It’s 2023. The world is going through a transformational change and so are the marketing & branding strategies.
Today’s businesses are expanding their horizons and are on the lookout for effective strategies that can help them outplay their competition.
As competition intensifies, it’s crucial to create a brand strategy that engraves your brand name and values in the minds of your target audience.
Now why is this important and why you must pay immediate attention to creating a strategy for your brand?
It is because strategic branding will help you portray your unique brand voice, establish a strong brand identity, and allow you to focus on your long-term business goals.
Before we jump into understanding how you can go about creating your brand strategy, let’s get a quick overview of what Brand Strategy is all about.
What is a Brand Strategy?
In simple words, brand strategy is a cluster of all those elements that will help you become familiar with your target customers and make your brand memorable in the long term.
By building an effective strategy, you ensure steady brand growth, reach out to a maximum number of target audiences, and a considerable inflow of revenues over time.
On top of that, it will also help you figure out your unique selling point [USP] or point of differentiation, trustability, and memorability for your brand products by your ideal customers.
For your better understanding, here are the seven different components of a brand strategy that you must take into consideration before creating one for yourself.
7 Questions you should answer
Before we begin, you must know that.
A brand strategy is not only about your logo, font, colors, and website.
There’s more life to it because since you’re creating a brand strategy and looking forward to investing your resources in it, you must craft one that makes you stand out.
Let’s check out the questions:
1. What drives your brand? [Your Vision]
As a brand, it’s important to identify the driving factors of your business.
These factors can be attributed to your long-term goals and quite normally, the reasons for your existence in the market.
Every successful brand has a strong & vocal vision statement that they continuously stick by.
This commitment allows them to draw a successful line of operation and execution between their current state to where they wish to go in the future.
So quite obviously, a brand’s vision is the Bigger Picture that you share with your target audience as to how you want them to know, understand, and talk about you for decades.
Check out the vision statement of a few global brands:
2. What defines your Brand Identity?
Brand identity can be defined as a combination of visually rich elements that distinguish you from your competitors as well as others in the market.
They include visual or brand assets such as brand logos, fonts, color palettes, typography, website design, product packaging, social media creatives, etc.
When we talk about a brand’s identity, it’s also about the user experience which colors, font, website interface, etc., created in users’ minds.
Here, the role of color psychology cannot be ignored since it has been one of the key reasons behind the success of brands and the relatability that customers feel while using a brand’s product.
Your brand’s identity is likely to leave a lasting impression on your viewers. Hence, it’s important to develop a strong visual front that makes your users stick to you always.
3. Are you consistent with your Brand Communication?
Brand communication is all about the tone in which every message is relayed or communicated from your social handles or official publications.
Your core agenda behind crafting a brand tone must be to develop a unique persona about your brand’s offerings in the minds of your target audience.
As a brand, your job is to maintain consistency in your approach toward your stakeholders, customers, and all those parties that form an integral part of your ecosystem.
Here’s a classic example of a brand that excels at brand communication:
Nike has been known to be a famous brand in terms of brand endorsements, sponsorships, associations, product collaborations, and whatnot.
And if you check out their social media handles, every post is in strategic alignment with their tagline – Just Do It.
Just look at the image above. It’s crisp, on-point, and fulfills the brand communication element beautifully.
What’s the best thing about it? Well, it speaks to one person at a time and yet manages to reach billions around the world.
Hence, your brand communication must be able to create an everlasting impact on your current as well as potential customers in a way they remember you for a lifetime.
4. Who are your Competitors?
Well, this is quite obvious as in today’s competitive world, every brand is on high alert regarding what its competitors are up to.
Look – Competitor Analysis is highly beneficial because it gives you and your team deep insights into their activities, marketing strategies, brand approach, behavior toward business, tone of communication, etc.
For this, the best way is to research their 4Ps [Product, Price, Place, and Promotion] and prepare a SWOT Analysis of your competitors as their key factors will teach you more than anything.
While you sit down to figure out who your actual competitors are, it’s necessary to bifurcate them into the 3 main types:
- Direct Competitors: The ones who sell the exact same product or service as yours with the same target group of audience in focus with differentiation in pricing.
For Example – Nike & Adidas
- Indirect Competitors: The ones who sell the exact same stuff but do not consider it as their primary source of revenue. It’s because they sell other numerous items apart from the product which you primarily deal in.
For Example – LinkedIn & Twitter
- Replacement Competitors: Consider these as your biggest threat because they differentiate themselves by enhancing the customer experience and the way they deliver products or services.
They may or may not be selling the same product or services as yours.
5. Who is your Target Audience?
Basically, your target audience is the one which you feel would be highly interested in buying your products or services.
Evaluating them is extremely important as it will help you drive your communication in the right direction.
When you target a people, you must brief yourself regarding the factors such as demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and other factors such as country, region, climate, etc., that make them fall in the category of the target audience.
Identifying your Ideal Customer Profiles [ICPs] will allow you to build marketing collateral that will effectively reach them as a brand.
6. What are your Long - term goals?
Having a clear idea about the goals to be achieved while creating a brand strategy is equally important as having a vision in the first place.
So when you set clear crystal goals [with room for flexibility in unforeseen conditions], you automatically align yourself to how well you want yourself to present your brand in the market.
For instance, consider yourself as a SaaS company that owns a SaaS product. Your long-term goals may include:
Generating brand awareness, establishing and increasing brand value, clocking X amount of net worth by X year, etc.
Remember – Setting goals is a great habit that will help you prosper in the future.
However since it’s an important element of a brand’s strategy, it’s reasonable to set realistic goals and not ones that are out of the way.
7. How easy-going are you in adapting to Modern Trends?
The world of social media has never been so happening before, especially when brands are jumping in and out to promote their products by leveraging trends.
This simply translates to the fact that if you want to establish your brand’s presence today, you must keep an eye on what’s happening around you always.
The reason is – If you chalk out a brand strategy that allows you to stay flexible and exercise creative freedom always, you would be able to stay in the minds of your target audience for a longer period of time.
So basically, everytime you launch a new product or anything in their interest, your brand profile will be easy to recall for your audience.
Conclusion
Standing out from your competitors is one of the key goals brands need to achieve in order to stay on the top of their users’ minds.
However, it’s necessary to carefully formulate a brand strategy that helps them achieve these goals.
With the necessary strategy aspects listed above, brands can establish their unique identity and serve customers better.
