Building an effective branding strategy is an essential part of running a profitable business and is potentially your company’s most valuable asset. The success of your brand strategy is directly linked to sales because nobody can buy your product if they don’t know about it. After all, Apple built one of the most successful companies in the world on a unique brand.
Luckily, there are five steps you can take to build an effective branding strategy that drives your brand goals and increases sales.
1. Decide on your business strategies
Your brand goals should align with your business strategies, so decide on these first.
A good place to start is by answering these questions:
- What type of company are you?
- What is unique about your products?
- How do you solve your customers’ problems?
It’s also important to think about your marketing strategy and how that will match your brand. For instance, are you growing organically? Is social media a big part of your marketing campaign?
2. Create buyer personas
Buyer personas contain information about what your customers are like and what they want. Understanding your customers is crucial to building an effective branding strategy because you need to design your brand around what your buyers want.
It’s a good idea to do some systematic research on the people you want to reach before writing these personas so you can accurately describe real customers and their needs.
3. Create your brand positioning
Brand positioning is also known as market positioning and is where your company sits in the market. Think back to the questions you answered in step one, about the type of company you are, why you’re unique and how you solve people’s problems. These answers will help you work out where you sit in the market and how you can develop your brand purpose accordingly. You should also think about how you’re going to get your message across – for example, your brand tone.
4. Decide on your name, logo and tagline
A uniform approach is really important for the consistency of your brand. Your company name, logo and tagline should reflect your brand purpose and be consistent with your brand tone. They should also represent the core of who you are as a company.
5. Develop your content strategy
Now you’ve decided on a brand strategy, it’s important to develop a content strategy that mirrors it. If your brand and marketing goals aren’t aligned, you won’t be able to build an effective branding strategy and get your message out to your customers. Even worse, your message might be confusing and disjointed. Make sure you create a website and content that fits with what you’re trying to achieve as a business
If you’d like to apply these five steps to your business in a thorough, systematic way, we can help.
We build effective branding strategies for both new and established businesses – get in touch to find out how we can drive your brand goals forward.
