How customers see your business informs their choice between you and your competitors, and ultimately, how much your business will grow. You need to control that perception, but how? The key is a strong brand strategy.Â
Discover what it takes to build a coherent brand identity and how to build a brand strategy that supports your company’s business objectives and fuels your long-term success.
What Is Brand Strategy and Why Does It Matter?
A brand strategy is your long-term plan for how you define your business to customers. Who are you? What do you stand for? How do you want customers to perceive you? The answers to these questions should all be covered in your brand strategy.Â
Think of all of the puzzle pieces that make your business special. The ones you show to customers are all part of your brand messaging. But why is a clear brand strategy important?
While many business leaders overlook its value, strategic branding has real business impact. When you execute your brand development strategy well, you build pricing power in your industry and develop a loyal customer base built on trust. Part of executing a strong brand strategy is making sure you align it with your marketing approach, so all of your campaigns also serve to strengthen your brand overall, instead of sending mixed signals to your audience.
On the flip side, the cost of skipping brand strategy and positioning is high. Businesses without a defined brand strategy often have to compete on price alone because they haven’t given customers a better reason to buy from them. If you neglect to follow a consistent strategy to build your brand, you may be missing out on sales, profits, and growth opportunities.
What Are the Core Components of a Brand Strategy Framework?
These are the key elements of a brand strategy – a wide range of components related to how you present your business to customers:
- Brand purpose: Why does your brand exist, other than turning a profit? What your brand aims to achieve is what guides all your business decisions, and it needs to resonate with customers.Â
- Target audience: Don’t try to cast too wide a net across broad or assumed demographics. Instead, build your strategy around a few specific customer profiles backed by real market research.
- Brand positioning strategy: How are you different? Why should customers choose your business over other options? The right brand positioning answers these questions and helps build brand loyalty.Â
- Brand voice and tone: Staying consistent with your brand personality and language across every touchpoint makes it easier for customers to recognize and trust your brand. Some of the biggest businesses in the world have distinct brand personalities customers love.Â
- Brand communications strategy: Your communications strategy outlines how your marketing efforts will deliver a consistent message across digital and traditional channels, from email to paid media. You don’t want your branding and message to vary too widely between your channels. Successful multichannel marketing focuses on engaging customers with consistent, recognizable brand messaging.
- Brand awareness strategy: When you’re trying to expand brand awareness, always tie your tactics back to your positioning strategy, so you’re reinforcing the right perception.
With all these components in place, you can start to build brand equity — real added commercial value from having a recognizable and trusted name in your industry.
How Do You Build a Brand Positioning Strategy That Sticks?
If you’re starting from scratch or trying to fine-tune an existing brand positioning strategy, getting all of the elements right can be overwhelming. Focus on following these basic steps.
Step 1: Start with a Comprehensive Audit
Understand how competitors position themselves so you can find the gaps they’re leaving that your brand can step into and own. Looking for the places where your brand can set itself apart is a much smoother path to success than knuckling down and trying to fight your competitors on their own positioning.Â
Many things may make your business special and uniquely valuable to customers. Figure out what they are so you can emphasize them as much as possible.Â
Step 2: Define Your Value Proposition
Your brand positioning answers the question of why a customer would choose your brand over competitors. For example, DuckDuckGo’s value proposition is that it’s a search engine that offers superior privacy features compared to competitors. You’ll notice the company’s ads frequently focus on this difference to win over privacy-conscious consumers.Â
Step 3: Anchor to Customer Truths
Effective positioning should tap into real consumer behavior — something your target audience already believes or wants to believe about themselves. Try to put yourself in the shoes of your target customer. What matters to them? How do they see the world? What frustrates and excites them?Â
Answering these questions can help you create a more compelling brand story and positioning strategy tailored directly to your ideal customers.Â
Step 4: Test Your Positioning Statement
Your brand’s positioning statement should be simple. If you can’t memorize and share it in a sentence or two, it probably needs revisiting.Â
At the same time, it shouldn’t be generic. Is your positioning specific enough to exclude competitor brands that are not you? If your statement is too broad or generic to pass this test, go back to the drawing board. Your statement needs to reinforce your brand’s credibility and value.
How Positioning Connects to Brand Messaging
Once you have strong positioning in place, you can craft more effective, consistent messaging. Your positioning statement will become what your team turns to when creating taglines, headlines, and campaign copy.
Make sure your messaging stays consistent across channels. Whether the message appears in a paid ad or a customer email, it should connect to the same core brand positioning. Consistency helps establish the brand credibility that is a crucial signal for your audience as well as for the AI models that recommend brands to users.
How Do You Put Your Brand Strategy Into Action?
Your next move is to actually execute your brand strategy effectively. Make sure you cover these important steps:
- Document everything: A brand strategy can’t just live in the heads of company leadership. Write it down and make sure every team member has access to it. Everyone needs to be on the same page so your communication is consistent.Â
- Build a brand marketing strategy: Take your strategy and turn it into a concrete plan focused on marketing channels and campaigns that will help you reach your awareness and positioning goals. As you run campaigns, monitor your customer awareness results and make adjustments as necessary.Â
- Train your team: Consistency is key, so make sure your whole team is aligned on the brand strategy.Â
- Create brand guidelines: Brand guidelines serve as your reference point for logo use, color, typography, tone, and messaging — keeping every piece of marketing material consistent across touchpoints. AI tools can help with consistently applying your brand guidelines.
- Review and evolve: Developing a brand strategy is not a one-time project. Audit your plan regularly against market shifts and business growth so it’s always as current and effective as possible.
What Do Strong Brand Strategy Examples Have in Common?
Every brand’s strategy has to be unique, so looking at examples from other businesses is helpful only up to a point. There’s no copying anyone else’s homework here.Â
However, you can learn from the things that a comprehensive brand strategy tends to have in common, such as:
- Clarity of audience: Before you do any strategy development, think about and research who your target audience includes so you can speak directly to their needs, frustrations, and goals.Â
- Consistent positioning over time: Constant reinvention weakens your brand. Instead, focus on deepening your positioning with each campaign.Â
- Emotional and functional balance: Don’t choose between appealing to customers’ hearts and heads — do both. Appeal to the rational and the emotional to get customers to choose your brand and stick with you.Â
- Integrated execution: Make sure your strategy is consistent across channels, from email to pay-per-click (PPC) ads. Nothing should be out of place or discordant.Â
- Strong brand values: Customers want your business to stand for something. Clarify the core values and guiding principles that shape your company’s decision-making to connect with like-minded customers.
Over time, this consistency is what builds brand recognition — so don’t stress about getting everything exactly right on the first try. While you don’t want to lose branding consistency due to constant overhauls, there is room to make adjustments as you see what’s working and what’s not. Focus on building a strategy that accounts for core elements like your brand’s voice, tone, purpose, and values, then measure your audience’s responses and tweak your plan as needed.
Grow Your Business With the Right Brand Strategy
Developing a brand strategy isn’t about hastily coming up with a slogan just to tick a box. Your brand strategy is an impactful, evolving business decision that affects how your organization competes and grows.Â
Make sure you understand how to build a positioning strategy and activate it across marketing so you can become a brand that stands out instead of blending in. If you’re ready to create a brand strategy that propels your business forward, elk Marketing can help you get there.
FAQs
What is brand strategy?
Brand strategy is a documented long-term plan that defines how a business positions itself in the market, communicates its value, and builds a consistent identity that drives customer preference and loyalty.
What is the difference between brand strategy and marketing strategy?
Brand strategy defines who you are and how you want to be perceived. Marketing strategy defines how you reach and convert your audience. Brand strategy should always inform and shape your marketing strategy.
What is a brand development strategy?
A brand development strategy is the process of building or evolving your brand over time, including defining your positioning, refining your messaging, and expanding your brand awareness in a way that supports business growth.
How do you create a brand strategy?
Start by defining your brand purpose, researching your target audience, auditing your competitors, establishing your positioning, and documenting your messaging and visual identity into a set of guidelines your whole team can use.
How do you develop a brand strategy that stands out?
Focus on a positioning that is specific enough to exclude competitors, anchor your messaging to a real customer truth, and execute consistently across every channel so your brand becomes recognizable before your name does.
