Why do people buy anything? What makes them choose your company’s product over others? What motivated them to buy your book instead of any of the thousand other books being released? Why do they choose your service?
It’s not necessarily because they think what you’re offering is the best. They might make that discovery down the road and decide to keep coming back for more, but it’s rarely the reason they decide to patronize you in the first place.
Customers and audiences are motivated to buy because something about the way you positioned your brand and marketed it appealed to them. That’s what a brand strategy is: the way you make people feel about your brand.
It’s the experience they associate with you or your business. A strong brand strategy doesn’t come from doing one thing right; it’s a combination of philosophy, audience awareness, targeted advertising, quality of the offering, uniqueness, personality, values, clear message, and more.
But what exactly can a defined branding strategy do for you? In this post, we’re going to discuss some of the benefits that strong branding can offer you and how you can use it to set yourself apart from the competition.
Why Does Your Company Need a Strong Branding Strategy?
A branding strategy is instrumental in helping your company stand out from the competition and build customer loyalty. A strong branding strategy can help create an emotional connection with current and potential customers, engage stakeholders, differentiate your services or products from competitors, and increase overall brand awareness.
Developing a strong brand also helps build trust between you and your customers. It’s important to create an authentic, memorable brand that customers can trust and rely on.
A strong branding strategy helps ensure that when potential customers think of a product or service within your industry, they immediately think of your company.
While many company owners believe “brands” are only reserved for higher-end companies, this belief is not entirely true. All businesses benefit from having a well-thought-out branding strategy that conveys the right message to their target audience and sets them apart from competitors.
The sooner a company can develop a strategy to create an effective and unified brand, the sooner it can start to reap the rewards.
How to Develop a Brand Strategy
It’s important to remember that a successful branding strategy will evolve over time in order to keep up with changes in customer demands, industry trends, and new technologies. By continuously monitoring your company’s performance, you can adjust your branding strategy accordingly.
To start your company’s branding strategy, you should:
- Identify and define the purpose of your brand. What message do you want to convey? How would you like customers to perceive your business?
- Analyze the current state of your brand, including customer feedback and industry insights.
- Craft a clear and concise brand message that will resonate with your target audience.
- Develop a branding plan that outlines how you’ll promote your brand.
- Set up a system for monitoring the performance of your branding strategy and make adjustments as needed.
A strong, unified brand strategy helps to ensure consistency in messaging across all channels, build customer loyalty, and increase the visibility of your company.
By taking the time to develop a comprehensive branding strategy for your business, you can have an edge over the competition and create a lasting impression on customers.
1. Showcase your commitment to customers
Your branding strategy is the promise that you make to your audience, customers, or clients. It’s what they can expect every time they interact with your products or services, and it also helps to keep you consistent.
When you know the kind of experience that you’re selling to your customers, it’d be easy for you to stay in line and keep giving them what they want.
Deciding on marketing strategies, ad copies, typography, colors, website design, and more would become more simplified. This is because you already have a strong brand identity in a place that you can model your efforts and choices after.
Let’s say you’ve built a brand around sustainability, nature friendliness, and ethical sourcing and manufacturing processes. Then you wake up one morning and decide to provide a non-eco-friendly experience that doesn’t align with the ethics of your customers.
Your bottom line is going to take a huge nose dive because you’ve broken the promise that got people invested in your brand in the first place.
But when you consistently stand by your brand promise and positioning, your customers will not only keep coming back; they’ll also spread the word about you so others can share in the experience.
Look at Apple, for example. The brand promises creativity, innovation, uniqueness, and high-quality products that help its customers realize their dreams.
Whenever you see the Apple logo, you imagine something sleek and sophisticated, and everything from their product launches to the atmosphere of their physical stores reinforces that.
This promise and experience have made Apple more than just a company. It’s a status symbol, a movement, a religion of sorts. It doesn’t matter what the price point is or how many better features other brands are packing into their devices, Apple fans are die-hard and will never stop patronizing the brand.
If you want to guarantee such levels of brand awareness and customer loyalty, you need to refine your branding strategy from the inside out. Be unequivocally clear about what your brand stands for and keep delivering on that.
Bear in mind that your branding strategy shouldn’t just focus on digital channels like social media and emails; it can extend to SMS marketing and other mediums as well.
Whether you’re running an online store or a traditional brick-and-mortar, leave no channel uncovered on the road to creating a unified brand experience for your customers. The goal is to meet and satisfy your customers wherever they are.
2. Work on the right business activities
A brand isn’t something that happens overnight. It’s a mix of different things that are perfectly combined together to create a specific image or conjure up certain feelings when people interact with you or your business.
Everything has to feel cohesive. If you’re a B2B company, this begins with your sales cycle. From the outset, you want to establish credibility so that your customers can feel confident that they’re getting exactly what they pay for.
You want them to see you as a reliable business that’s genuinely invested in helping their companies grow, solve their problems, and achieve their goals.
If you’re selling consumer products, everything from your online presence to packaging, and shopping/checkout process should communicate the experience your brand identity is built around.
You cannot afford to only engage with your new customers at the point of purchase or when they sign the final contract, then forget about them forever, and hope they’ll return when they need your product or service again.
A solid branding strategy helps you go beyond just selling. It enables you to look at your whole brand and identify areas where you can deepen and improve your customer experience and relationships.
One of the easiest and most effective ways to achieve this is by building a strong content marketing strategy that goes hand-in-hand with your overall marketing activities. 70% of marketers actively invest in content marketing and this content marketing trend is set to continue. Create culture-driven content that shares your values and explains who you are.
You can also produce valuable content that enriches the lives of your audience, either by educating them on a subject matter, answering questions they have, entertaining them, or showing them how to solve specific problems.
For example, Brian Dean of Backlinko was able to build a strong brand from scratch and establish himself as a digital marketing maestro by publishing long-form, how-to posts.
Entrepreneurs and marketers from all walks of life could visit his site and learn something about how to grow their influence or scale their business.
3. Drive emotional reactions from customers
Whether you’re selling complex products or seemingly trivial services, the most powerful branding strategy you can use to get people to buy is appealing to their emotions. This is because humans are very emotional creatures that rely on instincts and feelings to reach decisions or navigate a plethora of situations.
Customers might do their own research, read reviews, talk to other people who’ve used a product or service, and even create a pros and cons list. But in the end, their decision to go with your company or one of your competitors will boil down to how they feel about either brand.
Contrary to popular belief, triggering people’s emotions is not as difficult as it seems. The trick is having a solid brand positioning and knowing how you want people to feel about your brand.
For instance, instead of trying to convince consumers that their line of shoes was the best, Nike decided to sell something bigger instead—the freedom to dream. This is how it differentiated itself from the hundreds of shoe brands out there.
When you buy Nike shoes, you’re not really paying for the materials. What you’re paying for is the swoosh on the side, the feeling that is evoked every time you watch a Nike ad. That promise that you can be anything you want if you set your mind to it, that you can go far no matter the obstacles in your way.
Take a page out of the Nike playbook and abandon rational marketing that focuses on benefits and features in favor of a branding strategy that pulls people in and speaks to them where the words matter most—their hearts.
Keep in mind that you don’t have to spend money on elaborate ads to spark an emotional response from your audience. You can start by incorporating the emotional angle you want to reinforce into your brand voice, tone, copy, and even social media memes.
4. Align your employees and foster productivity
Employees are like customers. They don’t just want to pitch their tent with any business. They want a company that has a story or a vision that they can buy into. They want to work for businesses that know what they are about and why they exist so that they too can understand their jobs and the purpose they serve.
Good branding may not solve all the issues you’re having with attracting and retaining personnel, but it will go a long way in improving morale and enhancing teamwork. If you can get your employees to feel good about your company and what they’re working towards, they’ll be more eager to help make those goals a reality.
When you have an aligned team and a well-defined brand, you’ll be able to communicate, distribute resources, and assign responsibilities better whenever you’re working on a project. This will, in turn, maximize productivity and efficiency and reduce the amount of energy, time, money, and other resources that get wasted.
It’ll also create an environment that nurtures innovation. Members of your team won’t wait around for the managers and leaders to come up with solutions.
Since they understand the company’s vision and are committed to it, they can generate and share their own unique perspectives on how to accelerate growth and build a stronger brand.
5. Cultivate a stronger company culture
You don’t want to be one of those companies that are always hiring because they have high employee turnover and receive little to no applications for their advertised roles. Job seekers do their research too, and they’d rather join companies with a strong working culture and are known for doing great work.
To attract employees and prevent them from jumping ship quickly, you need to build a strong and good brand with a healthy and positive working culture. You can foster a happier work environment simply by knowing what your purpose is and why it matters.
There should be shared values that motivate everyone and influence how you review people’s work and reward those who perform great. If your purpose or values are just words on the wall with no follow-through, you’ll only succeed in wasting everyone’s time.
As more and more companies continue to shift to remote cultures, it’s more important than ever to get your branding strategies aligned. Otherwise, it’d be much harder for your team members to work together, provide an excellent customer experience, and achieve set goals.
Take time to reflect on the impact your business has on the world; this will make your employees five times more likely to be excited about working with you. Engage in dialogue with personnel at all levels and encourage them to share ideas on how you can help them fulfill their purpose.
Perform regular wellness checks via surveys to see what your workers think about your employer brand, monitor progress, and ensure you’ve not deviated from your branding and the culture that gives you an edge. Don’t just take it and forget it.
Implement their suggestions and strive to eliminate potential issues that could hurt your culture or negatively impact employee engagement and satisfaction. When you find a way to tell interesting stories about your company and the work you do, you’ll become one of the coveted brands that people dream of working with.
6. Build financial value for your company
The reason Samsung and Apple or Chipotle and Taco Bell keep dominating their respective markets is that they’ve established strong, consistent brands. They are already the names at the top of people’s minds when they think about smartphones or Mexican fast food.
They have successfully built strong connections with consumers, which has resulted in better financial performance compared to other brands in the same industry. When you have a good brand strategy and story driving you, you’ll enjoy customer recognition and loyalty.
Ultimately, this will mean increased sales, and the potential to scale, create new markets, or break into different markets. But this won’t happen unless you know exactly who you are, what you do, why you do it, what people stand to gain from patronizing you, and how employees will benefit from working with you.
Your story and the way you tell it will shape your sales numbers, market opportunities, and the talent pool you entice. Similarly, it’ll better equip you to attract shareholders and investors who can give you the resources and backing you need to expand your company’s brand and avoid financial distress while gaining a competitive advantage.
Essentially, everyone from consumers to employees and investors will want to associate and do business with you when your brand resonates with them. Or when you give them a reason to believe in what you’re selling.
7. Promote growth in your marketing and sales
Marketing doesn’t work in a vacuum. When you throw money at advertising without having a well-defined brand strategy or story to guide you’ll often end up wasting a ton of time and thousands of dollars with very little to show for it.
On the other hand, when you have a clear brand strategy, you’ll be able to approach your marketing with purpose and intention geared towards accomplishing your core brand objectives. Your strategy will also help you understand the promise you’re making to your customers or audience and how best to deliver on that promise.
For example, suppose you really want to make your brand stand out by breaking the status quo or doing something unconventional. This can be a brand attribute you want to showcase about your own product. A great way to do this is by employing a guerilla marketing strategy.
This strategy will be even more effective if you have a strong brand to keep it a memorable experience in the minds of your target audience.
Naturally, your brand strategy should inform how you market your products or services to your intended audience. This will help you better target potential buyers with relevant and contextual content depending on the buyer journey stage they’re in and lead to an eventual increase in your conversion rates.
8. Improves Loyalty and Customer Retention
Improving loyalty can be difficult, especially for newer businesses and startups. A strong branding strategy helps to provide customers with a sense of security when it comes to your company’s products or services. By creating an emotional connection between you and your customer, they may be more likely to stick around for the long haul and become loyal repeat customers. Loyalty can also give you the opportunity to upsell or cross-sell customers on other products or services.
A strong branding strategy helps to create a sense of familiarity and trust between you and your customer, which can lead to improved loyalty and customer retention rates. It’s important to stay aware of changes in the market, industry trends, and customer demands in order to ensure that your branding strategy remains current and effective.
For instance, let’s say your store sells women’s activewear. You can create a branded hashtag for each product to promote word-of-mouth marketing and engagement on social media, as well as develop a loyalty program that rewards customers for their purchases or referrals.
Today, body positivity is a great tool to embrace your brand as well as create a sense of trust and loyalty for customers. Using body positivity in your branding strategy is just one example of how to stay up-to-date with trends and maintain a successful strategy.
By implementing effective branding strategies, you can create an emotional connection with your customers that helps to increase loyalty, customer retention, and ultimately sales.
9. Keeps the Brand Identity Consistent
From Apple to Tesla, these high-end companies understand the importance of a consistent look, feel, and message. Companies that have been around for a long time often have an established set of values and standards which helps them to maintain consistency when it comes to their branding.
For instance, Ford has been around since 1903 and they still focus on American innovation and industrialization for their branding strategy, marketing to blue-collar workers and those with a passion for innovation.
It’s important to maintain consistency when it comes to your brand identity, as this helps customers to recognize and remember your business. Having a unique logo, color palette, font style, messaging tone, and imagery will help you to stay top of mind and establish a powerful brand identity.
By creating a cohesive branding strategy, you can ensure that your company’s identity is consistent across all channels and platforms. This will help customers easily identify your brand at a glance, boosting recognition and customer loyalty in the long run.
For newer brands and businesses, this can be difficult because they don’t always have the resources or experience necessary to create a unified look or message across all platforms. Newer companies might also have trouble identifying their message.
However, with the right tools and guidance, you can create a strong branding strategy that will help to keep your brand identity consistent and appealing to newer customers. For example, newer companies can use a combination of digital and traditional marketing methods to create a unified brand presence.
Having a unified set of values and consistent messaging will help customers to recognize and trust your brand, ultimately leading to increased loyalty and sales.
10. Increases Employee Engagement
How does branding that’s meant to bring in customers help employees? Consider the fact that 83% of employees want to feel pride in their job and go above and beyond if they feel proud of the company they work for. A strong branding strategy is a great way to show employees that their work is valued.
Brands can also create an environment of collaboration and unity among employees by leveraging their branding to create a sense of shared values and purpose.
Employees who are proud to work for a company that displays a strong brand are more likely to be engaged and productive. They will also be more likely to spread the word about your company on their own social media platforms, helping to increase awareness and potential sales.
11. The Brand Stays Ahead of Competitors
In an ever-changing world, companies need to stay on top of the latest trends and technologies in order to remain competitive. A strong branding strategy can help companies to stay ahead of their competitors by leveraging new trends and technologies to create a unique and memorable brand experience.
This helps customers to recognize your company as being innovative, which can set you apart from your competitors and make you stand out in the market.
Branding strategy also helps to keep customers engaged with your company and products. By having a strong branding strategy, you can ensure that customers are aware of your company’s new offerings and any changes in your products or services, which can help your company to stay ahead of the competition and remain relevant in a constantly changing market.
Some great ways to share your improvements and stand out among the competition include creating informative and engaging content on your website, launching digital marketing campaigns, and participating in relevant events.
A strong branding strategy will help your company to remain competitive and stay ahead of the curve, setting your business up for success in a rapidly evolving market.
12. Attracts New Talents
In addition to helping employees feel proud, a strong branding strategy also helps to attract new talents. A strong and recognizable brand presence is a great way to draw potential employees to your company. This can be especially true for younger generations, who are often drawn to well-known and respected brands.
By having a strong branding strategy, companies can show potential employees that their work will be valued and respected. Additionally, companies can use their branding to highlight the company mission or purpose, which can make it more appealing to potential hires who want to make a difference in their work.
Social media is a great way to showcase your company culture, as it can help attract potential employees who share similar values or interests. If you’re looking for ways to stand out from the competition and attract top talent, investing in a strong branding strategy is a great way to do just that.
In addition, attracting top talent will, in turn, help to create a better working environment and increase efficiency, which can lead to increased productivity and higher profits. New points of view, experiences, and skill sets can also bring fresh ideas and perspectives that can help to propel your business forward.
Build a compelling brand
Your brand strategy can push you towards success or keep you from reaching your full potential. Although creating a strong brand isn’t completed overnight and can be quite a challenge, it’s crucial to the survival of any enterprise.
It’s what will help you stand out from the hordes of competitors, what will make people come to trust you and choose you over others time and again. The advantages of strengthening your brand are too numerous to ignore. The question is no longer whether branding matters, but whether you’re ready to optimize your business by fine-tuning your brand.
Creating a brand is never easy. It involves high-quality branding strategies such as web design, content creation, marketing campaigns, and more. At Writer Access, we can help you create a strong and recognizable brand that stands out in the market.
Additionally, our services are designed to help you increase efficiency, attract new customers, and build a strong foundation for your business. With our help, you can create a brand that is memorable and effective.
Try out 14-day free trial today to experience the Writer Access difference. Join us, and get ready to watch your brand soar!
Begin that journey today.
This article was written by Mark Quadros, a SaaS content marketer that helps brands create and distribute rad content. On a similar note, Mark loves content and contributes to several authoritative blogs like HubSpot, CoSchedule, Foundr, etc. Connect with him via LinkedIN or twitter.
