What Is Branding Strategy in Marketing? – In-Depth Guide with FAQs, Tips, & More
Table of Contents
Your brand strategist is like an architect for your brand. Similarly, you can think of a brand strategy as a fleshed-out plan for the future of your business.
A brand strategy ensures that everyone in your team is aware of what the goals are and how they will try to achieve them.
It also gives you a great way to measure your progress and make changes in case you don’t perform as well as you hoped to.
Quick Summary
In this post, we will shed light on:
- What a brand strategy is
- The components of a well-conceived brand strategy
So without further ado, let’s get started.
What is a Brand Strategy?
A brand strategy can be described as a long-term strategy that seeks to identify what the long-term goals of your brand are and how you plan to achieve them. It’s a strategy that lays out what your company will strive to be reputable for and why consumers will prefer it over the competition.
A well-thought-out brand strategy will consist of the brand’s vision and mission, what value it hopes to bring to customers and how that value is communicated.
Important note: Many people wrongfully believe that a brand strategy is only a collection of your brand’s logo, color palette, and overall visual identity.
While a brand strategy may very well contain these aspects, that’s not the entirety of what it should have.
It deals with all the intangible aspects of your brand including techniques, tactics, and campaigns that you will run to achieve its goals.
A poor brand strategy or no brand strategy at all are often the reasons why many businesses fail. This is because a brand strategy is something that affects pretty much all facets of a brand.
Even entrepreneurs that come up with a decent branding strategy often fail to keep their brand relevant for an extended period of time. This is because a branding strategy often needs to be revisited and tweaked based on the level of success that the brand is seeing.
Obviously, if you’re hitting your numbers and the goals that you set out, that means your branding strategy is working out well for you. However, if you don’t see the results you hoped for, then you definitely need to go back and adjust the branding strategy you have.
Constant adjustment and improvement are what keep brands afloat.
Check out different types of marketing strategies and how to implement them HERE.
What Makes an Effective Brand Marketing Strategy?
It can be quite difficult to explain concepts such as a brand strategy because it strives to explain components of something that’s intangible: your brand. It’s something that can keep you relevant if done well or drive you into the ground if done poorly.
To understand how you can conceive a successful brand strategy, let’s talk about some components that every decent brand strategy should have. These are aspects that need to be addressed within your brand strategy for you to gain a competitive advantage.
Find out about Positioning Marketing and Mix Marketing Strategy.
These components are:
1. Vision and Mission
The vision and mission of your brand can essentially be boiled down to what the “purpose” of your brand is. Why does it exist and why do you, as an owner of your brand, wake up every morning to go to work?
It’s what your company wants to achieve and the impact it wants to make on either the market, the consumers, or just the world at large.
Your mission or purpose can be entirely functional. For example, to make money and become a prominent entity within your specific niche.
However, this is not something that’ll do wonders to set you apart from your competitors.
Of course, every business needs money but you have to set goals to differentiate yourself from others.
For example, your company could use only bio-recyclable materials. That could set you apart from your competitors who may be using materials that are harmful to the environment.
Make sure to have a vision and mission with an aspect that does something to make a positive impact on the market or the world, in general.
2. Brand Style Guide
A brand style guide is something you can put together to include within your brand marketing strategy.
This would just be a guide to ensure that your brand’s messaging remains consistent throughout all platforms no matter who creates the posts.
Obviously, when different people from your team make different posts, their own personalities will bleed into the messaging. To avoid this, it’s a good idea to have a style guide that gives them directions on exactly how to compose messages for posts.
Creative elements you can include as part of your style guide are:
- Your color palette
- Guidelines on what fonts and colors to use on a light background
- Guidelines on what fonts and colors to use on a dark background
- The tone and vocabulary to use within social media posts
- The formatting of social media posts. It can be a good idea to compose a template for this as well if you want.
- Guidelines on what type of posts need to be made and posted to your social media and other communication channels
What’s the point of constructing such an extensive style guide?
Well, it leads to consistency within your brand’s messaging. As you will learn as you navigate the competitive landscape, consistency is extremely important if you want consumers to remember your brand.
If your ads and posts are not consistent, there’s a chance that consumers might think two instances of them are by two completely separate brands.
On the other hand, if you use the same color palette, format, and phrasing to deliver your marketing messages, you’ll leave a mark on the consumers. The next time they interact with your brand, they’ll remember you.
If you use any third-party tools or software to format your posts, make sure to include them and how to use them as well.
For example, if you shorten links to your landing pages on social media posts, make sure to mention which tool you use within your brand strategy.
This will ensure that all your employees use the same tool so that there are no inconsistencies across posts.
To shorten your link through Pixelfy, register an account for yourself and log in.
Step 1: After you log in, you’ll be redirected to the dashboard page.
The dashboard page is the hub of your Pixelfy profile and you can see insights from all the links you’ve shortened with your account.
To make a new shortened link, you can use the fast shortener box located at the top of the dashboard page.
Step 2: Copy the URL of your landing page or whatever page you want to add and paste it into the fast shortener box.
As soon as you paste it in there, you should be redirected to the next page. If you are not redirected to the next page, click on the Shorten button.
Step 3: On the next page, you can see the shortened URL and copy it to use anywhere you want.
As mentioned earlier, you can come back to the dashboard page anytime you want to check out insights related to the link you shortened.
This can be a good way to keep track of whether or not your brand is hitting its set goals or not.
We just gave some examples above of the aspects you can include within your brand style guide. However, that’s not a comprehensive list.
Make sure to spend a lot of time on your brand style guide to ensure that all of the necessary details are included within it.
Take the creative input of your team as well so that there are no disagreements on what the brand’s messaging should be.
3. Emotional Impact
We’ve mentioned in other posts that consumer buying decisions are often not rational but rather emotional. Sometimes, it can be an impulse buy, and other times, a brand’s messaging really resonates with them and causes them to convert.
Hence, your brand strategy should contain information on how you intend to build that emotional connection with potential consumers.
As you can probably tell, the information you provide within this section will depend a lot on what your product or service is.
To get an emotional response out of a consumer, it’s a good idea to highlight an unmet need and communicate how your product or service fulfills that need.
You can write details about this within your brand strategy so that your team is on the same page on how to evoke an emotional response. It’s how you’ll be able to convert potential customers and build a long-lasting, strong brand.
4. Room for Flexibility
So far, you may get the impression that a brand strategy needs to be set in stone and it dictates how employees will act within your brand.
While that’s true up to a certain extent, that does not mean that your brand strategy should not have the capacity to change.
Remember that nothing’s really certain in any market and there’s no way for you to be sure whether your initial brand strategy will work or not. Who knows? You may expect it to do great and it may end up losing you your market position.
In such a case, you need to be open to changes within your brand strategy.
Hence, your brand strategy should be composed in a way so that if the need arises, you can make changes to your approach.
If old tactics and techniques don’t work, you should not be afraid to tinker with brand messaging.
5. Employee Involvement
We mentioned how you can build templates for your employees to ensure everyone delivers brand messaging in the same way across digital spaces.
You can get away with just that if your brand only operates online. However, that’s very rarely the case with most brands. Even if you do operate online, you may still have a customer support department that deals with customers directly.
In this case, your brand strategy should have guidelines that dictate core values and how employees are supposed to interact with customers.
For example, let’s assume that your brand primarily has an audience of middle-aged men ranging from 40 to 60 years old.
In this case, your employees need to be professional and ensure that any problems customers run into are addressed in a clear manner.
Let’s say you have a younger employee that doesn’t quite know how to relate to people in that age range; He keeps making jokes while providing customer service that most customers don’t get.
This can be a huge problem and such a mismatched customer experience can often drive away people from a brand for good.
Hence, your brand strategy should contain clear instructions on how employees are supposed to interact with the target audience.
Want to know all the insights of marketing and how to use them to make your business successful? CLICK HERE.
What Is Branding Strategy in Marketing – Conclusion
In the end, a brand marketing strategy identifies long-term brand strategies, brand identity as well as brand goals.
It contains essential information that all employees need in order to stay consistent with the company’s identity. A well-executed brand strategy affects not only the relevancy of a brand but also the average revenue that it generates.
Hence, ensure you have one so that your brand can hold its own in competitive environments.
If you have more questions, please ask us in the comments section below. Check out our blog for more content like this.
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