Brand Strategy – The Key for Building a Successful Brand

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

Building a brand or business doesn’t come easy, there is so much work to do and so many things to learn. It has been statistically shown that 30% of new businesses and brands fail within the first two years.

So what is it really that contributes to the failure of a new brand? Is it the brand name, which is not easily readable and memorable? Is your brand identity the problem that contributes to the risk of failure or is it the lack of understanding about your target audience and how to connect with them on a deeper level with empathy and understand the problem they are looking to solve. 

Every marketer will tell you, you need to understand your target audience, and make a persona, that will fix all your marketing problems because you will be speaking their language, or that you need to do SEO and make a content strategy for long term success. Is that really true? Well let us discover what Brand Strategy is and how despite all these things that contribute to the risk of failing it can help us solve this problem and why you require Brand Strategy for your business.

What is Brand Strategy?

Brand strategy in simple words is the ultimate plan for the direction your business will follow to reach its goals. It does that by building upon some critical components that when stacked upon each other will give you the actionable steps required to create a plan that will step by step incorporate all the essential elements a business needs to reduce its chance of failure.

It is the most effective for small businesses which have a good understanding of their product or services that they offer and the challenges their audience requires a solution to. However it is also a very powerful tool for startups since brand strategy helps you build the same understanding in exchange for research that a small business would have built over time with experience.

A good brand strategy incorporates these 5 things:

1. Mission, Vision, Goals
2. Brand Personality
3. Target Audience and Research
4. Gap Analysis and Competitor Research
5. Brand Positioning
6. Roadmap / Actionable Plan

What are Mission, Vision, Goals for a brand?

These three variables are the core component of your brand strategy and defines what your business is about and why your audience should care about its existence. Your mission helps define your mission statement, vision defines the foreseeable future of your brand or business.

Both of these are more internally focused towards motivating your employees and partners about what impact they’re making by contributing in the combined effort. Goals is more focused towards understanding the requirements of a brand, whether they are revenue goals, awareness goals or sustainability goals.

Defining our goals at the first stage lays the foundation to calculate the effort that will be needed to reach them when building a Roadmap and our Actionable plan, therefore it is important these three things are defined at an early stage so everyone gains clarity on the long-term goals that are being worked towards.

What is Brand Personality?

At this stage it is all about defining the experience a customer and your staff will have when they interact and engage with your brand at any given medium, in-person or online at any social media platform.

Having a well defined Brand Personality ensures the experience is consistent where ever they interact with your brand. Why is this important you may ask? Well let me share a personal experience and I believe many of you will find this relatable to Brand Behavior.

Have you ever shopped at a brand store? I once went to J. a local Pakistani clothing brand which has now gone international primarily focusing in men’s clothing. I bought a couple of clothing pairs for an upcoming event we call Eid, which is celebrated every year.

Since I was in a hurry and had pending tasks that needed my attention, I bought the pairs without checking whether they fit me properly or not, after a few days had gone by I decided to check how they fit, and unfortunately it was not well. I decided I will go back and get the sizes changed, even though it had been a few days and I had already unpacked them from their packaging, to my surprise J. took good care of me and exchanged them only asking for purchase proof which I already had. This made me a loyal customer of J. and I have been shopping for my Eid clothes there for the past 5+ years, many people have had the same experience at any franchise of J. they had gone to, which shows us how consistent experience will fuel the growth of your brand by peer recommendations and will play a great part in your customers recommending your brand forward. 

Had I faced a negative experience where I had lost my hard earned money and wasted my time going back and forth, I would have found a alternative which provided me a good brand experience. That is why consistency and a well crafted Brand Personality will create a path for sustainable growth of your business.

What are the benefits of identifying Target Audience and doing Research?

Once we define our Brand Personality, it becomes clear the type of Target Audience we ourselves want to serve because now we know what attributes our brand will possess and what kind of people would be attracted to those attributes. This makes the process of defining the Target Audience very easy and the only research that is needed to be done is for developing a deeper understanding of our audience is their possible salary ranges, positions in organizations etc.

Once we have that information we will plan out the touchpoints, these are the stages of a customer buying journey which they go through to reach the bottom of your marketing funnels and convert to a client and further become loyal fans. Understanding this will help us maximize our marketing efforts to gain more revenue and sales by generating more leads and optimizing our outreach to the ideal audience.

How Gap Analysis, Brand Positioning and Competitor Research helps generate brand awareness?

This is where it is time to take advantage of the SWOT analysis and find the strengths available to your business and how it can be differentiated from the competitors, it is crucial to go through the previous stages and then do this stage because it will define how you position your product/service in the market, allowing you to claim market share and de-position your competitors.

Once you have this nailed down your Marketing Strategy will become clear, it will allow you to understand what pain points to target, how to present them, how to be different and last but not least how to build awareness. There are many different brand positioning strategies, and this stage will clarify which one would be most effective.

Final Roadmap and Actionable Plan

Once we have completed the previous stages, we are now at the end-game. We have full clarity of our mission and the goal we are working towards, we know what experience we want our staff and customers to have when they are engaging with our brand, we know exactly what our target audience needs and how we can reach them, what mediums would work best for our marketing efforts, whether it is Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing or any other marketing strategy, at this stage we would have completely defined the type of brand and the target market its going to approach. This would have provided us clear vision of what the objective is and how to achieve it reducing the risk of failure by ten-folds since you will no longer be experimenting with different things to find what works, instead take action on what is evidently going to work towards creating an effective brand.

Conclusion

What would your business look like with a well crafted brand strategy that incorporated all this stuff? Hopefully you found this valuable and understand how many risks can be avoided by investing into building a brand strategy that will guide you step by step on how to reach your objective.

It is clear that creating a brand or business is no joke, and requires a lot of skillsets to work together to minimize the risk of failure, an out of this world idea poorly executed wont be able to make the impact it possibly could have and that’s how many ideas reach their end. If you want to take your business / brand idea and craft it with the finest strategies.

We recommend working with a brand strategist or brand strategy consultant who has deeper understanding of the terms mentioned above. It is important not only to understand those terms, but also have other skills under the belt such as Digital Marketing, Buying Psychology and Graphic Design to fully utilize the power of Brand Strategy, since the core concepts that are defined in Brand Strategy are going to further expand into these fields and being able to convert the strategy to actionable steps is only doable when you are working with an expert who knows these skills.

If you would like to build your brand strategy and positioning with us click here and work with Brandvil’s CEO one on one to elevate your business and outshine your competition.

FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions

How long does it take to make a Brand Strategy?

It usually takes 1 to 2 months to craft a well put together Brand Strategy that is fully matured and researched, usually it is done in stages, going from Mission, Vision, Goals to Roadmap and Actionable Plan.

How much does a Brand Strategy Package cost?

Usually a Brand Strategy Packages ranges between $5,000 to $30,000 depending on the stage of your business and type of business you are working towards establishing, some agencies price based on percentage of annual revenue, at Brandvil we provide Brand Strategy services ranging between $5,000 to $30,000 depending on whether it is just strategy development or additional implementation as well.

Is there any payment plan for Brand Strategy at Brandvil?

Yes we do offer a Payment Plan that is based on Stage Completion, the total cost would be divided into 5 Payments for 5 Stages of the Strategy Session.

Is there any criteria to purchase a Brand Strategy Package?

Yes, since we can only do a handful of strategy sessions each month, we only take on-board businesses that meet our criteria. Our criteria is as follows:

1. No Adult Entertainment, Political or Religious Businesses.
2. Individuals / Organizations with a Strong Belief in the Solution offered by their Product / Service.
3. Businesses that have the Potential to Generate $50,000+ Annually.
4. An effort towards building a nurturing and friendly relationship.

If you believe you qualify according to our criteria, you can apply by clicking here.

Is there availability of Marketing and Brand Identity Services at Brandvil?

Yes, you can avail those services by contacting us here.