A brand strategy is a company’s strategic plan that includes specific goals and helps marketers shape a certain image in customers’ minds. It allows a brand to generate more conversions, increase its value, and dominate the market.
In this article, we’ll unveil the importance of a brand strategy, its key components, and examples. We’ll also make the difference between a brand and marketing strategy clear and figure out how to build a brand strategy.
Why is a brand strategy important?
Every business owner who strives to grow a successful company needs to develop a strong brand strategy. With its help, businesses identify long-term goals and the type of company they manage. After setting key targets, entrepreneurs move towards their achievement and track their progress. A comprehensive brand strategy keeps them updated on whether they move in the right direction.
A brand is about intangible assets of a company that make it competitive in the market and worthy for customers. If you create an excellent strategy, you’ll generate customer loyalty, increase sales, and establish a good reputation and position within the market. People have positive emotions and thoughts associated with a specific company, generating purchasing decisions. As a result, brand equity increases.
You can reap many benefits after implementing a thoroughly developed brand strategy. It enables you to convey the core values of your company to the target audience. Establishing customer loyalty, trust, and credibility requires you to provide seamless experiences. So when you see some drawbacks, you’ll eliminate them.
A well-developed plan is a must for any company seeking to reach its goals efficiently. With its help, you’ll get away from ideas that can hurt your brand and its reputation. You’ll focus only on successful initiatives that bring profit to your business.
Now that you clearly understand brand strategy’s importance, let’s compare brand and marketing strategy to prevent any confusion.
Brand Strategy vs Marketing Strategy
Although these two terms are related, they are still different. We’ll review the description of each in detail to avoid confusion about brand and marketing strategy.
A brand strategy is a term that embraces a company’s reputation, products, and services it offers. The strategic plan includes the brand’s value, market position, purpose, vision, and ideal customer. These points are necessary for the company’s teams to work in one direction and make the right decisions. Besides vision and purpose, a brand strategy entails a brand’s long-term goals. To achieve success, the company’s team gets a good market position, provides customers with value, creates a consistent message, and develops initiatives.
A marketing strategy is a roadmap that outlines a company’s methods to convey the key message to the target audience. The essential components of a marketing strategy include digital marketing, content strategy, advertising, PR, and more. The strategy can change based on the information a company’s team receives. Customer data, budget, and trends can influence the plan and change its tactics.
Now that you know the difference, let’s walk you through the main components of a brand strategy so that you can clearly understand its fundamentals.
6 Key Components of a Brand Strategy
A comprehensive brand strategy consists of 6 key components. It’s time to review them to guide you through the strategy development for your business. Let’s dive in.
- Consistency. Companies stick to consistency to align every step with their brand message and strategy. If a business is consistent with its message across different platforms, it gains brand recognition and drives customer loyalty. Every action a company takes must be harmonious and well-planned. Be consistent in your brand voice, tone, colors, and content you communicate.
- Purpose. The most fundamental thing behind your business is your brand purpose. You should know the reasons why you’re in this business. Once you find it, you should convey it to your team and customers. Earning money isn’t the only target of your company. There should be a greater cause. After identifying a clear purpose, you’ll receive higher ROI, have a bigger sales volume, and attract more customers.
- Flexibility. To keep customers interested and remain relevant, companies should be flexible. Brands develop unique and creative marketing campaigns to draw consumers’ attention and stay competitive in the market. However, they still need to remember about consistency which sets standards. Flexibility allows adjusting to the needs of the target audience. So if a brand’s old methods don’t work with the audience anymore, it’s time to change, try new methods to approach customers and make them happy.
- Emotion. Many customers rely on emotions rather than use rational thinking. That’s why many companies choose to appeal to sensations. Being a part of like-minded people means a lot for connoisseurs of a certain product. Since people often strive to build relationships and be closely connected to others, companies need to establish emotional connections with customers. As an option, they can create communities to achieve them. If brands succeed in making consumers feel at home, they will drive loyalty.
- Loyalty. If customers demonstrate dedication, brands should reward them. Customer loyalty is worth the reward since it helps generate positive feedback, comments, and recommendations. Loyal clients can act as brand ambassadors and promote a company. Brands thank these customers by writing personalized emails and providing them with special offers, gifts, and discounts.
- Competitive awareness. Nowadays, the competition within industries is high. Knowing rivals and their methods will be very useful for a business. Brands explore the approaches that succeed and fail. It’s necessary to outline future tactics. This way, a company can improve its strategy and bring more value to customers.
So now that you know the key elements, let’s proceed to the next section to find out how to create a brand strategy for your company.
How to build a brand strategy?
A strong strategy is everything for the success of a brand. You need to have a unique identity, quality content, and consistency to reach customers and foster customer loyalty. Since a brand strategy means a lot for a company’s success, we’ve prepared several steps you should take to reach your long-term goals.
- Identify mission, vision, purpose, and values. Every brand has a set of principles and beliefs it carries through its existence in the market. Mission, vision, purpose, and values can help you obtain customers and encourage them to stay with your company. You need to create statements that clarify your purpose and values. Answer questions that will enable customers to understand your mission and vision.
- Define your brand essence. You need three key elements for your brand strategy: personality, voice, and tone. To identify your brand personality, you need to find human characteristics for your company. Your brand can be exciting, cool, sophisticated, luxurious, active, etc. Besides, personality should reflect your values, mission, and purpose. The next step is to identify your brand voice, the way you’ll speak to your target audience. It should be unique and recognizable. With the tone, you convey your attitude towards customers. It can be respectful and friendly. It encompasses words, phrases, writing style, and the emotional tone you choose to communicate with your customers. Lastly, tailor your messaging to convey your value and who you are.
- Work on your visual assets. Most customers rely on visual associations when they think of a brand. That’s why your company needs a visual identity. It includes a logo, colors, visuals, and font. These unique assets represent your brand and differentiate it from competitors. A strong visual identity will help you create an emotional impression and connection with your customers and update them about the product you provide.
- Develop guidelines. This step is necessary to write rules for those who create content. A brand guideline is especially useful if you work with freelancers. With its help, they will understand your goals, ways to create content and communicate with the target audience. You’ll control consistency across teams and ensure the quality of content they make.
The steps are clear, so let’s review some excellent examples to unveil how the strategy works in real life.
Examples of a Brand Strategy
There are many excellent examples of brand strategies with unique approaches. Some focus on creating a brand vision that talks to consumers, while others focus on developing personalities that resonate with the audience. Let’s now consider several most outstanding companies and their brand strategies.
Amazon
Amazon takes things seriously and gathers all efforts to establish a strong brand positioning. The famous e-commerce company took care of the features that differentiated it from dozens of others and allowed it to stand out from the huge competition. Now customers choose Amazon for its fast delivery and seamless customer service.
Tesla
Tesla is a super modern company that carries a higher purpose. It produces electric cars and promotes sustainability. You can find out about the company’s mission in its purpose statement. It mentions efforts aimed at bringing the world towards sustainable energy.
In a nutshell, a brand strategy helps you keep all your steps organized. With its help, you’ll reach your main targets faster and more efficiently.
References:
- This article unveils the difference between brand strategy and marketing strategy.
- In this article, you’ll find the steps necessary to develop a brand strategy.
Last Updated: 23.08.2023
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