A brand strategy is a long-standing blueprint that helps you build your business brand successfully in order to achieve certain goals. Constructing your brand strategy should be an important part of your overall company plan. It’s the expression of what your brand is and what it aims to be, the purpose it serves, and how you will share your offerings to the world.
Yet, when it comes to developing a brand strategy, it’s easier said than done. You can’t just throw a couple of ideas around about what you want your company to accomplish. In this article, we’ll explain how to construct a detailed framework outlining your products or services and how they will engage your ideal customers.
Pinpoint Your Brand’s Goal
Developing a brand strategy without analyzing and understanding your business objectives is ineffectual and a waste of everyone’s valuable time. Your brand’s goal is simply its purpose for existing in the marketplace. To really identify this, ask these questions:
- What problem does my target market have?
- How do my products or services solve this problem?
- Who is my competition?
- What is the story behind why my brand was created?
The problems customers experience are diverse and varied, and some don’t even realize they have an issue at all. This can make marketing difficult since you successfully need to assist people in recognizing they have a problem as well as persuading them that your product or service will solve it.
That’s why it is crucial to pinpoint the exact issues your offerings alleviate for consumers. As you begin to evaluate your customer’s pain points, consider these four areas:
- Monetary: Your customers want to decrease how much they spend
- Efficiency: Your customers want to use their time more proficiently
- Method: Your customers want to streamline their processes
- Support: Your customers want more help or one-on-one attention
Inspecting customer problems and how your brand reconciles them allows you to start thinking about how to position your business better and stand out against the competition as the prime solution to your customers’ issues.
Identify Your Target Market
Once you understand how your company solves peoples’ problems, you need to identify your target audiences. Your ideal market will be made of a combination of different groups, such as customers, vendors, influencers, shareholders, and employees. Get detailed when outlining each. In order to construct a powerful marketing strategy, you need to be very clear about who exactly you are targeting so you can address their unique needs and apprehensions.
And as great as your company may be, your business can’t be everything to everyone. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking your offerings are perfect for all people. They aren’t. Think long and hard about the specific type of person who would most benefit from your product or service. Are they young professional men? Moms in their forties with teenage children and part-time jobs? If you are too generic in your targeting, instead of appealing to a lot of people, you will appeal to no one.
You can also research your competitors and identify who they’re actively targeting to get an idea for your business. Two amazing tools to utilize for this research are UberSuggest and SpyFu. You can learn a lot about other companies that offer your products or services and their marketing strategies.
To get the maximum ROI from your marketing budget, it makes sense to find the group of people for whom your offer is the most compelling: the consumers who will love your product and want to tell all of their friends, family, and followers about it.
Research Your Market
Once you have clarified your business goals and who your target market is, you can begin building out your brand persona. A brand persona is an assortment of character traits, feelings, opinions, and values that your brand displays to connect with a specific segment of your target market. It should mirror and attract each ideal target audience and communicate the benefits of your offerings, how they solve their specific problems, and how they are different from your competitors.
This persona makes it easier for you to understand what type of person you are trying to engage with your marketing. If you don’t know who you are trying to connect with, how will you make an emotional impact with that person? Start by asking these questions:
- What are the demographics of this person?
- What is their age, gender, marital status?
- What is their educational background?
- What is their current job?
- What is their background?
- Where do they live?
A good brand persona is one that you can envision as someone you know. You can create personas in two ways: Using an audience centric approach or a product centric approach. An audience centric approach outlines the customer’s demographics, as detailed above. You can utilize psychographics, which are your customers’ personalities, values, and interests. Conversely, a product centric approach defines your product’s core offerings in terms of how changing one or more of these factors will appeal to an audience, including design, function, price, and time.
Lastly, it’s important to research where your target audience hangs out most of the time so it’s easier to connect with them. Are they scrolling through Instagram? Searching on Google? Watching videos on YouTube? Or none of the above? Discovering the websites, search engines, or social platforms they visit, and use is key to more effectively reaching and marketing to your target audiences.
The End Result
To sum it all up, once you create your brand strategy, it’s important to apply it to all your marketing and communications with your customers. This includes your website and your social media channels. Make sure that everything is aligned so your purpose and your values are reflected in everything you do. By focusing your brand strategy on pinpointing your business goals and discovering your target market, you will effectively connect with customers, meet their needs, and develop long-term and profitable relationships with them.
Now you have completed this 4-part series, you are well on your way to effectively brand your business.
Business Consulting Services: If you’re a small business owner looking to start or improve an online business then let me show you how to benefit from my experience. I have helped several online resellers grow their businesses by developing an online strategy to sell on Amazon, eBay or any other marketplace. Call me at 310-574-2541 or email me at Pez@Pezlogic.com for a complimentary business review.
One thought on “Branding 101: How to Build a Powerful Brand Strategy – Part 4”