A Complete 8-Step Brand Building Guide 2024!
Introduction
Your company isn’t just the name, the logo, or the people who run the business. It’s the stories you tell, the values you uphold, and the experiences you deliver. All these factors contribute beyond our imagination in the quest to build a connection with a target audience.
Believe it or not, you are one branding strategy away from exceptional customer loyalty, unmatched competitive edge, and ever-lasting long-term success. Therefore, here we’ll explore the steps required to build an effective branding strategy.
Let’s get started with the fundamentals, shall we?
What is a branding strategy?
A branding strategy is essentially a well-developed plan that entails the brand’s mission, values, target audience, unique selling points, and more, helping the business —
Build reputation
Communicate with audience
Maintain brand identity
It can also be considered a guide or blueprint that helps consistently deliver a cohesive message, establish a recognizable brand, and ensure the customers resonate with the company.
Key benefits of branding strategy
But, why even develop a branding strategy? Is opening a store (physical or virtual) not enough?
Well, the primary benefit of a strong branding strategy is its ability to make your business more recognizable and memorable.
It offers a significant competitive advantage that effectively differentiates your products or services from the competition. In return, it attracts customers who resonate with your brand identity.
Moreover, consistent and clear branding increases customer loyalty — encouraging repeat purchases as customers develop trust and emotional connections. Such loyalty leads to more repeated sales, driving consistent revenue.
Additionally, a credible brand boosts trust, making customers more likely to choose your products and services over others. In other words, you’ll ultimately experience an increase in revenue while establishing your business as a reliable industry leader.
How to build a branding strategy?
Now that you’re well-acquainted with the concept and benefits of branding strategy, let’s discuss the steps to build a world-class branding strategy for your company —
1. Establish brand identity, font, and color
Assuming you already have a name for your company, a branding strategy starts with giving your brand an identity, i.e., a well-designed logo.
How would you know if a logo is high-quality?
Well, the logo should be able to communicate your brand’s personality and trigger the right emotions among your potential consumers.
When designing the logo, give ample attention to characteristics like simplicity, relevancy to the industry, recallability, timelessness, and versatility.
And hey, while you’re onto it, why not develop your brand guideline document as well?
Just mention how you want the logos, fonts, and brand name to be used across all marketing collaterals. (More about it in upcoming posts.)
2. Set business goals and values
When setting up the business goals, focus on nailing these three aspects — 1) vision statement, 2) mission statement, and 3) values statement.
The idea behind these is to define your business and encourage team members to work toward a greater purpose.
Another excellent way to set business goals and values is by breaking everything down into these five parts —
Who you are
What you do
What is your purpose
What is your vision
How you will achieve it
Look, there’s no fixed format to follow when drafting business goals and values. So, you can always get creative with it, i.e., make it more personal to your brand!
3. Define the target audience
Who are you looking to attract through your branding strategy?
We highly recommend thoroughly researching the target market to get well-acquainted with the potential customers.
This will help develop hard-hitting marketing strategies that pull them to your brand.
Define a user persona using characteristics like age, gender, location, income range, education, and more.
You may even look at your competition and study how they approach their customers.
4. Conduct competitive research
Speaking of competition, it’s of utmost importance to discover existing market gaps and turn them into business opportunities.
That’s why we suggest investing in competitor research, which entails an in-depth analysis of competitors’ products, services, pricing structure, locations, marketing campaigns, and advertising strategies.
A SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis will adequately support your branding strategy and generate insights for better product and service development.
Note: For the strengths and weaknesses, focus internally, and for the opportunities and threats, focus on external factors.
5. Decipher brand positioning
When looking for information, do you “search on the internet” or just, “Google”?
Some of the most successful companies have nailed their brand positioning strategy to the point where their brand names have become synonymous with the industry — “Uber” for taxis, “Google” for the internet, “iPhone” for smartphones, and so on.
What did these companies do differently?
They figured out key features and benefits that their competition didn’t offer. They capitalized on affordable pricing, innovation, excellent service, user experience, premium goods, and several other pain points.
In other words, you’ll need to establish a unique value proposition, which a well-drafted brand positioning statement will help you achieve.
6. Focus on brand communication
Until you create a killer brand communication strategy, all this is an exercise in futility.
You need to develop a communication strategy that helps convey your messages. Since you have a business name, it’s time you couple it with a catchy tagline or slogan.
The next step would be to identify the unique and compelling voice that your brand speaks to the general public with — is the brand energetic, fun, and personable or serious, displaying solemn professionalism?
We highly recommend considering the nature of your business, the makeup of your target audience, and the ultimate purpose behind the business to develop an honest and sincere brand voice.
7. Create assets like official website and social media pages
It’s time to put all these collaterals and strategies into action!
For this, you’ll need to strengthen your online presence and make it credible. Start by developing your official business website as all your online marketing efforts will revolve around it.
Simply use user-friendly site builders and CMS platforms to get this sorted. We will explain this in greater detail in our upcoming posts.
Besides a well-designed website, you need well-managed social media accounts as well.
Focus on developing an online presence on major social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (X.com), and LinkedIn, as well as major search platforms like Google, Yelp, and others.
The idea is to ensure your potential customers find it easier to discover your brand online!
8. Invest in organic and paid marketing
Once you build a website and create social media accounts, you’ll need to start pushing out informative and entertaining content that effectively showcases your industry expertise and authority.
Find out what people are searching for on the internet to shortlist the target audience’s challenges and pain points, and start creating content to provide solutions.
We suggest you develop guides, post industry reports, write case studies, and thought leadership pieces, and push them out to your audience through —
Social media marketing
Email marketing
Search engine marketing
But don’t limit your brand to just organic marketing.
Invest in paid advertising (Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads, and more) to generate excellent results in no time, especially if you need to sell products online or quickly generate leads for your business.
Analyze, optimize, and keep experimenting!
The most effective branding strategy is one that never ceases to evolve.
To develop the best version of your branding strategy, you’ll have to ensure a data-driven approach that allows performance analysis, optimization, and experimentation.
It is a guaranteed way to boost brand credibility, increase brand recognition, attract ideal customers, and generate more revenue.
Although we have shared some valuable tips to assist you on your brand-building journey, we highly recommend you outsource the task to seasoned professionals like us.
Simply connect with our branding and marketing experts and we’ll quickly set up a meeting! Stay tuned for more informative content in the future.