Your brand is more than your logo, name or slogan — it’s the entire experience your prospects and customers have with your company, product or service.

Your brand strategy defines what you stand for, a promise you make, and the personality you convey. And while it includes your logo, color palette and slogan, those are only creative elements that convey your brand. Instead, your brand lives in every day-to-day interaction you have with your market:

• The images you convey
• The messages you deliver on your website, proposals and campaigns
• The way your employees interact with customers
• A customer’s opinion of you versus your competition

Branding is a marketing practice that helps individuals to differentiate your business’ products or service from others. Branding often involves creating elements such as a logo, mission statement, and design that is consistent throughout each marketing communication type.

Your brand is a representation of who you are as a business, and using effective brand strategies can help your business to grow and reach beyond your target audience.

Managing a brand is hard work, and it’s more challenging when you’re in an oversaturated market where every brand looks the same.

One of the crucial steps to growing in an oversaturated market is highlighting what makes your brand unique — which is what strategic branding is all about.

With strategic branding, you future-proof your brand and develop it in a way that differentiates you from others. By communicating uniqueness to customers, you strengthen your selling power, brand value, and customer loyalty.

Developing a long-term plan for building your brand can seem like an overwhelming task. Where do you start? There are 10 steps that can give you a solid foundation on which to build.

1. Pick your niche(s)
2. Define your business and marketing goals
3. Conduct brand research
4. Spotlight what makes you different
5. Think of your business as a person
6. Craft an exceptional customer experience
7. Get involved with your community
8. Create and maintain a high-quality
9. Develop your visual identity strategically
10. Unify your social media accounts

With so many branding strategies to choose from, it may be difficult to pinpoint which branding types work well for your business. Some of the best ways to select the proper branding strategy begin with understanding what branding is and defining your brand identity.

Once you learn how to position yourself as a brand and you take advantage of brand strategies, you will be on your way to earning brand loyalty, recognition, equity, and awareness.

Personal Branding
Product Branding
Corporate Branding
Service Branding
Co-Branding
Online Branding
No-Brand Branding

A strong strategy is everything for the success of a brand. You need to have a unique identity, quality content, and consistency to reach customers and foster customer loyalty. Since a brand strategy means a lot for a company’s success, we’ve prepared several steps you should take to reach your long-term goals.

1. Identify mission, vision, purpose, and values. Every brand has a set of principles and beliefs it carries through its existence in the market. Mission, vision, purpose, and values can help you obtain customers and encourage them to stay with your company. You need to create statements that clarify your purpose and values. Answer questions that will enable customers to understand your mission and vision.
2. Define your brand essence. You need three key elements for your brand strategy: personality, voice, and tone. To identify your brand personality, you need to find human characteristics for your company. Your brand can be exciting, cool, sophisticated, luxurious, active, etc. Besides, personality should reflect your values, mission, and purpose. The next step is to identify your brand voice, the way you’ll speak to your target audience. It should be unique and recognizable. With the tone, you convey your attitude towards customers. It can be respectful and friendly. It encompasses words, phrases, writing style, and the emotional tone you choose to communicate with your customers. Lastly, tailor your messaging to convey your value and who you are.
3. Work on your visual assets. Most customers rely on visual associations when they think of a brand. That’s why your company needs a visual identity. It includes a logo, colors, visuals, and font. These unique assets represent your brand and differentiate it from competitors. A strong visual identity will help you create an emotional impression and connection with your customers and update them about the product you provide.
4. Develop guidelines. This step is necessary to write rules for those who create content. A brand guideline is especially useful if you work with freelancers. With its help, they will understand your goals, ways to create content and communicate with the target audience. You’ll control consistency across teams and ensure the quality of content they make.

A strong brand is critical for building connections with customers. A successful brand strategy can help improve loyalty, drive brand awareness, build repeat business, and inspire word-of-mouth marketing and referrals. 

Brands without effective brand strategies can become diluted, weak, or forgettable. Without a knockout product experience (and even with one) it’s easy for customers to move on rather than commit to a repeat purchase.