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Introduction to Brand Strategy

Many businesses today are focusing on creating their brands because it leaves a memorable impression on your target audience. Creating a brand also helps in distinguishing your business from competitors. It represents your business’s values which further attracts your target audience and is used across many different channels to communicate these values.

What is a brand strategy?

Brand strategy is a long-term plan that focuses on developing a brand. A successful brand strategy focuses on the brand’s mission, promises to its customers, and how these promises are communicated.

It involves using elements such as logo, color palette, designs, and other creative visuals that can help a brand strategy succeed in creating a brand. But a brand strategy isn’t limited to only these elements; rather it also includes intangible elements such as the emotions and perceptions that your target audience feels when they think about your brand.

The brand strategy helps differentiate your brand from competitors where it helps with building the values, identity, and emotions that make your brand unique in the minds of your target audience.

Components of a brand strategy

Purpose

Brand purpose is the reason behind your brand’s existence that goes beyond making money. A brand purpose connects with a brand’s target audience on an emotional level.

For example, if your brand is involved with the educational sector, your brand’s purpose is to help children get the education that they need; It helps clarify why your brand exists by describing the reason behind it.

To have a successful brand purpose, you need to have a brand purpose that is close to the product or service that you sell which means it needs to be determined at the beginning where it is used in your branding strategy to create a brand.

Having a clear brand purpose can help you through making your brand:

Get more sales
Grow faster
Get higher ROI

Consistency

When creating a brand strategy, you need to make sure that all the messaging across all channels that is done by the brand is consistent so that everything is clear for the target audience and they can easily recognize your brand.

This happens smoothly when a business creates brand guidelines that show the criteria of how a business should communicate the brand to everyone. It includes visual elements as well as the tone of voice that can communicate what the brand is about.

Emotions

An effective brand strategy requires that you build an emotional connection that helps you connect with your audience on an emotional level. This happens through building a community around your brand such as creating groups. By doing so, people are more likely to buy your product or service because they want to be part of a community of common interests.

Employee involvement

Employee involvement is where a business’s employees need to understand how to communicate with their target audience. To help your employees, you need to educate your employees about the brand identity.

This can be done through organizing training sessions and workshops where employees learn how to use the brand voice effectively on different marketing channels.

Competitive awareness

You need to research your competition so you can create a better brand strategy that offers value. So, through becoming aware of what areas your competitors are great at and what areas they are weak at, you can create a brand strategy that focuses on developing your brand effectively.

Why is brand strategy important?

Helps you communicate your core values

You can communicate your business core values which are the beliefs that a business believes in and acts on when communicating with your target audience.

Through using brand strategy, you can communicate those values to your target audience who will support your brand when they see that they share similar values with you.

For this very reason, it’s important to communicate to your audience what your values are.

Differentiates your brand from the competition

Every business has a different brand strategy that helps to identify a brand’s unique selling proposition and then communicate it using marketing messages across different channels to reach the target audience effectively.

Also, every business has a different brand identity, values, visual elements, tone of voice, and other elements which differentiate it from others.

Brings effectiveness in the workplace

Through having clear brand guidelines, designers and creatives can create more effective work because there are unified guidelines that are used in the brand strategy to create and communicate what the brand is about.

Therefore, a brand strategy helps in creating a brand. Another benefit of brand strategy is that when it’s set, it keeps everyone aligned knowing the values and vision of the brand which can then be used in communication to the target audience.

6 types of branding strategies

Personal branding

Personal branding is a type of branding that is used for an individual person instead of a whole business. This type of branding is used to establish a person’s character or work as a brand. Personal branding is used by many different celebrities, athletes, politicians, and leaders.

Product branding

Product branding is a type of branding that focuses on making a certain product different and recognizable from the competitor’s products. This can be done through the use of different branding elements such as logos and designs which guarantee the product’s uniqueness.

Corporate branding

Another type of branding is corporate branding which is about promoting the brand name of the business as a whole across all marketing channels. Effective corporate branding seeks to display the business’s mission, values, and identity each time the business comes into contact with all customers.

Service branding

In service branding, businesses seek to provide the best service to their customers. By doing so, they are focused on offering the highest value to their customers. Businesses that are successful with offering the best service become known for their effective service branding.

Co-branding

Another form of branding is co-branding which focuses on connecting businesses together. It is a marketing partnership between two or more businesses. Through co-branding, brands can actually grow together, spread awareness, and enter new markets very easily.

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.

Osolutions

We hope you enjoy reading this guide

Introduction to Brand Strategy

What is a brand strategy?

For more details about how to create a brand and the best strategies to do so, read our guide

Components of a brand strategy

Purpose

Consistency

Emotions

Employee involvement

Competitive awareness

Why is brand strategy important?

Helps you communicate your core values

Differentiates your brand from the competition

Brings effectiveness in the workplace

Want to know how to create an effective brand design, we offer you a step by step resource that will help you create the best design for your brand

6 types of branding strategies

Personal branding

Product branding

Corporate branding

Service branding

Co-branding

Ready to Make a brand strategy?

Steps to building an effective branding strategy

Develop your brand’s principles and beliefs

Purpose:

Vision:

Mission:

Values:

Define your target audience

Research and know about your competition

Figure out your brand messaging

Brand personality:

Brand voice and tone:

Create your brand messaging

Design your visual identity

Need to know about how to create an effective brand strategy, Get your free one to one consultation session that will help you in:

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