Branding Strategy : A Beginners Essentials Guide For long-Term Success

With kind of branding strategy to choose from, it may be difficult to pinpoint which branding types work well for your business. In other words Some of the best ways to select the proper branding strategy begin with understanding what branding is and defining your brand identity. Once you learn how to position yourself as a brand and you take advantage of brand strategies, you will be on your way to earning brand loyalty, recognition, equity, and awareness. Join Virlan to learn more.

What Is Branding Strategy ?

By definition, brand strategy is a long-term plan for the development of a successful brand in order to achieve specific goals. A well-defined and executed brand strategy affects all aspects of a business and is directly connected to consumer needs, emotions, and competitive environments.

How to Select the Best Brand Strategy For Your Business

Define your brand and its objective

Your brand’s objective is simply its purpose. In conclusion knowing why your brand exists, what purpose it has in the world and what it stands for is what defines it from the very start.

When you want to define your brand, you’ll need to ask yourself some questions:

What problem does my brand solve?

Who is my ideal customer? what is my target audience?

Who is my competition?

What does my brand make my customers feel?

Why do my customers trust me?

What is the story behind why my brand? Should I try storytelling?

If my brand was a person, what would their personality be like?

Once you answer these questions, you can begin to choose things like logo colors and font, your motto or tagline and other marketing elements to communicate your brand’s overall story.

1. Cover your basics in Branding Strategy

We won’t go into the minute details of a basic branding, but what you do want to make sure is that you have is a consistent logo, color palette, bio, boilerplate and handle. Some companies like to change logo styling slightly between networks depending on how small the allotted photo space is and the interests of those specific audiences. Whichever you choose, the most important thing is to ensure your profiles have a common thread that people will recognize as your brand.

2. Extend your visual branding

So now that you have a consistent visual brand across network accounts, it’s time to enhance that even further. What does that mean? It means ensuring you have the same colors and fonts reflected in your images, graphics and videos. When someone visits your Instagram page, is the filter or pop of color immediately apparent to them? When a video is published, are the overlay text fonts similar to those that you use for your blog post’s featured image?

Over time, your customers will see the consistency in posts and begin to recognize when a post is from you without seeing your brand’s logo or social media handle. This type of brand recognition is the ultimate goal for your social media branding efforts.

3. Develop your marketing personas As Branding Strategy

Your marketing personas are going to vary between the networks. Audiences on TikTok are younger than audiences on Facebook. This is the reality and if you use the same content across both networks, it’s possible that it won’t resonate the same way. To this end, it’s best to create multiple personas for your own marketing efforts.

4. Establish your brand voice & tone

After visuals, captions and related copy are the next important piece of branding your social media posts. Company social media accounts tend to have some personality. For some, it’s sarcastic or snarky and for others, it’s informative. You might already have a brand voice established for your other marketing focuses. Extending that to social media, and cultivating a specific approach by social platform, is highly recommended.

A voice and tone guide should include details like brand persona, company catchphrases, personality traits and vocabulary. The smallest details, like whether you use the term “clients” or “customers” will help you keep your writing consistent.

5. Create multiple accounts for different areas of focus

If your company is large enough or has a diverse set of products and/or services, it’s sometimes best to have multiple accounts. The advantages of having these different accounts include being able to hyper-focus your branding, cater to a specific audience and serve up relevant content.

5 Components for a Comprehensive Branding Strategy

1) Purpose

Every brand makes a promise. But in a marketplace in which consumer confidence is low and budgetary vigilance is high. It’s not just making a promise that separates one brand from another, but having a defining purpose.

While understanding what your business promises is necessary when defining your brand positioning, knowing why you wake up every day and go to work carries more weight. In other words, your purpose is more specific, in that it serves as a differentiator between you and your competitors.

How can you define your business’ purpose? According to Business Strategy Insider, purpose can be viewed in two ways:

Functional: This concept focuses on the evaluations of success in terms of immediate and commercial reasons. The purpose of the business is to make money.

Intentional: This concept focuses on success as it relates to the ability to make money and do good in the world.

2) Emotion toward the brand

Customers aren’t always rational.

By providing customers with an opportunity to feel like they’re part of a larger group that’s more tight-knit than just a bunch of motorcycle riders, digital seller is able to position themselves as an obvious choice for someone looking to purchase a bike.

Why? People have an innate desire to build relationships. Research from psychologists Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary best describes this need in their “belongingness hypothesis,” which states: “People have a basic psychological need to feel closely connected to others, and that caring, affectionate bonds from close relationships are a major part of human behavior.”

Not to mention, belongingness (the need for love, affection, and being part of groups) which aims to categorize different human needs.

What lesson do we learn? Find a way to connect with your customers on a deeper, more emotional level. Do you give them peace of mind? Make them feel like part of the family? Do you make life easier? Use emotional triggers like these to strengthen your relationship and foster loyalty.

3) Staying Flexible In Branding Strategy

Of course, the best brands stick with their strategies, but those strategies leave room for flexibility as the market, consumers, and competitors change. Think of it this way:

Just as your goals in life might change over time, so might your brand goals.

Similarly, just as you might modify your plan to achieve your goals in life, so too might your brand marketing plan change.

Finally, just as you seize opportunities to move closer to your goals as they arise throughout your life, you’ll also seize short-term opportunities to grow your brand and move closer to achieving your long-term brand goals as those opportunities are presented to you.

A specific, achievable brand strategy is an essential component of any business, because it affects every area of your business.

4) Loyalty

If you already have people that love you, your company, and your brand, don’t just sit there. Reward them for that love.

These customers have gone out their way to write about you, to tell their friends about you, and to act as your brand ambassadors. Cultivating loyalty from these people early on will yield more returning customers — and more profit for your business.

Sometimes, just a thank you is all that they are need. Other times, it’s better to go above and beyond. Write them a personalized letter. Sent them some special swag. Ask them to write a review, and feature them prominently on your website. (Or all of the above!)

Loyalty is a critical part of every brand strategy, especially if you’re looking to support your sales organization. At the end of the day, highlighting a positive relationship between you and your existing customers sets the tone for what potential customers can expect if they choose to do business with you.

5) For Best Branding Strategy: Avoid The Short-Term Trap

It’s easy to get caught up in the short-term activities and tactics that drive business today, but when it comes to building a brand, that’s a big mistake. Brands aren’t built overnight. So your brand strategy shouldn’t be focused on short-term tactics but rather on long-term goals and sustainable growth.

Admittedly, it’s hard to stay strategic when executives are weighed down by data and demand measurable growth right now. The best brand leaders, however, fight against short-term focus, because they know being short-sighted is a brand killer.

Without a strong brand foundation built on a well-defined strategy, brands have little chance for success. However, it’s hard to stick with that strategy rather than be tempted by the allure of short-term focus.

Summary:

In short, companies have long used perceptual mapping to understand how consumers feel about their brands relative to competitors. Finding gaps in the marketplace, and to develop brand positions.

While you certainly don’t need decades for social media branding, some patience is required. Utilizing the strategies above will set you on the path for improving your brand online.