Your brand strategy is the most important long-term aspect of business. If your aims are not just to make transactions, but also to create an image of your business within the present marketplace, the branding strategies which you’ll approach will decide whether you’ll celebrate long-term success or not.
There are certain factors that could influence the success of a brand strategy. From proper competitor analysis through to setting up internal structures from the get-go to make sure you have procedures set in place to ensure consistent customer service, adequate workflow, and so forth. During today’s article we’ll take a look at 9 strong factors that could potentially bring your brand to the next level.
The branding strategy that you adopt is made up of more aspects:
- The way you display your name, products, and services
- The unique selling proposition that you’re coming up with
- Your brand’s mission or purpose
- So much more.
It is the most challenging aspect of a newly launched business because it has a huge impact and influence concerning how well your company performs in the longer run.
There are though certain factors that could influence the success of a brand strategy. During today’s article, we’ll take a look at 9 strong factors that could potentially bring your brand to the next level.
1. Define Your Brand’s Value and Purpose (Mission)
It all starts with a simple idea. Then it develops into a plan, and it quickly turns into a business. When you’re starting to work on your branding, the first thing you must do is to define your brand. The question is: “What does my business do, and what value does it give to the marketplace?”
After you figure out how exactly your brand is useful, you can proceed to create a brand mission or purpose. Every professional brand has its own purpose, and it is usually leveraged through marketing campaigns.
For example, Nike’s mission is to bring innovation and inspiration to every athlete out there. Create a mission statement for your own brand, and show it to the public.
2. Understand Your Target Audience
Before you sell anything, you must do proper market research in order to determine what types of consumers are belonging in your target audience. A target audience is a group of individuals which might be interested in what you have to offer. Here’s a good exercise that’ll help you a lot:
Start to imagine your ideal customer. Think about:
- What does he want most in life?
- What are his biggest problems?
- What unfulfilled needs does he have?
- Age/nationality/gender?
- What’s the average yearly salary that he receives?
When you get a clear picture of how your ideal customer looks like, you can start to validate your branding strategy ideas taking him into consideration.
3. Analyze the Competition
If you’re planning to take your brand to the next level, you’d better know what your competitors are doing. After all, you’re fighting over the same target audience so there’s always going to be a fight over customers. Start analyzing your competition and look for the following things
- The quality of their products
- The brands’ messages
- Customer reviews and opinions
- Unique strategies that they’re using
These are enough to start. Take a look at your biggest five competitors’ websites and brands. With much patience, analyze their strategies and look for weak spots. When you discover a deficiency in your competition’s branding, you can leverage that.
Do something that will fix their issue, and let your potential customers notice the difference between you and them. One more thing – make sure that you never copy-paste your competitors brand strategies, or else you’ll McDonald’s as a copy-cat.
4. Focus on Your Brand’s Logo and Tagline
You do realize that your brand’s logo must get stuck in your customer’s heads, right? It must be that good. First of all, a professional brand logo is distributed across all your promotion channels. Your Social Media channels’ profile pages, your business card, and almost every marketing material will also contain your logo.
I’d suggest investing in a professional graphic designer. The person who’s going to take care of your branding design must fully understand your company’s purpose.
Secondly, you must create an amazingly catchy tagline. Let’s use the Nike example again: “Just do it McDonald’s See, it’s just three words, but it’s an awesome message. Your brand’s tagline is essential to your success, as most people tend to remember the taglines which they liked.
5. Develop a Healthy Brand’s Reputation
If McDonald’s wasn’t so tasty, their brand would have to suffer a lot because of their reputation. Everyone knows that McDonalds alters the ingredients in order to become addictive and extremely tasty. Few videos came out showing how incredibly unhealthy it is to eat from McDonalds.
Your brand’s reputation is another differentiating factor between a mediocre and a successful brand. In order to maintain a healthy reputation, you must focus on your customers. The moment you see negative reviews, or you see customers that complain, you must immediately find solutions.
6. Seek Consistent Feedback from Customers
In order to stay on track, a consistent analysis of your performance is necessary. The best way to figure out whether you’re on the right path or not is to seek feedback from your customers. You can do this in plenty of ways.
Michael Hardy, marketing specialist at Australian Writings suggests that:
“You can take advantage your brand’s Social Media presence and get responses directly from your followers. In order to motivate your audience to help you with constructive feedback, offer them an incentive. It could be anything from a special report to a small free e-book.”
The feedback should never stop. It is the only way in which you can find and fix your brand’s issues. In addition, your company’s reputation will improve as a result of all the positive adjustments that are being made.
7. Hire the Right Employees
Your employees are the only ones who are going to assist your activity, so you’d better choose them carefully. The recruitment process must be quite strict, and you should definitely wait until you really feel that they’re good for the team.
The people that you choose to hire must understand your brand’s purpose and mission, and they should resonate with it. If they enjoy the cause and the workplace conditions, there’s no reason for them to perform poorly.
8. Stick to Your Brand’s Purpose
When you start your company, you are declaring your brand’s purpose. According to that purpose, your actions and strategies will be heavily influenced. Here’s something that could sabotage your brand’s success: the inability to stick to your brand’s purpose.
Many entrepreneurs do the big mistake of changing their plans along the way. This is wrong, because you have already stated your mission. Therefore, changing your brand’s purpose will make you lose a lot of reputation and customers.
9. Set High Standards and Eliminate Limits
Do you actually want to become the best in your industry? Unless there’s a big monopoly in the industry (Coca-Cola, Google, Microsoft), no one says that your brand can’t become the best. If your niche market is smaller, there’s quite a big chance to overstep your competitors in time.
Set high standards and goals, and try to eliminate your limiting beliefs. You may think: “But I don’t have the necessary capital” or “But X Competitor is always going to be the best in the field”. These are such damaging beliefs.
Everything starts with you – the owner of the business. If you limit yourself, your company will never become the biggest dog in your niche market.
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Conclusion
If you want to have a strong brand, everything you do has to be qualitative. The employees, the marketing campaigns, the investments, and all the factors that come into play will have a huge impact on your branding performance.
If you care to invest time, focus, and money into these things, you’ll skyrocket your chances to become a big name within your industry.