When we talk about branding strategy, we must realize that this concept is not just about the image of a business such as a logo or website, the real brand strategy is much more than that.
Are lots of ways to position your brand, you just need to choose the strategy according to your business and most important, to the needs of your target. Once you know your target, you can start your strategy and the results will start to show up.
Putting your customer first, will bring you the success that you never could imagine because making your customer happy, you as a business owner, you will be happy too seeing your success. Everything is like a chain that must be fallowed slowly, slowly in achieving the result that you wish to get.
What is Branding Strategy?
BRANDING STRATEGY is a long-term plan with well-known goals that makes the business distinctive, memorable, credible, trustworthy, and likable by the target customer.
Identifying and leveraging the distinction factors that your brand has, the emotional advantages and connective hooks to the specific audience with a strategy that has integrity and authenticity, can bring an important achievement, a better profit and a competitive environment for every business that offers the same services or products.
In building the successful business, branding strategy is coupled with the business strategy. These two, provides the key commercial directions in your business together with marketing campaigns, culture development and design. These is the structure foundation of the high-quality brand and the growth strategy with the help of the marketing campaigns and design application.
An important note is to mention that marketing, design, branding strategy are separate and interlinked disciples that all together brings the business the success. These are important elements in building a successful business and are separate disciplines.
When you develop properly a brand strategy, it empowers you to be relevant, purposeful, innovative, inspiring and on-trend in the context of your market sector.
A strong brand strategy empowers you to build a brand with significance and mining that attracts new clients and especially keeping a loyal community of customers, generate high-quality leads, increase market share, achieve premium price points, grow sales, and close high-value deals.
Briefly, branding strategy it is an essential and critical factor in your business success.
So, to help your business to be around for ages, here you can find 10 best branding strategies steps that are essential in the achievement of your success
Tip # 1. Create your brand identity
Creating an identity is the way that you bring this to the public with visuals, messaging, and experience.
Your brand strategy will influence how you present your identity and align it with your purpose of your business in making the impact. Your brand identity should be applied across all channels consistently when you post something or creating something. This is the way that your business becomes recognizable.
Your brand identity includes your logo, colors and fonts, website design, content, advertising, print or packaging,
For instance, the coffee cups with the logo on them will attract the attention to other people and even without realizing it, they read it and remember it when they see your business again.
Tip # 2. Pick your niche
What is a niche?
A niche market is a segment of a larger market that can be defined by its own unique needs, identity, preferences that makes it different compared with other markets.
For example, within the market for women’s shoes are many different segments or niches. Shoes for tennis women would be a niche market, as would shoes for plus-sized women, shoes for nurses, and high heels shoes for those who likes to be elegant. These are all niche markets within the larger market for women’s shoes.
Every market can be further refined, or divided, by the needs and preferences of its constituents. Some of the most common ways to define a niche are based on:
- Price (luxury, moderate, discount)
- Demographics (gender, age, education and income level)
- Psychographics (values, interests, attitudes)
- Geographics (country, city, neighborhood)
- Level of quality (handmade, economical, premium)
Have you heard the following expression ?
“jack of all trades, master of none”
Meet Viktor Vicsek
It means that a generalist can do everything decently, while a specialist does one thing very well. Now you can imagine that what is important in a business is to be the master of the products or services that you are selling and not to extend in many things offering just a “decent” quality of it. If you start slowly in achieving the success in one specific thing , than is no problem in expanding your products once you have created a quality branding in your customers mind
Tip # 3. Build a brand story and a message
Tell customers succinctly who you are, using your marketing channels.
The message that you create to your brand should be intricately associated with what you are doing and conveyed consistently. This part of the brand development process goes beyond your logo and define the key aspects of who you are, what you are offering and why the people should care about it.
An example is NIKE and their message of “Just Do It”. They are consistent in what they are doing with the meaning of their message behind their products.
Tip # 4. Set your marketing goals
The whole point of a strategy is to have listed your goals and keep them in mind to reach them. So, in developing your brand strategy, you need to point out your short and long-term goals.
You must think where exactly you want your business to be in the future, next month, next year or in one years.
These are some of the common goals for every business:
- Drive more sales
- Grow brand awareness
- Develop stronger relationships with stakeholders and customers
- Expand market share
- Expand in a new market
- Reach new targets or demographics
- Raise the revenue
- Secure funding
- Increase profits
Doing so you will find a way to increase your customer base, establishing for example a customer loyalty program and always keeping on track with the modernity and for a successful and well organized business.
Tip # 5. Brand research of your competitors
Building a brand strategy without having an idea on how your competitors are doing and how their strategies work, is a very bad start.
You do not need to replicate what they are doing. You just need to understand what is working for them, how their target responds to the applied tactics, and even to pay attention on what your competitors are not doing for their branding.
Looking at existing brands can give you a better idea on what you should do to set your business apart from the crowd with new tactics, creative inspiration, and a better strategic insight.
Tip # 6. Be unique
You might not be the only one on the market that is offering the same service or product, but you can always stand out as being different compared with others if you have a good plan.
One of your uniqueness can be through your branding message, offering a superior quality using high-quality ingredients, an authentic and enjoyable experience for your customers that cannot find elsewhere and making them feel like part of the family.
The importance of adaptability in brand strategy is essential in keeping the customers in the business and attract new ones.
Every time you must ask yourself what can I offer to the customers that they cannot get from my competitors?
Tip # 7. Always provide value
When you provide value, you will build trust. Once you have the trust, you will have the ability to do more selling.
This is one of the main rules of the business because it is the reason a customer buys your product.
Offering value to your customers, your brand is gaining recognition though the quality of it and starts to be known as a trustful place from where to buy. If the value decrees, no matter it if has a big popularity, will fail bad.
Everyone wants to improve their profits but do not make the change to the quality of the products because if you do that, your competition will come from behind and will exploit your weakness stealing your audience, thing that I suppose you do not want to happen.
Offer the best quality of your product, do not take advantage of your customers’ needs because in any moment they can change company without looking back. If it happens, your fans will generate negative feedback that can damage your brand’s reputation.
Tip # 8. Offer an exceptional customer experience
Customer experience is extremely important in every business. Most of the time, the only people that represents the business in the eyes of the customers, are the ones that provide the service to them face-to-face and not really the owner.
The competitors might offer the same products or services at a cheaper price, but if they treat their customers poorly, it will not matter.
People are willing to spend a little more money or time for a better experience and to say the truth now, so do I and you and everyone.
The advantage of it is that satisfied customers can become a way of marketing. Sharing their good experiences online, on the traditional way of spreading the word to friends and acquaintances, will bring you recognition and fame.
You must find a way to make your happy customers to share their positive experiences online through platforms such, Facebook page, TripAdvisor and so on. Doing so, many new potential customers can try your business.
Now you just must put yourself in the shoes of someone who is looking, for example, a good vegetarian restaurant. What do you do first? Most probably google it. Doing so, you can see all the restaurants from your region that has reviews. If the reviews were positive, you might try it, if they were negative, most probably you would not.
In this century we can find everything online and you, as a business owner, must pay attention to create a good name that your clients can talk nicely after they leave your place.
Now, just came in my mind a situation that happened to me in a restaurant that has a San Marino cuisine. When I had to pay the bill, at the bottom of it was a message saying:
“Se hai mangiato bene, parlane con gli amici
Se hai mangiato male, reclama alla direzione”
Ritrovo Dei Lavoratori XXVIII Luglio, City of San Marino
What does that mean? Well, it says, if you have good things to say about your experience, share it with friends, if you do not have, talk with the person in charge of the place and fix it straight away. Simply saying, they care about your experience and they want to make you happy because they will be happy too.
If you put the same accent on your customers happiness, your business will grow.
Tip # 9. Great exposure
This century has developed a lot in technology and especially with the access to the internet from every part of the world. This development is helping the businesses to enlarge their influence not just local or national, even globally.
Having a good website, social media pages where you are present every day, you can create the customers opinion about your product or service even before they could try it.
That is the advantage of it. Goes straight to your customers fingers and everything depends if they like what they see or read.
Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube are just a few of the most famous platforms. Put your attention on at least 2 of them and make your presence every day with news and posts. No worries about expenses, are free of charge and easy to use.
Other ways to have a great marketing strategy where to expose your brand with success are the fallowing channels:
- Traditional advertising
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- TV, Radio
- Forum Marketing
- Video Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Paid Advertising
The bad news about them is that you need a bigger capital for most of them, so my advice is to focus on those that you do not have to spend too much. A good website and 2 or 3 social media platforms are more than enough if you know how to attract your customers and new targets.
Consistence, quality, attractiveness, and modernism, these are the check list that must have all your social media platforms.
Tip # 10. Target a new audience, extend your business or be the best that you can be
Now you might say that I was the one saying that you should not focus on more niches than one to be successful. Well, this situation can change when you become successful at that specific niche that you focused on at the beginning of your journey.
To grow much more than that, you must take it step by step. Becoming successful with that niche, now gives you the opportunity to think bigger. Doing so, your business is getting larger and larger and with this, another chance to open new offices/shops/ restaurants/etc.
If you do not want to put yourself in this possible situation than you should instead think how to keep your customers and how to attract even more with the same service/product that you offer. Keep on eye with on the news and how technology can influence your actual customers opinion and the future ones.
“One thing’s for sure, if you do not play, you do not win”
Kaylie Francis
Resume
I covered a lot in this post, so here is the list of the 10 best branding strategies:
- Create your Brand Identify
- Pick your niche
- Build a brand story and message
- Set your marketing goals
- Brand research of your competitors
- Be unique
- Always provide value
- Offer an exceptional customer experience
- Have a great exposure
- Target a new audience, extend your business or be the best that you can be
Author: Anamaria Bogdan
Pictures from and created in Canva.
Sources:
- Brand Positioning and Alignment | Principles of Marketing [Deprecated] (lumenlearning.com)
- 10 Steps to an Effective Brand Strategy That’ll Bolster Your Business | WordStream
- Brand Positioning Template | Brand Consultant | Brand Strategy Consultant (equibrandconsulting.com)
- 🥇 What is digital branding and how to use it for your business (yeeply.com)
- Employer Branding Strategy in 5 Steps [INFOGRAPHIC] | TalentLyft
- Brand Strategy 101: 7 Essentials for Strong Company Branding (hubspot.com)
- 10 Brand Strategy Examples and Why They Work (myva360.com)