How to Craft the Best Branding and Marketing Strategy
A solid brand is one of the key ingredients of a successful branding and marketing strategy.
Understanding what your brand is, what it stands for, how to position it, developing your brand identity and personality are the main sweet spot areas to strategically focus on when crafting your strategy.
What is a Brand?
When building a brand alongside your strategy and/or a business, it’s important to have a deep understanding of what’s the meaning of a brand.
There are so many definitions for “what is a brand?”
Here’s the definition I created:
“A brand is a business concept that is entirely based on the perception of people and their experience with it.”
A brand in a nutshell is basically what people think and say it is.
Crafting a successful branding and marketing strategy is a strategic step-by-step process, but don’t worry, I got you!
I’m going to walk you through each step.
4 Ways to Build a Successful Branding and Marketing Strategy
Step 1- Your Brand Story
Brand positioning can be used to communicate the story behind your brand. After all, storytelling is a brilliant way to connect with your audience!
When positioning your brand, consider how you want your ideal customer to feel about your brand.
What type of perception would you like your brand to have?
How do you want your brand to be remembered?
What is unique about your brand?
When developing your brand story, ensure that you have all of these questions covered.
Also, ensure that your brand story reflect these areas below:
1. What is the inspiration behind your brand?
2. What is your tagline?
3. Why do you want to introduce your brand to the world?
4. How do you intend to introduce your brand?
5. What type of imagery do you want to align your brand with?
6. The tangible and intangible benefits customers can experience with your brand.
7. Last, but not least; the best customer experience!
Brand Associations and Characteristics
Brand associations and characteristics are also 2 sweet spot areas in an effective branding and marketing strategy. They are the main characters of your brand story and determine how your brand is positioned.
A great example is Coca Cola; one of the biggest brands in the world!
Coca Cola associates its brand with that sweet feeling, togetherness and the perfect addition to a delicious meal!
Coca Cola embodies these associations and characteristics in the form of stories reflected in its ads that often connects plus touch a lot of people all over the world.
Brand associations represent what comes to mind when your brand is seen, heard or even mentioned. They relate to perceived qualities and your brand characteristics should always be aligned with these perceived qualities.
For instance, when you hear Sandals Resorts, what comes to mind is an amazing all-inclusive luxurious vacation experience which is exactly how the brand is positioned.
The characteristics of the Sandals brand embodies luxury, high standard, value along with the ideal vacation experience for couples and these brand characteristics are aligned with the perception of the Sandals brand.
Step 2- Brand Development
The brand development step is another important and exciting area in your branding and marketing strategy. This step is where you determine and define your vision for your brand together with its objectives, values and purpose.
Your vision can be along the lines of a brand that represents innovation, the best customer experience and the “Go to Brand” in the minds of the ideal customer.
Some examples of brand objectives can be to increase awareness, increase online visibility, increase sales or to increase customer engagement.
The purpose of your brand should be aligned with value and creating an impact.
Also, carefully define your target market/your ideal customer.
Ask yourself these following questions when defining your ideal customer:
1. What inspires them?
2. What are they interested in?
3. What issues do they encounter?
4. What do they value?
Research Your Niche
A major part of building your branding and marketing strategy is to firstly research the market you’re venturing into. You can effectively research your niche by using online tools to gather industry info and trends online.
SEO Tools
Semrush is a great tool to use to conduct thorough research on what keywords relating to your niche are most commonly searched for from various countries.
It provides a comprehensive range of insights such as:
1. The ideal target keywords relating to your niche.
2. Searcher intent such as keywords searched for informational, transactional and commercial purposes.
3. Competitor data and content ideas.
Google Trends is another useful tool to explore as it helps you to determine which countries together with the areas within these countries your ideal customer/target audience resides.
This helps with carefully building your advertising strategies to reach your target market.
Building your brand requires a concrete understanding of the market you’re looking to tap into.
These tools are great for gathering information about your target market where you can determine exactly what type of information they are searching for online. This is the ideal opportunity to plan and create content on what your target customers commonly search for online.
Let’s say for example, you’re developing a natural skincare line where you’re targeting women between the ages of 18-40 years old who constantly experience problems with their skin.
After conducting your research, you identified a trend that these women are searching for the best skincare products made with natural ingredients that will help them to achieve flawless skin.
You can create content to upload on social media plus a YouTube channel, articles, blogs or even a website about the benefits of using natural ingredients on your skin and share the type of experience your products can provide.
Also, include the commonly searched keywords used by your target customers in your content.
You can even explore the option of hiring an SEO consultant or specialist to guide you with this entire process. The information you can gather from this process form the key areas of your branding and marketing strategy!
This helps to form a solid position for your brand.
Google Scholar is where you can find research and journal articles relating to your niche.
For example, let’s take a look at the skincare industry again.
If the trends in the skincare industry show that your ideal customer is seeking skincare products with more natural ingredients, your strategy should reflect the aim to offer the best natural skincare line in the market.
This type of research enables you to carve out the ideal branding and marketing strategy for your niche where you align your strategy with trends.
Step 3- Assessing the Performance of your Brand
Brand monitoring is another key area.
It helps you to determine what’s working for your brand and which areas require improvement. This step is quite insightful as it reflects how your ideal customers are responding to your brand in terms of their buying power.
First thing first, assess your profit margin against your objectives. This relates to your pricing strategy and it shows the sales performance of your brand.
Profit Margin: Revenue – Cost of Revenue
Revenue X 100%
Secondly, assess your return on investment (ROI). Your ROI is another key area to determine if your branding and marketing strategy is successful.
ROI: Net profit
The cost of your brand investment X 100%
Collect as much feedback as possible from your customers. This can be done through customer interactions and even asking your customers to share their reviews and testimonials on their product experience.
This helps to eliminate what’s not working and to focus more on what works.
Step 4- Growing your Brand
Brand extensions are strategies that are used by successful and well-established brands. It can also be referred to as capitalized opportunities where other markets are tapped into when trust is established.
Growing your brand is another important part of the branding and marketing strategy process.
The key point here is to always pay attention to your customers and their needs. That’s how you can determine if there’s an opportunity to expand your offering.
Here’s how you can do that:
1. Establish a solid reputation by consistently improving your customer experience.
2. Ask your customers what else your brand can offer with the focus on addressing their needs and exceeding their expectations.
3. Gather customer feedback.
4. Continuously research your niche to identify if there are any additional related areas that are under served and determine if you can tap into these areas.
A good example of this Dove Men + Care.
Dove realized through research that men didn’t quite connect with how they were represented in commercials. So, Dove positioned its product as a product that makes men comfortable as there weren’t many self-care products available to them at the time.
The product was released at a time where the men’s personal care market was expanding and it did pretty well.
In summary, crafting a successful branding and marketing strategy can be achieved through delivering an interesting brand story, brand development, assessing your brand and growing your brand.
The best way to achieve this is to pay close attention to the market you’re operating in and most importantly, your customers.
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- Branding and Marketing Strategy