by understanding their psychographics, demographics, behaviors, and interests.
Therefore, before moving on to the next step, you will need to understand who your ideal customer is and how your product or service offers them value. You can get to know all that through learning about your target audience and buyer personas.
Research and know about your competition
You need to research your competitors who are in the same market as you are because these brands also compete with your brand for the same audience as you are. Your brand needs to stand out from the competition.
To stand out, you will need to understand who your competitors are and what they are doing, then you will need to do things differently than them. Don’t try to copy what they are doing exactly, rather you have to learn from the brand strategies that they applied and then come up with different effective strategies.
Figure out your brand messaging
In this step, you will need to learn about how to communicate who you are to your target audience. To figure out your brand messaging, you will first need to identify three crucial elements which are your brand’s personality, voice, and tone.
Brand personality:
The brand personality consists of the human characteristics that are associated with a brand. When you have a brand personality, you can easily use it in every area of your brand such as in customer service and product descriptions.Brand voice and tone:
Brand voice is the way you communicate to your customers and target audience. There are many different styles of brand voice that you can use such as authoritative, playful, fun, and friendly.Create your brand messaging
For effective brand messaging, you will need to communicate your value proposition clearly. The value proposition communicates the benefits, features, and value that makes a business different and unique from other competitors.
Therefore, you will need to show how your brand offers value to its target audience that solves the customer’s problem effectively.
After understanding your value proposition clearly, you will need to create your tagline. The tagline is a short and catchy statement that summarizes your value proposition and brand positioning. A tagline is important because it makes your brand memorable in the minds of its target audience and customers.
The next step in effective brand messaging is to create your messaging pillars which are a set of selling points that represent your brand and can be communicated in your messages. These pillars clearly reflect a brand’s values, value proposition, and what makes it different from other brands.
The messaging pillars guide the creation of your brand messaging because every content that you put to communicate on channels needs to be aligned with them.
Design your visual identity
Visual identity is the images and visual elements that make up your brand. A brand’s visual identity is made up of the logo, colors, typography, design, images that is used to create the brand identity.
A strong visual identity needs to be memorable and recognizable so that your target audience can identify your brand instantly.
In conclusion, a brand strategy is used to create your brand. Each business has implemented the branding strategy based on their vision and values which ultimately creates differentiation between brands.