Strong Brand Strategy for Growth and Success
Without a strategy, a brand can survive but it won't thrive. Accidents can happen and you may stumble upon a profitable stream of revenue, but without a plan in place, you won't be able to replicate that success. For instance, many businesses that experienced sudden growth during the pandemic are now struggling to stay afloat in a highly competitive market. To truly succeed, you need to be different, to stand out and be special, otherwise, you'll get lost in the crowd.
Think of a brand strategy as a roadmap for your company.
A strategy gives the direction for the efforts you'll make to create, develop, and maintain your brand uniqueness. Without a strategy, it can be hard to effectively communicate your overall value to the Target Audience, stand out from the competition, and maintain a loyal customer base.
A well-thought-through strategy gives you direction and focus and helps you make informed decisions about branding, marketing, sales, operations, and other parts of your business. It also helps you adapt to changes in the market and stay emotionally relevant to your target audience. Without a strategy, you might find yourself just reacting to market trends instead of leading them. And such a defensive strategy will put you in somebody else’s game as a disposable pawn.
What is a brand?
In the business world, a brand is an overall perception or image that customers have of a company or its products and services. It is a combination of such elements, as the brand’s name, logo, color scheme, and packaging, as well as its reputation and values, that the customers can remember, relate to, and with which they will associate solving their needs.
When we talk about a brand, we mean the “uniqueness” of a product or service. It’s how people recognize it, even if the product is broken into pieces (Coca-Cola’s famous bottle for example). When you take off the packaging, will it still be your brand? If you only show one little portion of your brand, will it still be unique and recognizable? When you answer the phone, will the caller instantly know and relate to your values? When you print your marketing brochure, do people know what to expect simply by glancing at it? Is it something fun? Something useful? Something scary? (I am talking about bank statements here for example, I know what they are just by the thickness of an envelope, and they scare the …values out of me :))
A company's brand is often an important aspect of its overall marketing strategy and is closely tied to its mission and vision.
When creating a brand strategy, you plan to maintain your brand’s unique identity. To write a brand strategy, you can follow these steps:
Research your market. This will help you understand your target audience, competitors, consumers and non-consumer and gather data on their behavior, needs, and location. No need to stand with a questionnaire on the street. Use a digital one on your e-commerce website, ask 2-3 questions over the phone or hire a market research company to do the research for you. Sometimes certain research studies are pre-conducted and sold as reports.
Define your brand: Identify your brand's unique value proposition, personality, and voice. Imagine your brand as a person, a car, a place. Such associations will help you personify your brand to help you think of it more clearly and focused. Expect this definition to change over time, and let it naturally progress in the direction your brand strategy was planned. If you feel the need to shift in a totally new direction, consider creating another brand or at least a brand extension instead of redirecting the existing one. Confused customers lose trust, and lost trust results in lost sales.
Develop a brand communication strategy. Use the brand’s environment elements to communicate your brand's unique value proposition. In the digital world, use all digital communication blocks that add value. Don’t disperse your efforts on the channels or activities just because they exist. Pick the most effective ones, and use them to the max.
Create visual and verbal identity guidelines and stick to them. Your brand's visual identity, such as logo, typography, and color palette, as well as guidelines for verbal identity, such as tone of voice and wording, need to be used consistently and forever as long as your brand’s strategy exists.
Don’t be afraid to continuously evaluate the effectiveness of the strategy and make changes as needed. If you make a mistake, correct it, or pretend you meant it. Maybe it will stick?
Continuously communicate the brand internally and externally, through internal branding, employee training and external marketing campaigns, customer engagement and PR campaigns. You need to believe in it. If you don’t live it, don’t expect your customers to live it either.
Track and measure the impact of the brand strategy: Use metrics to track the effectiveness of your brand strategy, such as rates of brand awareness, customer loyalty, and sales. Use this data to make adjustments and improvements to the strategy. Brand awareness is the metric that is primed to result in sales if you continuously support it.
Develop a brand strategy
it will help you create an emotional connection with your customers. This is super important for building loyalty. In our oversaturated world of thousands of brands for every product or service, customers’ attention span is as short as a scroll through the mobile screen. But if you strategically build emotional connections with your customers, they will become your voice and your most valuable communication channel. Without a strategy, it can be tough to communicate your brand's personality and values, making it hard to connect with customers and this may result in huge marketing budgets, which many businesses do not have. By the way, huge marketing budgets do not guarantee a successful brand.
All in all, a brand can exist without a strategy, but it's unlikely to be successful in the long run without one.
Contact Nataliya from Toro N2 to consult on building a successful brand strategy for your product or service. Do not expect to see your brand dismantled when a consultant steps in. We believe in consistency and trust. Company’s trust in its brand is as important as customers’. All the work done so far can be nurtured and built upon, so don’t expect me to come and say “I will change everything to make it better”. I promise to come and say “What do you think you need and why?”. And we’ll take it from there.
