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How to Come Up With a Rock-Solid Brand Strategy for Your Business

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How to Come Up With a Rock-Solid Brand Strategy for Your Business

Modern businesses have to battle for audiences’ attention. A strong brand will make your business stand out from the competition and help create a long-lasting, positive association with target audiences. Without a solid branding strategy, your business is in danger of being lost in the crowd and failing to impress worthwhile audiences.

Although investing in building and growing your brand may not seem to give immediate returns, the exercise has long-term benefits that impact visibility and conversion positively.

A solid branding strategy is a result of conscientious effort and thorough research and we have distilled the complex mechanism into comprehensible steps below:

Outline your brand’s objectives

Your brand’s objectives need to align with your business goals. If you are starting a new venture, your vision needs to be clear and realistic. Your brand message, proposition, and tone will resonate with your business activities. If your business is diversifying into new markets or you are expanding your suite of products or services, you might need to adjust your existing brand to reflect the new changes. Brand building from scratch can be a costly affair but is absolutely vital to survival and customer loyalty.

Identify and research your target markets

How well do you know your ideal clients? Who do you expect to attract using your brand? If your answer is “anybody and everybody,” you might be shooting in the dark. The better you define your target audiences, the more laser-focused your marketing strategy will be, and better will be its returns. Understand your audiences’ perceptions and challenges and build those into your brand values.

Define your brand positioning

Brand positioning refers to your USP (unique selling points) - how your brand is different from competitors and why should your target clients choose to engage with you. Capture your essence in a few lines and make this your business vision. The vision should be grounded in reality as you will be expected to deliver on your promises. It should also be aspirational to indicate you are progressive.





Develop brand collaterals

To build your brand, you need many weapons in your arsenal. First and foremost, develop a logo, tagline, and message that reflect your brand positioning perfectly. “Just Do It” is synonymous with Nike and “Taste the Rainbow” sums up the essence of Skittles. Brand colors and message tone should remain consistent on all platforms and formats- advertisements, print material, website, social media posts, and mailers.

Different target audiences may be interested in different aspects of your brand but your brand messaging should remain consistent so that the connection between audiences and your brand gets strengthened after every interaction.

Your website is your brand’s showcase. Most audiences and prospective clients will judge you and your brand on the basis of your website. Often, websites are the first place potential clients, and partners will go to gather information about your portfolio, history, services, and contact information. Ensure your website is contemporary, responsive, and updated with latest information. Furthermore, optimize it for target keywords so that it is found by search engines easily.

Your marketing and branding toolkit will be incomplete without efficient content marketing tools. Organize valuable content offerings, e-brochures, pitching presentations, video testimonials in archives using a CMS (content management system).

Many website development platforms have an in-built CMS that schedules and publishes content pieces according to pre-set content calendars. This can keep your branding efforts consistent and maintain a regular flow of content to delight interested audiences and push them along the sales funnel.

Implement, analyze, and align

A good branding strategy is as good as its implementation. Often, businesses invest a lot of energy in creating a strategy, keep to the plan enthusiastically for a few weeks, then lose steam when they don’t see tangible benefits or when business starts pouring in… and the branding exercise is all but forgotten.

To keep at the forefront of audiences’ minds, you need to always be focused on brand building.  So, use analytics tools to track how well the brand building objectives were met. Be prepared to re-align objectives or strategies, if required.


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