How to Create a Winning Brand Strategy

Successful businesses don’t grow by accident. Having the right people, processes, and finances are all important, but you need one more secret ingredient to attract customers: an effective brand strategy.

Your brand strategy is the main way you differentiate your company from the competition. It affects everything you do, from your PPC ads to your packaging to the new services you offer down the road. The best strategies come from following a process like the one we outline below.

5 Steps to Develop an Effective Brand Strategy

If you’re looking to grow your business, your brand strategy needs to focus on a specific, real-world need in the market. Identifying that need starts with identifying an audience.

1. Choose your target audience

Consumers are constantly bombarded with messages from social media and the world around them. The best way to cut through all that noise is to target your message to a specific group of people you want to reach.

Your brand can’t be everything to anyone. Trying to reach every possible customer leads to a diluted marketing message with no real impact. The more targeted your message is, the more effective it will be — just ask the 94% of marketers in a recent HubSpot survey who reported that personalization boosted sales.

Targeting a specific audience doesn’t mean people outside that audience will never buy from you. It just means you aim to prove that your product is the best choice for that audience. Once you sell to some of your target audience and meet their expectations, word-of-mouth marketing can help you expand your reach.

2. Research your target audience

Your target audience has its own goals, pain points, and circumstances that other consumers don’t necessarily share. If you want to reach them, you need to understand their needs.

There are a lot of different ways to do audience research. In many cases, the best way to learn about your target audience is to interview some of them about their buyer journey and experience with your brand. You can also gain insights in other ways:

• Some SEO tools like Semrush can show you where people who visit your site come from, such as Google searches for specific questions.
• Short surveys and questionnaires let you gather information directly from customers. If you’re not getting responses, you can come up with an incentive for filling them out.
• Customer feedback can show you where your products don’t align with your current customer base’s expectations.
• You can interact with your target audience on social media or study them through social listening.

Keep in mind that your target audience has different concerns at each stage of the buyer’s journey, from the moment they identify a problem your product solves to the moment they decide which product to buy. Take notes on their concerns at each stage.

3. Determine your market positioning

When you know what your target audience wants, you can determine your market positioning based on those desires. You should be able to summarize your market positioning in a brief statement that captures how your brand helps its target audience.

At Rocketship, we usually format positioning statements like this:

To [target audience], [brand] is the [company category] that provides [promise based on the target audience’s needs]. That’s because [something here is different from the competition].

For instance, a private school’s brand strategy might have a positioning statement like this: To parents who prioritize academic excellence and preparation for a technology-based future, Example School is the high school that helps students achieve their potential. That’s because of our evidence-based teaching practices, advanced curriculum options, small class sizes, and wide range of STEM elective courses that help students explore technology careers.

4. Create a brand messaging strategy

The next step is to come up with messages for your target audience at each stage of the buyer journey. Your messages should address the concerns you identified through audience research with ideas that relate to your market positioning.

Most marketers find it easiest to lay out their messages in a document or chart. You can group key messages together with common objections or concerns from your audience, your brand’s response to those objections, and any proof you have to support your claims. At this stage, you can also start to create sample headlines, ads, and elevator pitches.

5. Implement your strategy

Now that you’ve developed your brand strategy, it’s time to put it into action. For most companies, implementation includes the following:

Creating brand identity elements

Your company name, tagline, logo, and imaging should all support your brand strategy. Even if you’re not a new company, you may want to consider changing your brand’s visual identity elements if they create an impression that conflicts with your brand strategy.

Designing a branded website

Your company website acts as the face of your brand, and consumers will definitely interact with you there. Your web design needs to support your brand messaging and speak to your target audience’s needs.

Developing a content marketing strategy

While content marketing has changed a lot over the past few years, it’s still an essential part of your overall marketing strategy. Your brand’s content should address the concerns you identified in your audience research and include your brand messaging.

Brand implementation tips

• Be consistent as you create tools for marketing and sales. Every pitch deck, video, brochure, sale one-pager, and case study should support your brand strategy.
• Get all employees involved. If your employees have a good understanding of your brand strategy, they can do a better job of supporting it through their work.
• Track your implementation progress. It’s easy for brand development tasks to get put off when your employees are busy with client requests and their regular workload. Your team is more likely to implement your brand strategy if you track the process and set deadlines for all of the related subtasks.

Need Help With Your Brand Strategy?

Your brand strategy is the main factor that determines whether people buy from you. If your company could benefit from more expertise in this area, Rocketship is here to help. 

Our agency team includes seasoned brand strategists who can help you identify your target audience, conduct research, determine your market positioning, develop messaging, and implement your strategy. Schedule a consultation with Rocketship today to start building a brand strategy that fuels your business growth.