What Is Branding and Why Is It Important?

What is Brand Strategy?

A brand strategy is a plan you can use to align your business elements with your target audience, to ensure consistency in all channels. It sums up why your business exists beyond just making profits. An effective brand strategy needs to define what makes your brand what it is, what sets it apart from its competitors, and how you want your target audience to perceive it.

Why is brand strategy important?

Helps you articulate and communicate your core values

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. If you want to attract loyal customers, you need to figure out what your brands stands for, and how to communicate that to consumers.

Creates accountability

In the same vein as the previous point, committing to a clear brand strategy helps keep everyone in your organisation accountable, focused on high-yield initiatives that will actually move the needle rather than glorified busywork.

Strategy helps you stay on track — and if you do fall off track, it helps you refocus and get back to where you need to be faster.

Achieve laser focus in your marketing efforts

By narrowing and clarifying the scope of your marketing efforts, you can ensure smoother and more effective execution of marketing campaigns. You know who you’re targeting, you know what they care about, and you know how to speak to them.

Instead of wasting thousands of dollars A/B testing different campaigns, you’ll hit the mark faster and maximize the return on investment of your marketing efforts.

Increases the valuation of your company

Startups will love this one. Whether you’re planning for an exit, or looking to raise capital from investors, having a clear brand strategy shows potential buyers and investors that you’ve thought carefully about how to grow the most valuable asset of your business, which can help justify a high valuation.

Branding Tips:

Building a brand, is not the same as building a branding strategy. Building a branding strategy is about using your core brand assets like logo, color palette, websites and social media accounts to convey a feeling, emotion or purpose to your audience.

When outlining the goals you would like to achieve, it’s important to think about:

• Brand awareness. What qualities of the brand do we want customers to be familiar with?
• Positive brand associations. What is the first thing that comes to a consumer’s mind when they think about us?
• Brand loyalty. What does a loyal, regular customer look like?
• Perceived quality. When referring us, what qualities will customers highlight in our product or service?
• Brand preference. How do we ensure customers choose us over the competitor?
• Brand experience. What will customers say after trying our product or service for the first time?

How to build a branding strategy

1. Find your purpose Customers are also getting more wary of brand’s exaggerated statements of purpose and there’s more and more distrust—so make sure you can genuinely deliver on what you promise.
2. Identify your core values Your values are right at the core of your brand: what you want to stand for. As with the brand’s purpose, communicating clear values will attract customers who share those values. Those values will also guide your business decisions and help you make strategic trade-offs.
3. Create a brand personality If your brand were a person, what kind of person would it be? This one is a bit less obvious but can really help to guide your choices when it comes to how you communicate. The kind of content you share and the tone of voice that you use with your audience.
4. Pinpoint your positioning Your positioning is all about standing for something specific and meaningful to your customers, something that is different to the other players in the market. You want to be crystal clear on the benefits that your products and services provide.