Summary: This guide helps small business owners create a cohesive and effective brand strategy. Key elements include understanding your brand’s purpose, defining your target audience, crafting a distinct voice, and curating a recognizable brand identity.
All business begins with connections. If your branding doesn’t appeal to your leads, they’ll look elsewhere.
And, in this saturated market, they’ll have plenty of options.
Your goal is to craft and curate a cohesive, creative branding strategy. Ideally, it should invite your prospects to get to know your company or product better.
The truth is that strong brand strategies are nuanced and multi-faceted. Your brand’s voice, personality, and approach to storytelling should be targeted and cohesive. That requires research, creativity, and a clear understanding of your values. Though it takes hard work, the results are numerous, from steadfast customer loyalty to exponential word-of-mouth growth.
In this guide, we’ll explore the elements of a strong brand marketing strategy. Plus, we’ll offer tips for how to develop a brand identity that stands out. Continue reading to strategically create the type of brand that your prospects will be excited to engage with.
The Foundations of Your Branding Strategy
Before crafting a branding strategy, you must understand your brand’s purpose and target audience. Without this knowledge, your strategy will lack cohesion and consistency. Research is the only way to ensure you’re reaching your hottest prospects by addressing their unique pain points head-on.
What Is Your Brand’s “Why”?
A brand strategy should be built around your mission statement. That means you need to understand your company’s purpose and how it will achieve it.
A mission statement should be brief, clear, and concise and can be used to communicate internally and externally. It should include the things that make your company unique from your competitors and hint at your brand’s value proposition. It can even allude to the tenets of your company culture.
When taken together, this information should fundamentally explain why and how your company exists. Once you can communicate that information succinctly, you can tailor your message to your target audience.
Who Is Your Audience?
To speak directly to your prospects, you need to know who they are and what problems they need to solve. Discovering this begins with market analysis and engagement with industry trends.
Most brands create buyer personas, especially if they have a few different audiences or serve several segments. You might utilize customer surveys, focus groups, or analytics. You can also attend business conferences to learn the latest industry trends.
Through research, you’ll discover gaps in the market. This can help clue you into segments your competitors aren’t currently serving. Likewise, it can help you learn who your customers aren’t so you don’t waste resources on the wrong channels or strategies.
The more you know and understand about your audience, the clearer your brand strategy can be.
Every Brand has a Voice
Your brand’s voice is a description of the language, style, and tone your brand uses to communicate across marketing channels. Essentially, it telegraphs the type of relationship you wish to have with your customers.
In the medical industry, you might aim to be reassuring, comforting, and knowledgeable. After all, your goal is to project expertise and peace of mind. In the fashion and beauty industry, you might aim to take the role of a trendy best friend or cool older cousin. The consistency of this voice helps your customers know who you are and what they can expect.
Once you’ve crafted a voice, be sure to stick to it. A jarring switch between informal and formal can give your prospects whiplash. They can only develop trust and loyalty when they are confident in what to expect.
As part of your branding strategy, consider creating an internal style guide. This is a resource that defines the elements of your brand’s voice, from preferred phrases to ideal sentence length.
Do you use emojis? Do you use a certain name for your customers or clients? By referencing the style guide, your writers will ensure your email voice sounds like your social media and web copy voice.
Define Your Brand’s Identity
When your customers close their eyes and picture your brand, what do they see? Your brand’s identity should encompass more than a logo. It should include a style that’s consistent across social media channels, product packaging, blog images, and physical locations. If they looked at your brand’s newsletter, would a customer know who it was from?
The more identifiable your brand, the clearer and stronger its position in the market will be. It can help you stand out from competitors. That’s especially true if their identity is less distinct or appeals to a different customer segment.
This information can be included in the brand style guide mentioned above. Consider details like your color scheme, preferred fonts, preferred image types, and the appropriate ways to display your logo.
Tell Your Story
Once you’ve curated your voice and identity, you can communicate the full story of your brand. This can include the history of your company down to your public-facing values and mission statement.
Your story should answer these questions:
- WHY does your brand exist?
- WHAT does your brand care about?
- WHO are you, and what expertise do you bring?
- HOW do you achieve your goals and live your values?
Let your customers know what makes your products so important and why your company is the best choice. Do it through a clear, affecting narrative that keeps the customer’s needs at the forefront.
Once you can clearly communicate your story in a distinct brand voice, you’re ready to implement your strategy.
Put Your Branding Strategy to Work
Developing a branding strategy is the first step toward growing your small business.
Are you interested in learning more about the facets above? Do you want to learn from experienced businesses whose strategies speak for themselves?
Check out the FREE online webinars in our Small Business University. You’ll be on your way toward curating a compelling persona that inspires loyalty and draws in new customers.