How to Build a Brand Strategy

What is a brand strategy?

A brand strategy is a plan or approach that a company takes to create and maintain a unique, recognizable position for its brand in the marketplace. A well-defined and executed brand strategy can help a company achieve business goals such as increasing sales, building customer loyalty, and attracting new customers.

What are the components of a brand strategy?

There are many different elements that go into a brand strategy, but some of the most important include developing a unique selling proposition or USP, creating a recognizable and consistent brand identity, and crafting a strategic marketing plan.

Unique selling proposition

Developing a USP is all about understanding what makes your brand different from your competitors and then communicating that to your target audience. Your USP is what will make your brand stand out in the minds of consumers and help you attract new customers.

Consistent brand identity

Creating a consistent brand identity is also essential to a successful brand strategy. This includes developing a catchy and recognizable name, logo, and tagline, as well as using consistent colors, fonts, and imagery across all marketing materials.

Strategic marketing plan

Finally, crafting a strategic marketing plan is essential to putting your brand strategy into action. This plan should include goals, target markets, and specific marketing tactics that you will use to achieve your objectives.

Why is it important to develop a brand strategy?

There are many benefits of having a brand strategy:

• A brand strategy helps businesses to create a unique and differentiated brand identity that can be used to compete in the market.
• A well-defined brand strategy can help businesses to build customer loyalty and trust, as well as increase brand awareness.
• A clear brand strategy makes it easier to manage your company's reputation and protect your brand equity.

Build a brand strategy that sells

How do you develop a brand marketing strategy? There's no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, as the best answer will vary depending on your business, your products or services, your target market, and a number of other factors. However, there are some basic steps you can take to build an effective brand marketing strategy.

Define your brand

A brand is more than just a logo or catchy slogan. It's the sum of a company's values, its history, and the way it treats its customers.

To define your brand, take a step back and think about your value proposition and core values. What makes your company unique? Why should customers choose you over your competitors?

Identify your target market

Who is most likely to buy your products or services? To identify your target market, you need to consider factors like age, income, location, and interests. Once you know who your target market is, you can develop messaging and campaigns that are designed to appeal to them. This will help you attract more customers and grow your business.

Research customer demographics

As a business owner, it's essential that you take the time to research your target market and understand its demographics. This information will help you make key decisions about your marketing strategy, product development, and overall business direction.

There are a number of ways to gather data about your ideal customers, including online surveys, customer interviews, and market research reports. Once you have this information, you can start to develop a profile of your ideal customer, including their age, location, income, education level, and so on. This gives you the information you need for audience segmentation and creating customer profiles.

Create 3-5 customer profiles (buyer personas)

Creating a customer profile begins with understanding who your ideal customer is. This is where you will use the demographic information you just collected. Once you have a good understanding of who your target customer is, you can then create a buyer persona.

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. It takes into account the data you've gathered about your target customer and fleshes it out with additional details like name, occupation, and goals.

Creating a buyer persona is an important step in creating your brand identity, but it's also important to remember that your customer profile is always evolving. As you learn more about your target audience, you may find that your buyer persona needs to be updated.

How do you build a brand strategy from scratch?

At this point, you may be wondering how this applies to a company just getting started. It's hard to find information on customers that don't exist yet.

If you don't have customers yet, then you can still do market research. What problem does your business solve? Who has that problem? Start by brainstorming a list of people who might buy your product or service, then narrow it down to about five. Next, Google demographics for the customers on the list. From this, you can start to build your buyer personas. Don't worry if it isn't perfect. Get started and refine your customer profiles as you learn more.

Determine your brand positioning

Your brand positioning is how you choose to communicate your brand to your customers and prospects. It should be based on a deep understanding of what your brand stands for and what your customers need and want.

Creating a brand positioning statement is one of the most important things you can do for your brand. It will help you develop a content strategy that will build trust and credibility, differentiate yourself from your competitors, and make it easier for customers to understand what you do and why they should buy from you.

1. Define your brand's core values. These are the principles that will help you make decisions about your brand communications.
2. How do your core values appeal to each of your customer profiles?
3. Write a brand positioning statement that articulates your brand's unique position in the for each customer profile.

Keep in mind that your brand positioning should be adaptable as your brand grows and changes over time. As your business evolves, your brand positioning should be reviewed and updated regularly to ensure that it still accurately reflects your brand and resonates with your audience.

Create and execute a brand marketing plan

Finally, you need to create a plan for executing your marketing strategy. What channels will you use to reach your target market? What kind of budget do you have to work with? How often will you be releasing new content or campaigns? By answering these questions, you can start to put together a roadmap for success.

Evaluate your plan execution and keep updating

Measuring campaign impact is essential to know how well your brand strategy is working. With the right tools and tactics, you can analyze how your marketing campaigns are working and make adjustments to ensure that you're getting the most return possible.

Brand awareness

Use surveys or social media monitoring to gauge how well your target audience knows about your brand. You can also track metrics like web traffic or brand mentions to get an idea of reach.

ROI on marketing

Keep track of how much you're spending on your brand campaign and compare it to the results you're seeing. This will help you calculate your return on investment and make sure that your marketing budget is being well spent.

Audience engagement

Use analytics to track how people are interacting with your brand campaign. This includes things like website visits, social media engagement, and click-through rates.

These are just a few ways to measure the impact of your brand campaign. By tracking these metrics, you can get a better understanding of what's working and what isn't.

Don’t rush the brand strategy process

Building a brand marketing strategy can be a complex process, but by taking the time to define your brand and your target market, you can set yourself up for success. By creating a plan and executing it effectively, you can reach your goals and grow your business.

Mailchimp has several tools to help build your marketing strategy. Check out our marketing plan template and marketing library. We are always happy to share resources to make our customers more successful.