4 Steps To Planning A Useful Brand Strategy
Your brand strategy shouldn’t be what falls through the cracks – and creating it yourself shouldn’t be intimidating! In fact, creating your own brand strategy will help you learn about your business, your audience, and your market BETTER than if you had someone else do it for you.
Sometimes, learning by doing is the best route to take – so that’s what we’re diving into today: planning your brand strategy on your own.
I have the perfect Brand Personality Freebie for you to go along with this episode! PLUS, you can use the Brand Strategy Framework Template in my shop to create your own strategy from scratch. It’s not as hard as you’d think, and no design experience is needed – just a willingness to learn and do the work yourself!
Now, we all want our brand strategies to be useful. You don’t want to do all this work for something that you’ll never use or reference again. Whatever your background, I want you to be able to walk away from this with some tangible items you can actually accomplish on your own – and it be something that actually helps you out, not something that you have no idea what to do with.
To get started, let’s talk about what a brand strategy usually includes:
- Market & competitor research
- Your unique value & What you offer*
- Ideal audience personas*
- Brand Positioning
- Brand Personality*
- Brand Voice & Tone
- Brand Messaging*
ALL of these are important – and I can help you figure all of them out with the Brand Strategy Framework Template – however, for the purpose of today, I wanted to zero in on just a few of these.
Here are 4 steps to getting started with your brand strategy:
Step #1: Find Your Value
I think the #1 thing you need in order to have a strong brand strategy is to figure out your value. Once this is solid, the other parts of your strategy should come a bit easier – not quickly, but just slightly easier.
If you have something you’re doing, that you’re offering to your clients and customers, that you 100% believe in, it will change the way you go about your day and the way you market your brand.
It will help you when you’re talking about what you do, and will guide you as you put together a strong, useful brand strategy.
For instance, let’s say you’re a coffee shop. Those are everywhere. When people are looking for a cup of coffee, depending on where they are, they can literally have their pick between local or franchise and everything in between. What’s going to make them come to your coffee shop? Is it the different drink options? Is it the customer service experience? Is it the comfort of the chairs and the music and the vibe when they come in to work for a few hours?
It doesn’t have to be this big, grand gesture.
Usually in cases like this, it’s the small things that add up to make customers want to come back again and again.
For my brand, I know it’s the education aspect.
I know that I can offer pretty designs and give you a helpful template from my shop and I’d be doing a decent job in providing what you need.
But for me, I’ve learned that it doesn’t – it can’t – just stop there. People like you reading this are needing more than just a pretty logo or template to use for their brand.
You need to learn about the different parts of a brand, such as what we’re talking about today.
My clients might be coming for a beautiful design, but they stick around for the extra added value I’m offering with my content and educational experiences – such as the guides and videos that come with my shop items, as well as my free content like this podcast, my newsletter, and other things I’m working on that have yet to be released.
That’s what I do differently, and that’s the value I offer that’s different from others in my same space.
Your value ultimately boils down to the 10% edge you have on your competitors – and your ability to point it out and put it on blast in front of your ideal audience day in and day out in a way that they understand, and remember you for.
The best way I know to find the value that you’re offering is to brainstorm and think about the different parts of your business. Of course this includes your services and your products, yes, but also think about your customer service, the experience you offer, and the overarching vision or purpose behind your brand.
Then, find that one, small thing that you’re doing differently that no one else is doing – or that no one else is doing in the way that you do it.
Ask yourself, what – truly – is your value proposition?
It’s not going to come overnight, but if you take the time to think about it – maybe start a brainstorming note on your phone or on google docs – you’re going to figure it out.
Step #2: Your Ideal Audience
If you figure out your value proposition, that will then help you narrow down your ideal audience. Think about it this way:
The type of people that are interested in working in a cool vibey coffee shop for hours on end are those that work from their computer. Maybe they work from home a lot or they’re on a flex schedule, and they just want to get out of their house or out of their normal work space to new scenery to get work done.
You’re going to do whatever you can to attract that type of ideal audience.
For my brand, I want to attract business owners that are small but mighty, that know they need to learn about branding in order to grow. They’re seeking beautiful designs, yes, but they’re also seeking education surrounding those beautiful designs – because they recognize the value of the whole package.
They’re not looking for a $50 logo to call it good.
They’re looking to the future and thinking, “I might be small now, but I want to put myself in a position of growth, and I know my brand has a huge part to play in that.”
Now, there’s more that goes into it, but that’s the very start of my ideal audience persona. Those are the types of people I’m looking for, and strategically planning all of my content and marketing and efforts towards attracting.
But the only way I know that I know that those are my people, is because I first took the time to figure out the value I offer. THEN I was able to narrow down who my ideal customers were – the types of people that are interested in what I offer.
I can’t deep dive into ideal audiences today, but I will help you get started with a few questions (and if you’re interested in learning more, you can head to my shop for the Brand Strategy Framework Template).
Here are those questions:
- Who are you helping and why?
- How does what you offer fit into their life?
- Who do you ideally want to buy from you?
Step #3: Your Brand Personality
Once you figure out your ideal audience, that will then help you find a brand personality. Think about it this way:
You want your brand personality to mirror your ideal audience.
You want them to know, like and trust you – and who better to do that, for your ideal customers, than themselves. Everyone likes themselves, and is always thinking about themselves, (sorry that’s how we are, people are selfish that way) so why not try to attract them by using their own personality.
Okay, this might sound a little crazy so let me explain:
Take the coffee shop example again. We all know that there are many different types of people that go grab coffee through a drive-through, but there are a completely different set of people that would work inside a coffee shop for hours.
Some people don’t like it because it’s loud, they can’t think, they don’t like all of the distraction because of all of the different sounds, sights and smells. While others thrive in it. They can really focus and put their head down and get their work done. (Hi. It’s me.)
So for the people you want to attract inside your coffee shop, you want to mirror their personality and what they love.
Make the chairs inviting, something comfy you could sit on for a bit. Play the music they might like and sing along to. Use words and phrases in your branding and messaging and even on your menu they might know and appreciate.
You see where I’m going here?
You’d cater to that ideal person, in brand experience, brand offerings, and brand personality.
If you want to learn more about defining your brand personality, you can grab that Brand Personality freebie linked in the show notes.
Step #4: Your Brand Messaging
The last step we’re talking about today for creating a useful brand strategy is your brand messaging.
You might have guessed by now that I’m going in this order for a reason:
If you can figure out your brand value > You’ll find your ideal audience > Then you’ll get to the bottom of your brand personality > Which will then fuel your brand messaging.
I know I’ve said this before, but your brand messaging fuels your brand strategy.
I believe a brand’s design can make such a big impact on companies.
But, even I know messaging has just as much to do with your brand as the visuals.
Your brand messaging is how you’re going to communicate what you do to the world. It’s how people are going to learn about you, know you, and come to love you.
It includes a lot of things, but at the very core, it’s your brand vision, brand purpose and brand values.
How you brainstorm and formulate your brand messaging is up to you, but if you get the different parts of your brand strategy figured out that we’ve covered today, it makes it SO much easier to do so in a way that resonates with you, and aligns with your brand and your ideal audience.
For example:
Nike’s “Just Do It” tagline that was coined in 1988 conveys direct, no-nonsense action. It’s stood the test of time – which makes sense because although their offerings and products may have evolved since, their ideal customer has always been the forward-thinking, action-taker type.
Chobani’s “To love this life is to live it naturally.” hits the health-conscious right in the heart. They’re here to serve the people that pay attention to what they put into their body.
These companies didn’t just throw these messages up on the wall one day. They thought about them with purpose and, you guessed it, strategy.
To start forming your own brand messaging, think about some of the different parts, such as:
- Brand vision
- Brand purpose
- Brand values
What of these do you need to write out, decide on, or refine? It’s not that they’re necessarily hard to decide – it’s that you have to take the time to do so.
What’s that big goal you’re trying to achieve as a company?
Why do you do what you do, and who for? What drives your brand and guides you as you work towards these things daily?
I recommend you have a good ‘ol fashioned brainstorming session with yourself to get going, and begin to write things out on paper.
As you go along, you’ll find yourself getting more confident with your messaging and all of the other parts of your brand strategy. But the key here is to allow yourself the time to actually think about it and do the work – it won’t get done by itself, or by anyone else, for that matter.
Using Your Brand Strategy To Keep Your Brand Aligned
It’s important to form your brand strategy sooner rather than later so that you have a backbone to start with and always come back to.
It helps when you’re creating something new, to have something to compare to and against, to make sure that what you’re doing aligns.
That’s really the whole purpose of a brand strategy in general: To have something to put everything you’re putting out there against, so that you know that what you’re doing actually aligns with your brand and what you said you set out to be and do.
To recap:
- Find your value
- Figure out your ideal audience
- Decide your brand personality
- Form your brand messaging
There’s a method to the madness, and although this doesn’t include every single aspect of a brand strategy, these four parts are 100% going to get you started on a good track and they’re probably some of the most important things to figure out first, in my opinion.
Thank you for being here and reading this post – now go out and make YOUR BRAND STRATEGY a sweet one!