How to Create a Brand Strategy (+ Challenges)

So, you want to stand out from the other 33 million small businesses out there on the market. What can you do? One of the first things you'll want to do is create a brand strategy for your business to leverage that differentiates it from imitators and earns buy-in from your target audience.

Without further ado, let's explain what a brand strategy is, some of the challenges of creating a brand strategy, and how you can make one.

What Is a Brand Strategy?

A brand strategy is your organization's approach to driving brand awareness and controlling your overall brand image. It can include countless tangible and intangible aspects of your overall marketing strategy.

For example, a blog post like this one can be a tangible part of a brand strategy. Posts like this help pose a brand as an informative resource that helps its audience answer common questions that they might have. It's a resource that people can see at any time simply by clicking a link to this blog or finding it in Google search results (if it ranks well on SERPs).

Another, less tangible, but no less impactful, part of a brand strategy is how front-line employees (like customer service reps) interact with your target audience.

For example, if a service rep projects a calm, collected, and helpful attitude in customer interactions, that helps to establish a brand as reliable. On the other hand, if that rep is rude or unhelpful, the customer comes away with a negative impression of your brand's reliability.

Imagine setting sail without a compass—navigating the business waters without a brand strategy is just as directionless. A brand strategy is your compass, it's the master plan that encompasses specific, long-term goals that can be achieved with the evolution of a successful brand—the combined components of your company's character that make it identifiable.

It's also one of the ways that you can set your business apart from the endless crowd of competitors out there vying for your audience's attention.

Top Challenges in Creating a Brand Strategy

So, you want to create a brand strategy. Before we tackle the individual steps of a brand strategy, let's cover some of the basic challenges you'll face:

• Understanding and defining your brand's unique value proposition. If you want your brand to stand out, you'll need to have a unique proposition that sets you apart from the crowd.
• Aligning the brand strategy with the company's broader business objectives. Before you start ideating on a brand strategy, it's important to know what your goals are. This helps you create a strategy that fuels those goals rather than aimlessly consuming time and resources.
• Ensuring consistency across all touchpoints while remaining flexible to market changes. The bigger your brand and the more channels you plan to communicate it through, the harder it is to ensure consistency. Having a playbook related to your brand guidelines helps alleviate this challenge, however.
• Distilling the essence of your brand into a compelling narrative and visuals. It's one thing to create a brand strategy—it's another thing altogether to translate that into something that resonates with your target audience to drive engagement and meet your business objectives.
• Engaging stakeholders throughout the organization to foster brand alignment and advocacy. If you have a brand strategy, but nobody adheres to it, does it really help your business? Of course not. To make your brand strategy effective, you'll need to get everyone in your organization on board with it.
• Keeping up with the evolving digital landscape and consumer expectations. Times change, and so do the needs of your brand. As new technologies or trends come to the fore, you'll need to revisit and revise your brand strategy to leverage these changes.
• Measuring the impact of your brand strategy and adjusting it based on data-driven insights. No matter how great your brand strategy is, it's important to measure its actual impact on your business. Take the time to assess how your brand strategy is performing so you can change it to realize your goals.

These are just a few of the challenges to creating an effective brand strategy for your business. 

The Key Steps in Establishing an Effective Brand Strategy

To overcome the challenges of establishing a brand strategy that helps your business meet its goals, it's important to follow a consistent process. Here are a few key steps to help you establish a brand strategy that will be useful for meeting your goals:

Step 1: Identify Your Brand’s Core Values and Mission

Before you can even think about logos or taglines, you need to dig deep and unearth the bedrock of your brand: its core values and mission. Start by asking some questions:

• What does your brand stand for? Define the "why?" behind your brand's existence so that you can keep your brand strategy consistent with that reason.
• What are the principles that guide your every business decision? Your brand's core values are the ethical compass for everyone in your organization to follow.
• What's your mission? Establishing a goal to keep in mind helps you create a strategy that addresses that goal more effectively and efficiently. It also establishes your brand's raison d'être, the overarching goal that fuels your passion and pursuit of excellence.

Together, these elements form the foundation of your brand strategy, giving meaning to your marketing and a voice to your vision. It also helps later when you want to ensure that your brand voice is consistent.

Step 2: Understand Your Target Audience and Market

Creating a brand strategy without understanding your target audience is like trying to hit a bullseye while blindfolded after being spun around. Sure, there's a chance you'll hit the target, but it won't be something you can consistently leverage if you don't know how you hit the mark in the first place.

To understand your target audience and market, you need to conduct market research and harness data to get to know your audience intimately—their needs, wants, behaviors, and pain points.

Once you have this insight, you can tailor your brand's messaging and experiences to resonate deeply, fostering a connection that turns casual consumers into loyal advocates.

It can also help to leverage storytelling that turns your target audience into the hero of your brand's story. Here, your brand strategy acts as the guide that helps customers triumph.

Step 3: Developing Your Brand’s Visual Identity

A picture is worth a thousand words, and your brand's visual identity is the canvas where your business's story is told.

Colors, typography, logos, and imagery are not just aesthetic choices; they're visual cues that evoke emotions and convey the essence of your brand. Having a consistent visual identity helps you:

• Make your brand immediately recognizable. If your brand colors, logos, and other visual features are consistent, it's easier for your audience to identify your marketing materials, products, and other collateral.
• Improve memorability. A consistent visual style makes you easier to remember for your core audience. This, in turn, makes you stick out more to those who regularly consume your marketing.

When developing your visual identity, ensure it reflects your core values, resonates with your target audience, and stands out in the crowded marketplace.

Your brand's visual identity should be tailored to fit perfectly and make an impression that lasts.

Step 4: Crafting a Compelling Brand Message and Voice

Your brand message and voice are the heart and soul of your communications. Together, they articulate your brand's promise and how it's delivered to the world.

A compelling brand message is a clear and consistent narrative that tells your audience who you are, what you offer, and why it matters. It's your story, told in your unique voice—a voice that is authentic, relatable, and distinct.

Whether it's through inspiring campaigns, witty social media posts, or empathetic customer service, your brand voice should be unmistakable and unforgettable.

Step 5: Disseminate Your Brand Strategy to Your Key Stakeholders

If the employees acting on your brand strategy don't know what your strategy entails, how can they possibly follow it? The short answer is that they can't.

So, a key step in any brand strategy is finding a way to share that strategy with all of the key stakeholders in your organization. From the marketing managers to the customer service reps, departmental VPs, and everyone in between, everyone needs to know what your brand identity is and your strategy for creating it.

Some best practices for disseminating a brand strategy include:

• Create a formal brand strategy document. In this document, define how each employee role fits into and supports the brand strategy.
• Make the brand strategy document easily accessible. Instead of just emailing the brand strategy to each employee and counting on them to download and read it on their own, consider putting the document in an employee portal site or other resource center. This way, they can access it whenever they need it.
• Test your employees on their understanding of your brand strategy. Verify that your employees understand your brand strategy by holding one-on-one roleplay sessions or group meetings where you can see how they interpret the rules and put them into practice.

Step 6: Review and Refine Your Strategy

Just because you've created a brand strategy doesn't mean you're done. Your brand strategy might not work out or it might succeed massively. Either way, you need to continuously review your results and refine your strategy to optimize your brand strategy to meet your business goals. 

Tracking the right metrics can help you identify what worked, why it worked, and what you could do to make improvements. Without a strong system in place for tracking key metrics, it's impossible to establish if your brand strategy is working, let alone why. 

Once you've collected your metrics, analyze them to determine how well your strategy is performing and what you can do to increase success.

Measuring Success: Key Metrics for Your Brand Strategy

So, what are the best metrics to track to analyze the overall success of your brand strategy and identify your key opportunities to improve? Here are a few suggestions to get you started and how to analyze each.

• Brand Awareness: This metric tracks how well-known your brand is among your target audience. Surveys are one way to track brand awareness.
• Brand Equity: How much does your brand add to the value of a product/service compared to a "non-branded" version of that product/service? Measure the value your brand adds to your products or services through surveys and comparing market data between your brand and others.
• Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty: How satisfied are your customers with your company—and how likely are they to buy from you again? Use surveys and Net Promoter Scores to gauge customer happiness and retention.
• Digital Engagement: This measures how engaged your audience is with the content you generate online. Analyze interactions on social media, website traffic, and content performance to track your overall digital engagement.
• Market Share: This metric helps you measure your brand's position and growth within the industry relative to your competitors. The simplest way to measure this is to compare your company's revenue from a particular market with that market's overall revenue. 
• Customer Lifetime Value: How much is any given customer worth over their lifetime, on average? Knowing your customer lifetime value (CLV) helps you evaluate customer loyalty and how much you should spend on acquiring customers.

These are just a few of the potential metrics you could track as part of your overall brand strategy. Have a favorite metric to track? Share it in the comments below!

Need Help Optimizing Your Marketing Around Your Brand Strategy?

Reach out to the Bluleadz team for website design and ongoing management services that leverage your brand strategy to help you attract and delight customers.