To create an effective brand strategy, you need to understand your brand.
A brand is more than just a logo, more than just a tagline, and definitely more than just a few social media posts. Branding has always been and will be about a story.
It moves people to reach out for the products and services they believe would fit their requirements.
And that is why, to make your business successful, you have to put effort into branding. You have to go against the grain and get a top view of what spreading awareness about your product or service is all about. The clearer those answers become, the more your brand will attract.
And the more your brand attracts, the more it will convert.
And the more you’ll convert, the more you’ll be able to delight.
Therefore, to give yourself the ability to understand the pulse of your custom, we’re going to deconstruct branding strategies into six components.
But first, what is a brand strategy?
What is Brand Strategy?
For brand strategy, the definition can be as straightforward or as complex as you want. In a few words, it is a long-term plan to achieve long term goals that leads to your customers identifying and preferring your products and services.
It is not a sum of your color palette, logo, or website. These are just creative decorations that can add an extra push to your enterprise. But instead, it is about:
- Brand awareness: How many people are aware of your company and what you provide?
- Brand sentiment: What do these people feel about your enterprise or your products/services?
- Brand equity: What’s your trademark’s contribution to driving growth for your company?
The primary goal of creating such a strategy is to tell the world that your brand exists. Used to be that many relied on the old-trial and error approach to come up with tricks to attract customers. And it was legible, considering the strategies often involved (and still do) unquantifiable elements that are intangible.
But it is not 2022, and we have deconstructed strategies in various components. In this article, we discuss the six most important ones among them.
Critical Components of killer branding strategy
Embracing these critical components will take your approach to unveil your brand to the people to another level. It would lead to more ROI, and you’d finally devise a campaign that proves fruitful in the long run.
Competitive Analysis
You can’t make your brand shine without knowing the players already playing the game. You have to understand their understanding of your target audience. It involves many sub-components, including:
- Finding out your competitor
- Learning about their products
- Understanding their sale tactics
- Comprehending their branding strategies
- Learning about their technology
- And observing their approach to marketing their content.
Why?
Perhaps the most crucial component of any strategy driven towards making your brand successful is the question – Why?
- Why are people driven in your organization towards making it better?
- Why should your customer care about your offerings?
Position
Without positioning yourself as a person of authority or friend, you lose the relatability factor – one of the most important parts of brand strategies. You have to decide the position a customer sees you in when they’re approaching you.
- Is your position that of a thought leader?
- Are you approaching your customers as a problem solver?
- Or do your customers see you as a service provider?
Brand Architecture
Your brand should not stay stagnant. It has to grow. But it can only happen if you’ve decided how it could fit in your portfolio. You have to map out your brand’s growth in the upcoming years. Everything you do should push it further towards that rise.
Promise
One of the greatest missteps when devising a technique to grow your business is believing it is about you. It is not; it’s about your customers. You have to design your product and communicate it so that your customers see it as valuable. The days of using flowery terms for making false promises are gone. You need to provide real solutions backed by real words.
Emotion
Your customers are reactive. It is not rational thinking that would drive them towards your product; it’s how it makes them feel. That’s why your business needs to appeal to their sensations. Foster an emotional connection with your customers, for it will drive the next component in this list – loyalty.
Loyalty
If customers show you dedication, it is your cardinal duty to reward them. Branding is about building relationships. It is a two-way street that fosters growth for the brand and its loyal customers. That dedication can transform customers into brand ambassadors, but only if some incentive is involved. One way to foster loyalty is through specialized discounts. It shows your commitment to your long-time customers and incentivizes them to stick by you.
Conclusion
Many would say we should’ve added more components to this branding strategy list. However, those components are passive, and the ones we have mentioned are the drivers. Without the forethought of creating a brand architecture, you can’t position yourself. Without positioning, there is no promise to be made. Without promise, you won’t have a way to elicit emotions through your brand and without emotion, there won’t be any loyalty.
Creative brands leverage these components when devising their marketing campaigns. So, we hope that these points were enough to get you closer to the answer to – how to build a brand strategy.