What is a brand strategy?

When starting out as a new business, you need more than a few bullet points of what you want to do in order to succeed. You need a brand strategy that you can apply across your business to identify who you are and what you can offer people. To successfully create a brand strategy, you need to understand what it is.

This guide will focus on answering the following questions:

1. What is a brand strategy?
2. What goes into a successful brand strategy?

A branding strategy is a company’s plan to reach a series of long-term goals that’ll help customers identify their brand and choose it over others. Successful branding strategies will encompass every aspect of a business, including its mission, promises to customers, communication style, customer service, and so on. 

Contrary to what you might think, a brand strategy is not merely the summary of your logo, colour palette, website, or chosen font. While these elements are a key part of your brand strategy, branding goes much deeper into the very core of your business. The more thorough you are when creating your brand strategy, the faster you’ll increase brand awareness and revenue streams.

Many aspects go into creating a successful brand strategy, so make sure you:

All brands make promises to their customers, but building a brand strategy requires you to go beyond the benefits your business can offer. While you need to understand what you offer when building your brand strategy, you need to dig deeper and define why you do what you do. 

Defining your purpose will help you differentiate yourself from your competitors. If you’re lost for words in terms of how to word your purpose, take a look at some big brands you admire to see how they communicate their purpose.

Setting clear goals from the start will give you an idea of what you want to achieve with your brand strategy. Adding objectives of how you’ll reach your goals will also help you build a strategy to get you there. An excellent method is to set SMART goals.

Standing for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely, SMART goals ensure that the intentions you set for your brand strategy are relevant both to your business and marketplace.

Your goals should cover key strategic areas, including financial performance, marketing, customer relationships, and more. The clearer and more specific you make your goals, the more likely you are to achieve them. Learn more about how to achieve your business goals here.

A good brand strategy will also help you spark emotions in your customers that inspire them to engage with your brand. Think about your business and the emotion you want your customers to associate with you. 

Perhaps you make them feel supported and understood or spark excitement in them with your new, cool gadget? Maybe you show that you can help fuel their passion or get their life back on track?

Whatever emotion you want to bring up in your target audience, the key is to create a connection with them, so they want to choose your brand over others. 

Consistency is key when it comes to branding. You need to remain consistent across your messaging, design, communication, and the content you share so people can recognise you easily. 

A great way to ensure consistency across your brand is to create a style guide. This guide should include everything from your tone of voice and brand colours to how you’ll position certain products or services. 

In this ever-changing business world, brands need to remain flexible to stay relevant. While consistency sets the standards for your brand, adding room for change will allow you to make adjustments as needed to build interest. 

If you notice that your tactics don’t work as well anymore, take the opportunity to engage your audience in fresh, new ways. Find new methods to connect with new customers and remind old ones of why they chose you.

Loyalty is key to building a successful brand. After all, you can’t build a reputable business without loyal customers that keep coming back. Highlighting a positive relationship between your business and existing customers or clients sets the tone for what new ones can expect. 

In addition, if your brand strategy includes great customer service, your happy customers are more likely to spread the word about your business. These customers might tell people they know about your offering and share your content on social media. This way, you’ll attract more returning customers, generate more revenue, and increase your profits.

It is important to remember that a brand strategy should never be stationary. Ask yourself:

• Are the tactics I use the best fit for my brand strategy and SMART objectives?
• Is my brand strategy still relevant and effective in the competitive landscape?

If you answer ‘no’ to any of these questions, you need to refine and develop your strategy. To do this, you need to start by identifying which parts of the strategy no longer work and explore why that is.

When you explore reasons and alternatives, it’s good to get feedback from key stakeholders involved in your business. These people include your customers, suppliers, competitors, and so on. Once you’ve gathered information, you need to find alternatives and figure out how to implement them into your brand strategy. For more information on the best ways to build a brand, check out this guide.

If you succeed in developing a strong brand strategy, you’ll soon attract paying customers to your business. More customers equals more sales and more revenue, meaning you need a good system for managing your income, expenses and other financial activities.

Countingup is the business current account with built-in accounting software that allows you to manage all your financial data in one place. With features like automatic expense categorisation, invoicing on the go, receipt capture tools, tax estimates, and cash flow insights, you can confidently keep on top of your business finances wherever you are. 

You can also share your bookkeeping with your accountant instantly without worrying about duplication errors, data lags or inaccuracies. Seamless, simple, and straightforward! 
Find out more here.