There are two things most marketers get wrong with a brand strategy. Both are errors of judgment.
Focusing on short-term results is one such problem. The other issue is getting so rigid and possessive about your brand that you resist evolving with changing market conditions.
Building a strong brand takes time and consistent effort. But too many people expect quick results from their brand strategy, and they focus too much on short-term goals like immediate sales or website traffic.
Focusing on long-term brand-building goals is essential because some things cannot be achieved overnight – like growing brand awareness, loyalty, or reputation.
Further, a successful brand strategy must be adaptable and able to evolve with changing market conditions. Unfortunately, some businesses get so stuck into their brands, and make them so non-negotiable, that they resist the flexibility needed to stay relevant and competitive.
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Brand strategy helps defines how a company wants to be perceived by its target audience, and how it plans to differentiate itself from competitors. It is a long-term plan that an organization creates. The idea is to develop and manage its brand in a way that will enable it to achieve its goals.
Whether your business has products and services as its brands, or the people in the company (including the owner) are the primary brands, there needs to be a strategy in place for people to know how the brand is of value to customers. Brand strategy is not so much about the brand itself, but how target audiences see the benefits projected by the brand as valuable to them.
People tend to see value in brands when they are clear on how one brand differs from another, how different brands promise them different things, and how the brand and its promises and personality resonate with them.
People may understand what a brand is trying to say and even like it, but they will not want to give the brand a place in their lives unless they begin to feel an emotional affinity with it. Think of all the brands whose messages we like and remember, and yet we never buy them. Why?
We only buy those brands that make us feel good to have them in our lives, and that we are proud to say we own. Feeling good about being seen using a particular brand is also a very important issue for buyers. The brand’s market domination makes the buyer feel self-esteem through an associative rub-off.
There is one more important aspect to brand strategy: if we do not consciously articulate our brand and its values, people will ascribe whatever characteristics they think fits our brand. This would be akin to a marketing disaster to allow someone else to define what your brand stands for and how it should be perceived. It’s hard – and pretty expensive –to change first impressions.
Here are two great quotes on the importance of brand strategy from top experts:
"If you don’t give the market the story to talk about, they’ll define your brand’s story for you.”
"Products are made in a factory but brands are created in the mind. "
Defining your brand is crucial for creating a clear and consistent image for your business that resonates with your target audience. Your brand is more than just your logo or your marketing campaigns; it’s the sum total of every interaction people have with your business.
By defining your brand, you can create a cohesive and memorable brand experience that sets you apart from the competition and builds customer loyalty.
One key benefit of defining your brand is that it helps you stand out from the competition. In today’s crowded marketplace, many other businesses will likely offer similar products or services to yours. Defining your brand can help you differentiate yourself by identifying what sets you apart and emphasizing your unique selling proposition.
This can be particularly important for smaller businesses that may not have the resources to compete on price or marketing spend alone.
Another benefit of defining your brand is that it helps you build customer loyalty. By creating a clear and consistent brand image, you can develop a sense of trust and familiarity with your target audience.
When people know what to expect from your brand, they will likely become repeat customers and recommend your business to others. This can be particularly important in industries where customer trust and loyalty are key drivers of success, such as healthcare or financial services.
Here’s an example of how to define your brand as a stand-out.
Patagonia is a well-known outdoor clothing and gear brand that focuses on producing high-quality, sustainable products for outdoor enthusiasts. Its products include outdoor apparel for activities such as hiking, snowboarding, surfing, and fishing, as well as gear such as backpacks, sleeping bags, and tents.
The brand has defined itself as a champion of sustainability, environmental activism, and ethical business practices. To amplify this self-definition, Patagonia has a Worn Wear program, which encourages customers to repair and reuse their clothing, rather than buy new products.
Market research is critical to brand strategy as it provides insights into your target audience, competitors, and industry trends.
You can identify key trends and opportunities by conducting thorough market research, understanding customer needs and preferences, and developing a brand strategy that resonates with your target audience.
One advantage of market research is that it can help you identify and understand your target audience.
By conducting surveys, focus groups, and other research methods, you can gain insights into customer demographics, buying habits, and preferences.
This information can be used to develop a brand strategy that speaks directly to your target audience, using messaging, visuals, and other elements that resonate with their values and interests.
A second benefit of market research is that it can help you stay ahead of the competition. By analyzing your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, you can identify opportunities to differentiate yourself and develop a unique selling proposition that sets you apart.
This can be particularly important in industries where competition is intense, and customers have many options to choose from.
Steve Jobs, the co-founder and former CEO of Apple, was known for his unconventional approach to business and marketing, which included a reluctance to rely on market research to discover opportunities.
Jobs was skeptical of market research because he believed that customers don’t always know what they want. He believed that true innovation requires a visionary approach and that relying too heavily on customer feedback can limit creativity and prevent businesses from taking risks.
Instead, he started creating products that were so intuitive and well-designed that they didn’t require extensive market research to be successful.
Hear Jobs explain his approach in this video … eye-opening!
Defining your target audience is a critical step in developing a successful brand strategy.
By identifying the specific group of people that you want to reach, you can tailor your marketing efforts to their needs and preferences, increasing the likelihood that they will engage with your brand and become loyal customers.
One of the key benefits of defining your target audience is that it allows you to create more effective marketing messages. When you know who your audience is, you can tailor your messaging to their specific interests, concerns, and pain points.
This can help your brand stand out in a crowded marketplace and resonate with potential customers on a deeper level. By speaking directly to the needs and preferences of your target audience, you can build stronger connections with them and create a more compelling value proposition.
Defining your target audience can also help you allocate your marketing resources more effectively. By focusing on the specific group of people who are most likely to be interested in your products or services, you can avoid wasting time and money on marketing efforts that are unlikely to yield results.
This can help you stretch your marketing budget further and achieve better ROI on your marketing investments.
Micro-segmentation is the practice of dividing a target audience into smaller, more narrowly defined segments based on specific characteristics and behaviors. This allows your brand to gain a deeper understanding of customers’ needs. It helps identify specific patterns and trends in customers’ behavior, interests, and preferences.
Your brand can then tailor messaging, content, and marketing campaigns to better address the needs of each micro-segment … which can improve engagement and drive greater loyalty.
The graphic below shows you the clarity your brand gets between looking at your target audience as a whole versus micro-segmenting.
Creating a clear brand voice is essential to establish a consistent and recognizable identity for your brand. A brand voice represents the personality and values of the brand.
A brand’s voice is as important to audiences as hearing a person’s voice. It is crucial to ensure that your brand message is communicated effectively to the target audience through a voice that’s authentic and credible.
Watch this video from Alex Cattoni on how to develop your brand voice as part of your brand strategy:
Brand personality is the set of human characteristics that consumers associate with a brand, such as sincerity, excitement, competence, and sophistication. In contrast, brand voice refers to the tone, language, and communication style that a brand uses to interact with its audience.
For example, a brand with a sincere and trustworthy personality will likely use a more straightforward and genuine tone in its messaging. In contrast, a brand with an exciting and adventurous personality may use a more lively and engaging voice to appeal to its audience.
Consistency in the brand voice helps create a cohesive and unified image of the brand in customers’ minds. When a brand uses a consistent voice, it becomes easier for customers to recognize the brand and distinguish it from competitors.
Further, when a brand uses the same tone and messaging across all channels, it creates a sense of familiarity and connection with the audience. It creates a perception of reliability and stability, which can lead to brand affinity, establish trust and credibility, and increase customer loyalty.
A brand voice is seen as authentic if it is honest and transparent, providing accurate information and avoiding misleading or exaggerated claims. This honesty builds trust with the target audience and reinforces the brand’s reputation.
Stories are a powerful way to show empathy and connect with customers. By sharing stories of real customers or individuals who have benefited from the brand’s products or services, a brand can demonstrate that it understands its customers and cares about their experiences.
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Your brand’s visual identity is a critical component of your overall brand strategy, and is important because it helps to convey your brand’s personality and values in a visual and memorable way. A strong visual identity can help establish a recognizable and consistent brand image, which is important for building brand awareness and making your brand more memorable.
A strong visual identity can help to differentiate your brand from the competition, and make it stand out in a crowded marketplace. When customers see your brand’s visual identity, they should be able to immediately recognize it and associate it with your brand’s unique personality and values.
It’s important to create a Brand Guidelines Manual to lay out all the visual details, as well as important notes about a company’s voice, tone, and messaging. A snapshot of the brand identity manual from Jegs shows their meticulous documentation of how brand identity must be portrayed.
Your brand’s visual identity can include various visual elements, such as your logo, color scheme, typography, imagery, and overall design style. Each of these elements should be carefully chosen to reflect your brand’s personality and values, and should be consistent across all your marketing materials and touchpoints.
Responsive design is a critical component of a brand’s visual identity, as it ensures that the brand’s website and other digital assets are accessible and functional across a wide range of devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones.
A well-designed visual identity gives the impression that the brand is professional and takes its business seriously. This can help build credibility with customers, as they are more likely to trust a brand that presents itself professionally and consistently.
A strong visual identity can also help a brand to build an emotional connection with its customers. By using colors, images, and other visual elements that resonate with its target audience, a brand can create a sense of familiarity and comfort that builds trust over time.
A tagline is a short phrase or slogan that is often used in conjunction with a brand name, and can play an essential role in a brand strategy. A strong tagline can help convey your brand’s essence memorably and concisely, and can be a powerful tool for building brand awareness and recognition.
A tagline can serve as a shorthand for your brand’s core message and values, and can help to differentiate your brand from the competition. A well-crafted tagline can evoke emotions and establish a connection with your target audience, helping to build a stronger brand identity and make your brand more memorable.
Developing a content strategy for your brand is a critical part of your overall brand strategy. Start by defining your content marketing goals (look at great content marketing examples for ideas). Determine the demographics, psychographics, and behaviors of your target audience. Understanding their needs, pain points, and interests will help you create content that resonates with them.
Then choose the content types you will create. This can include blog posts, social media content, videos, podcasts, webinars, and much more. You’ll also need to decide what your content distribution channels will be – like listings on search engines, social media, email marketing, guest blogs, and so on.
Choosing the right content types to create that align with your brand strategy is crucial for any successful content marketing campaign. By taking a strategic approach to content creation, you can ensure that your content marketing efforts are effective and successful in achieving your overall marketing objectives.
An editorial calendar is an important tool for any brand strategy that involves content marketing. It is essentially a schedule that outlines the content you plan to publish over a set period of time, such as a month or a quarter. This can include blog posts, social media updates, email newsletters, and other types of content.
The importance of an editorial calendar lies in its ability to help you stay organized and focused in your content marketing efforts. By planning out your content in advance, you can ensure that you are consistently publishing high-quality content that is relevant to your target audience and aligned with your brand messaging.
The simple blog planning editorial calendar below shows how useful it can be to preplan your content creation. You can also pack the calendar with your social media posting schedules, webinars and events to hold, or promotional activities to complete.
An omnichannel brand strategy is a marketing approach that focuses on delivering a seamless and consistent customer experience across all channels … including social media, email, website, mobile app, etc. The goal of an omnichannel brand strategy is to create a cohesive and integrated brand experience that strengthens customer engagement, loyalty, and advocacy.
To execute an omnichannel brand strategy, your brand needs to understand its customers and their behavior across all channels deeply. By aiming for total coherence in its content across various channels, your brand can create marketing campaigns targeted to drive conversion and sales.
Brand experience refers to the overall perception and emotions that a customer has towards a brand based on their interactions and experiences with it at every touchpoint along the buying journey.
(A touchpoint refers to any interaction or point of contact between a customer and a company or brand, whether it’s through advertising, social media, a website, or a phone call … )
When planning brand experience, three factors need to be considered:
The goal of brand experience is to create a positive and memorable experience for customers, leading to greater customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.
A positive brand experience can create an emotional connection between customers and a brand, leading to increased sales, customer loyalty, and advocacy.
A negative brand experience can result in a lost customer and negative word-of-mouth, while a positive brand experience can lead to increased customer retention and referrals.
An experiential brand is a brand that is focused on more than just delivering positive brand experiences. An experiential brand aims to create a unique and emotional connection with its customers. In some cases, a brand may choose to offer a “themed experience” where the customer is transported into another universe which the brand choreographs to keep the customer highly engaged.
Brand experiences of experiential brands are usually designed with the deliberate intention to be immersive, interactive, and engaging. The idea is to create a heightened sense of emotions such as joy, excitement, and satisfaction. The brand tries to raise the customer experience from a “good experience” to a “unique and memorable experience.”
Airbnb is a platform that allows people to rent out their homes or other properties to travelers. Airbnb’s brand experience is planned around the idea of “creating a personalized and immersive travel experience” for its users.
Measuring and adjusting your brand strategy is essential for ensuring that your brand stays relevant and effective. Remember, measuring and adjusting your brand strategy is an ongoing process. By regularly collecting and analyzing data, and making adjustments based on that data, you can ensure that your brand remains relevant and effective over time.
Here are some key performance parameters to stay in control of:
1. Brand awareness: This measures the level of recognition and familiarity consumers have with a particular brand. It can be measured through metrics such as website traffic, social media engagement, and search engine rankings.
2. Brand equity: This measures the overall value of a brand, based on factors such as consumer loyalty, market share, and brand differentiation. It can be measured through metrics such as sales growth, customer lifetime value, and brand reputation.
3. Customer engagement: This measures the level of interaction and involvement that customers have with a brand, through channels such as social media, email marketing, and customer service. It can be measured through metrics such as social media followers, open email rates, and customer satisfaction scores.
4. Customer retention: This measures the ability of a brand to retain its existing customers over time. It can be measured through metrics such as customer churn rate, repeat purchase rate, and customer referral rate.
5. Brand sentiment: This measures the overall perception and sentiment that consumers have towards a brand, based on factors such as brand personality, reputation, and messaging. It can be measured through metrics such as online reviews, customer feedback, and sentiment analysis.
6. Brand reputation: This metric measures the overall perception of your brand in the market. It can be measured through surveys, online reviews, and social media sentiment analysis.
7. Brand loyalty: This metric measures the degree to which customers are loyal to your brand. It can be measured through metrics such as customer retention rate, customer lifetime value, and repeat purchase rate.
8. Brand advocacy: This metric measures how likely customers are to recommend your brand to others. It can be measured through metrics such as net promoter score (NPS) and customer referral rate.
9. Sales and revenue: Ultimately, the success of a brand strategy should be reflected in the company’s bottom line. Measuring sales and revenue can provide an overall picture of how well the brand strategy is performing.
10. Market share: This metric measures the percentage of the market that your brand is able to capture. It can be measured through surveys and market research.
1. Building a strong brand takes time and persistent effort. Focus on long-term brand-building goals. Some things cannot be achieved quickly – like growing brand awareness, loyalty, or reputation.
2. A successful brand strategy must be adaptable and able to evolve with changing market conditions. You should not get so stuck into your brands that it becomes non-negotiable to flexibility, relevance, and competitiveness.
3. Feel free to use my list of 8 steps to building a smart, resilient, and resultful brand strategy. It’s a battle-tested plan I have used to grow my own entrepreneurial venture and my clients’ businesses.
When planning your brand strategy, remember it’s not so much about the brand itself, but how target audiences see the benefits projected by the brand as valuable to them. People see value in brands when they are clear about how a brand differs from another, and how the brand and its promises and personality resonate with them.
Branding and content marketing are tough because they require a deep understanding of the target audience, a commitment to delivering high-quality content consistently, and ongoing optimization to remain effective. This is where an expert hand can be invaluable.
With cutting-edge knowledge of the latest industry trends and best practices, an expert can help provide the guidance and support needed to achieve the desired results.
"I am committed to elevating my clients' branding and content marketing to a dominant position because I believe that a strong and distinctive brand identity, coupled with high-quality content, can be a game-changer for businesses. I've done it over and over for 40+ years and 125+ clients."
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Give yourself truly big benefits.
Get my weekly newsletter packed with cutting edge brand content tips, tricks, tactics, techniques, and trends. I scour the Net for you.
Use my Privilege Discount on all my products and services – at any time, without limit – as long as you’re uninterruptedly subscribed.
Just fill in the form to join my community … we have big and small brands for company. You’ll stay on the speedway to growth.
