Business Branding Strategies
A crucial step towards building a brand for your business is understanding and drafting a comprehensive branding strategy. Find out how to achieve both objectives here.
First and foremost, what are branding (or brand) strategies?
Marty Neumeier, a branding strategy expert, explains brand strategy as a plan that guides and lays out the systematic development of a brand for the purpose of meeting business objectives.
Brand strategy aims to influence perceptions of a brand by members of the public who would engage with it. It helps promote your business by shaping the perceptions of your brand’s audience through visual and verbal forms of expression. We can say that a successful branding strategy starts from you and evolves all the way back to your target audience.
Based on this, here are some of the best, proven branding strategies for your business:
Develop your brand’s identity and voice
To help your audience identify easily with you and your brand, you must be easily identifiable. You must stand out from the crowd, and the only way to do this is to craft your brand identity.
Be intentional about how you want your brand to be perceived and recognised, what difference you want your brand to make, your company’s objectives, core values, and mission, and how you position your services in the minds of your audience.
Taking care of these from the get-go will give you focus and direction, which will, in turn, prevent your brand from becoming mired in mediocrity.
When we talk about voice, we mean both visual and verbal elements that give expression to your brand. It includes the copy for your handbills, posters, fliers, blog, and website, but it also includes the shape and design of your logo, the colour scheme of your website and physical office, even down to your stationeries, letterheads, and envelopes.
Keep your brand voice consistent across all platforms. When creating copy for online and offline ads, ensure that your brand voice is consistent, and use the same language as your target audience.
Define your audience
The quickest way to burn yourself out is to try to please everyone at once. Not everyone will find your style attractive and that’s okay. Trying to be a jack-of-all-trades will make you a master of none, which is one of the surest ways of being unremarkable, nondescript, and irrelevant. Don’t do it.
What you should do instead is find out what appeals most to you, then look up your audience, those people that are most likely to be interested in what you do.
The best way to know your audience? By conducting market research. Or do some deep thinking and try to detach yourself from being on the inside and look at it from the third person point of view. Jump in your customers ‘shoes’.
This gives you insights as to what product is popular with them, their interests, shopping behaviour, age, location, and motivations. Knowing the demographics and interests of your target audience helps you target your product or service and ads (when they become necessary) to suit their needs better.
Find out what works and what’s popular with your target audience after you’ve identified them.
You may also take inspiration from your competitors by carrying out a competitive analysis.
Identify your unique selling proposition
Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is what sets you apart from others. It’s what will convince people to choose your brand instead of hundreds of available alternatives.
As such, you need to identify what it is quickly and make it an integral part of your branding strategy.
Do you have a unique way of rendering your service, or does your product provide a faster, more effective solution than anything else available on the market?
Be sure to incorporate this piece of information in your branding message. It’s that idea that you want your brand to be known for; your brand’s Positioning in the minds of your audience.
Use social media
By now, everyone knows that social media wields considerable clout, power, and influence when it comes to digital marketing. It simply cannot be ignored, so you owe it to yourself to harness its incredible power and use it to build your brand.
Once you’ve identified your target audience and know which social media platform they’re most active on, start a campaign to promote your product or service to them.
Provide timely, engaging content, including pictures of your products, and connect with them. Consistent application of this strategy will skyrocket your brand’s popularity, which will lead to increased engagements and conversions in almost no time at all.
