What would you do without your smartphone’s GPS?
A stellar brand marketing strategy serves a similar role, giving your company direction and steering you toward a chosen goal.
- Promote a new product
- break into an industry
- or just capture the hearts and minds of millions.
It’s all possible when you have a brand marketing strategy that makes sense and gets you ready to make waves.
What is a brand marketing strategy?
A brand marketing strategy is a long-term plan intended to guide your business toward a set goal. That goal should be specific to your brand but is typically linked to profitability, with tasks intended to
- help grow your customer base
- increase revenue
- and boost overall brand visibility
Brand marketing strategies are a combination of documents that outline what your brand is and a blueprint that lays out where your brand wants to go. Everyone in your company and all those who join later should be able to look at your strategy and understand what they have to do to stay on brand and how to do their jobs in a way that helps propel the company forward.
What does a strong brand marketing strategy entail?
Brand marketing starts with shaping what the brand is all about.
A brand’s identity includes:
- it’s core values
- Mission
- Messaging
- the nuts and bolts of what everything from its website to team business cards will look like.
Choose a logo, brand colors, packaging designs, and a website layout that feels authentic to your purpose, product/service, and industry before you start building a strategy and you’ll be starting with a sturdy foundation.
From there, a strong brand marketing strategy should:
- Identify your target audience
- Emphasize your key differentiator
- Speak to consumers’ pain points
- Include metrics to measure the success of each element of the campaign (check out our post on top metrics to track)
- Share your brand story whenever possible
- Fill gaps left by your competitors
- Always, always, always be cohesive and coherent (no leaving your readers confused — if they’re wondering whether your social media feed was hacked, you’re doing something wrong)
Why do you need a brand marketing strategy?
A brand marketing strategy solidifies what your brand is and ensures everybody is on the same page as you chase down your dream.
Without a strategy, you risk having different departments using different logos or you might realize you’re spending a ton of money on marketing campaigns that don’t speak to your core audience.
Remember Kendall Jenner and the Pepsi commercial mishap?
Somebody in that marketing meeting forgot to refer to the soda conglomerate’s branding before they decided to alienate a good chunk of their customer base. It’s not that their intended “global message of unity, peace and understanding” was a bad idea, it’s that it was done in a way that didn’t feel authentic.
On the other hand, using your brand marketing strategy as a sort of touchstone that guides all your brainstorming, design, and consumer-facing interactions ensures you always come back to who you are and what you want to be. Brand marketing should be deliberate above all else.
Creating a brand marketing strategy can be a tricky process. Let the experts at Aliste Marketing create a customized brand marketing strategy for your business.
