Three key steps to start building your brand strategy

First thing’s first, I wanted to get something out of the way from the outset of this article, and that is that brand is not just your logo or the colours that your website uses. Nor is it a vague list of values or something that just consumer marketers do.

Building a recognisable brand is now essential to drive long-term growth and revenue. Not only does brand building set you apart in often overcrowded marketplaces, but with the right strategy it can attract customers and enable you to grow long-term.

For a brand to grow there are a number of steps to take that are deep rooted in overall marketing strategy, it’s something you work towards to understand how your company and products are perceived and a clear indication of how you turn up for your ideal customers and showing why you’re the obvious choice.

However, I see a lot of companies decide that building a brand strategy isn’t ‘necessary’ as they ‘don’t need to do anything to the website’.

I chose not to get myself dragged into this and politely ended the call. They didn’t want an expert. As an expert would have made it clear that:

A successful brand strategy crafts together your ICP, your messaging, how you position yourself, and aligns that with your goals and the customer needs. This then provides a consistent blueprint of how you’re going to show up across all channels with execution and is tied together with your overall brand personality and tone of voice.

It’s strategic, it takes time, it is essential.

How can you start to build a long-term brand strategy?

1. Start at the beginning to define your brand identity

This activity is part of your overall marketing strategy and is the most important part of your brand building process. This is because all of the work you put in here will build the foundational brand blocks of all activity moving forward.

Here, you should start to workshop and document:

Target Audience: Identify who your ideal customers are and understand their needs and preferences. You should ideally talk to your customers and find out what made them sign up with you, what they are using your product to do and where they get their industry information from. You can see the post on how to build an ICP here for reference.

Unique Selling Proposition (USP): Determine what sets your business apart from competitors in your particular marketplace. Make sure you analyse direct and indirect competitors, and not those that you aspire to be competitive against. You can find out how to start building your competitive analysis framework here.

Mission and Values: Clearly articulate what your business stands for and what you believe in. What values do you have as a company and how are these values are beneficial for your customer. This will serve as a starting point to start building your overall story and narrative.

2. Set your brand narrative and establish a storytelling framework

You can still have a brand in look and feel but to really bring it to life you will need a compelling narrative of your why and how. This ultimately builds trust and authenticity, which in turn will develop into revenue and upsell. So, how do you build that trust within your target audience?

• Start to develop a brand story that connects with your audience on an emotional level. How did the business come to be? Does the product/business solve a core problem and how has that evolved? Who are the humans behind the brand?

• What is the most important story to convey and how? What are the core milestones that need to be celebrated and which stories on which channels will be key to build that trust and authenticity.

• Start testing your narrative through LinkedIn with your founder front and centre.

Here you should also already have an idea about what your brand image and tone of voice should be from what starts to gain traction.

3. Create a consistent brand image (now you’ve set the strategic foundations)

All of your hard work in building the foundations of your brand narrative have led you to this point and also the step that most would associate with the term ‘brand’. By the time you get to this stage there will already be an image in your mind of the personality and the voice of your brand and that all now needs to be captured and brought to life.

Visual branding: this needs to reflect your values and what you stand for as a company. If you already have a brand and it needs a refresh, you’ll need a designer who specialises in brand design, and they’ll be able to take you through colour theory, what a refresh means and also what assets you’ll need to update.

Once you have a visual brand you are happy with, then you will need to update the brand on all assets and material. Start internally so that your organisation embraces the change and understands why a uniform brand is important externally. Once that’s complete, then you can start to update externally. Be sure to stick to your newly created brand guidelines.

A tone of voice document is a clear definition of a brand’s personality and how this can be communicated externally. Like visual branding, a uniform tone of voice is essential as it not only defines what you want to say but also how you say it. With tone of voice mentioned, the big players like Monzo and Oatly come to mind but it’s also a huge part in B2B and small businesses too - your tone of voice will resonate with your customers and filter down through all of your channels.

Of course, brand building is an ongoing process which can take years to perfect. This is why brand is always a long-term strategy and will always continue to attract new business even when solid leads are hard to come by. It’s an important process to establish and involves more than just the marketing team in a business to manage. Your company’s brand image is the most important thing you can cultivate and should always be carried out with care. Once you’ve built these blocks and created your strategy, then you’re in a great position to start delivering your activation plan and start measuring the results.