What is a Brand Strategy?

Your brand strategy is what makes your brand recognizable to the public. It’s the embodiment of your long term goals. It needs to be directly connected to the consumers you’re looking to attract. When it comes to branding, you need to think past the obvious: logo, colors, name, etc.

Your brand strategy is something that will feel tangible to your audience and easy to pick out of a crowd. It’s what’s going to separate you from the competition.

Let’s get started on creating your own!

Branding Creates the Face of Your Business

When first thinking about your brand strategy, you need to define your purpose. Stating facts and offering a huge promise you can’t possibly deliver will make your brand memorable for all the wrong reasons. Instead of providing lofty promises, focus on your intention and function.

Your function will help define your purpose. Your intention will help define your what you can offer of value to your potential clientele.

You can combine the two into one sentence like this:

“The purpose of my brand is to create an environment of learning and creating that empowers women to work together and not against each other.”

When defining your purpose, it might help you look up some of your favorite large brands, such Target, Aveda, or Wendy’s. They are all offering more than the obvious. They’re main goal is to become a stable in your lifestyle. Start thinking of your brand as a staple in someone’s life and ask yourself how you could positively contribute to making it better.

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Become A Credible Source

The key to credibility is consistency. If you consistently show up in someone’s face with the knowledge and charisma of a worthwhile brand, your brand will eventually be looked at as a credible source of information.

To get this process started, create a list of questions to go along with your mission. Use them to reach out to your audience and simple ask them what they are looking to gain from a business such as yours. Find out what other options they’ve tried so you can do a competitive analysis of what you’re up against. Listen to what your audience has to say and form your brand as a way to answer their questions and calm their confusion.

If you find out your target audience is already getting what they need from another source, it’s time to rework your business model. Go back to those first questions and focus on what they want more of. Find ways to be helpful in that area and look up your competition.

Form A Clear Mission

For clients to start looking to your brand for help, guidance, products, or opinion, they have to know what you’re about. It’s easy for a brand’s mission to get lost in the color scheme of it all but it’s your job to make sure that while you look good, you are also an abundant source of resources your audience can count on.

Keep in mind that your mission will not align with everyone that stumbles across your social media or website. You won’t be for everybody. The questions you ask in the beginning are to help you target your audience and find a niche within them that you can profit from.

You can start by writing out exactly what you want your brand to accomplish and comparing it to the answers your audience has given. Have you touched on their concerns? Are they looking for what you’re offering? If yes, then you’re well on your way to getting noticed. If not, you’re either targeting the wrong audience or asking the wrong questions.

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Deliver Your Message

Having a clear vision is the first step but having a foolproof delivery is the second. Knowing your audience, vision, mission, and product are great, but if you can’t deliver those in a way that resonates with your potential customers, you’ve just simply wasted your time.

Create a content strategy that will speak to your potential client. Develop a persona, choose distribution channels that your audience uses, and get creative. Think about the Geico gecko. That’s a persona that will live on forever because that gecko has become a staple in everything Geico does and is a quick and easy reminder of who Geico is and what Geico does.

The only way to keep people coming back is to become memorable. This is where colors, fonts, and logos start to play their part. All of these brand characteristics come together to form what anyone will think of when they hear your brand name.

Decide on the story you want to tell, the vision you want to portray, and the content platforms your audience visits the most.