How To Create Your Brand Strategy
You’re passionate about your brand, because you know you have something unique and valuable to offer your customers. But how do you establish your brand’s market presence? Without careful, strategic planning on your part, your potential customers might never know what they’re missing. Even if your business is currently successful, you need a brand strategy to keep that success going. Otherwise, your brand won’t grow, and it will likely become stagnant over time.
The Importance of Image
For your brand to succeed, it needs a unique, compelling image. One important element of your brand’s image is its reputation. When your leads think about your brand, what comes to mind? Hopefully, they associate it with values that are relevant to their lives, like expertise, fairness, integrity, or innovation. Your brand also needs a captivating visual image. Fonts, stock images, artwork, logos, and color palettes are all key visual elements to consider. Furthermore, your brand needs a powerful name that speaks to your audience’s desires.
To evaluate your brand’s image, try this simple thought experiment. Imagine that your brand is a person you’ve just met at a party. Visualize them in as much detail as possible. What adjectives would come to mind to describe this person’s behavior and personality? What would they be wearing, and what would their overall aesthetic be? How would you expect this person to talk? What about this person, if anything, would make you want to see them again? Would you be surprised when they told you their name, or does their name seem to reflect the person you imagined? If it’s hard to develop a memorable mental picture of your brand as a person, you may need to work on refining its image.
The Power of Presence
Your brand also needs a strong, vibrant presence in the market. You can have eye-catching marketing and a valuable product to offer, but these won’t do you any good if your target audience isn’t able to find you.
Business owners often make the mistake of focusing on presence but not on image. If the purpose of your marketing outreach is simply to let the world know your brand exists, it’s not likely to succeed. You need a strategic marketing campaign to establish a presence in the spaces where your target customers are found. However, it’s important that each element of that campaign is designed to define and strengthen your brand’s image and reputation.
Refining Your Target Audience
Typically, the more a business invests in market research, the more it’s able to grow. Truly understanding your target audience requires you to dig deep. Again, it can be helpful to sketch out an imaginary profile of your target customer. Go beyond age and gender here. Where does your target customer like to eat or shop? What industries are they likely to work in? What values and beliefs do they hold? On the weekends, would you be more likely to find them on the beach, on a hiking trail, at a concert, or in a corner bookshop? What other brands do they identify with? The more you know your target audience, the more you can target your brand image to connect with their lifestyle.
Knowing your target customers is an ongoing process. For one thing, you need strategies in place to request feedback continuously. Asking for feedback not only makes your customers feel valued, but it gives you valuable insights you can use to hone your brand strategy. Also, as your brand develops, you may find your target customer base begins to change. Ideally, it will expand outward, along with the reach of your brand. Take time to reassess periodically, so you can stay one step ahead of these changes.
Riding the Waves of Your Own Success
Once you’ve established a trusting connection with your customer base, it’s important to keep that relationship fresh. Expanding your product line is one way to capitalize on your existing success. Once your target audience is on board, keep them interested with fresh additions to your line of products or services. However, be sure to extend your brand gradually–otherwise, you risk making your brand image fuzzier.
You can also extend your brand’s reach and influence by venturing into new markets. This is usually most successful when your new market partially overlaps with your existing market. You can find great examples of this strategy on the cereal aisle in your local grocery store. The candy market isn’t the same as the breakfast cereal market, but the two would overlap on a Venn diagram. That overlap powers the success of 2022’s new candy-flavored cereals, and new cereal-flavored candies, such as Fruity Pebbles candy bars.
Leverage the Power of Emotional Appeals
You’ve got plenty of reasons for customers to choose your brand, such as quality, value, and expertise. But remember that customers aren’t decision-making machines. Tapping into your customers’ emotions can help propel your brand to success. Think beyond basic emotions, like happy and sad. Can your brand help customers feel more connected to their communities? Less anxious about the future of our planet? More proud of daily victories and achievements? When you connect with your customers on an emotional level, your brand becomes more than just a tool–it’s part of their lives and even their identities.
Pivot To Help Your Brand Reach Its Full Potential
Over time, successful brands in a given market tend to grow more and more alike. To avoid blending in, you may need to pivot your branding to keep it unique. Successful brands are able to strategically evolve over time to respond to changes while maintaining their core identities. The beauty brand Lush set a great example of this strategy by pivoting when the Covid-19 pandemic impacted sales. While its key offerings have typically been bath bombs, face masks and other small luxury products, the brand pivoted to a focus on soap for handwashing during the pandemic. This pivot didn’t undermine the strength of the brand’s existing image, but it did differentiate the brand from competitors successfully.
Looking to take your brand to the next level? The creators at Personalized Creative are ready to join your team and help you formulate a winning strategy!