14 Steps to Building a Brand Strategy Framework
So you’ll probably have heard me preach about the importance of have a solid brand strategy in order to build a long term sustainable foundation for business growth. But what exactly does that mean?
Well, fair to say it’s not just about creating a pretty logo and have a consistent colour palette, there is sooo much more that goes into building a brand that connects to an audience and ultimately converts into paying clients and customers.
So let me give you a 14 step framework that you can follow to
- Internal Brand
Your internal brand is the foundation for everything. These should include your Vision, Mission, Purpose and Values and they should be created by the leadership team as the compass to guide every decision that you make as a business.
2. Define your Target Audience
This is where you should start to dig really deep to uncover exactly what your clients and customers want. We’re not just talking about listing out demographics here, but really going deep into psychographics, challenges, desires and emotions. Once you understand what makes your ideal audience tick, it becomes so much easier and far more powerful to connect to them.
3. Map your Market Landscape
You need to get a good handle on your competitor market, going deep into research and analysis to understand where they excel and where they are lacking. This work should identify any market gaps or unmet needs, helping you to see where you could play and shine brighter.
4. Uncover your Market Position
Once you’ve identified the gap in the market, you can start to build out your point of difference. How will you turn heads? Will you be faster? Stronger? Better? Different? What makes you remarkable and why should anyone care?
5. Shape your Brand Personality
As humans, we’re all connected through our personalities, through the characteristics that we are attracted to. If we recognise characteristics in others that we are attracted to, then we’re more likely to be open to listening to what they have to say. The same goes for brands. If you want to connect to your audience on a deeper level, then develop your brand’s personality taking into account what characteristics your audience like, essentially making your brand more human.
6. Develop your Brand’s Tone of Voice
Once you have your brand personality, you can start to bring it to life through your brand voice. It’s an opportunity to inject a bit of personality into certain situations! If you’re a personal brand then you really need to just write as you speak! If you’ve got an overarching business brand then you need to consider words ou do and don’t use…but whatever you do, stay away from being generic and overly formal. That’s one of the first ways that you’ll turn people off.
7. The Message Behind the Strategy
You now understand your audience and what makes you different, so now it’s all about clarifying the message behind the strategy. What are you saying and how are you going to say it? And don’t forget to answer the key audience question….what’s in it for me? Once you’ve got the key message nailed, you then explain the reasons why your brand is not just about the transaction. What else do you stand for? What do you believe in?
8. Craft your Brand Story
As humans we’re 22x more likely to remember stories than we are to remember facts as it really is built into our DNA (proven by neuroscience). So if you want to develop a more engaged audience, it makes sense that you use story telling as a key tool to help you to do so. Crafting your brand story as well as using other metaphors and story telling structures is essential for building a brand that really connects.
9. Develop your Brand Name and Tagline
A lot of business owners develop brand names based upon personal or emotional attachments. But based upon all of the information that you have developed previously, your brand name and tagline can become so much more powerful as another tool to be used to connect to your audience.
10. Design your Brand Identity
Most people will start building their brand here (come be honest, has that been you in the past?) But hopefully you can see from all of the previous steps that have gone before, your brand is definitely not your logo. The visual identity of your brand has far more power and meaning to it when it’s based upon all of the information that you have created.
Bringing to life the strategy based on all the info you have created, makes the design even more important!
11. Design your Brand Collateral
Your collateral is the ‘stuff,’ that communicates your brand to others such as your website, business cards, brochures, point of sale, etc, etc. Think about how you can bring your brand to life at every touch point because remember, every interaction that your clients or customers have with your brand is another opportunity for them to get to know you and what you’re about.
12. Devise your Brand Awareness Strategy
Your brand awareness strategy is essentially your marketing plan. This is where you will answer the question…
“Where do my audience hang out and where are they most likely to be open?”
You then develop specific messages for each of these environments.
13. Launch your Brand
How you launch your brand will depend upon how and where you want to put your message out there. It will also depend upon the budget that you have and whether you’re going to be focusing on paid or organic marketing. Whatever your strategy, it’s all about getting your brand in front of your audience.
14. Analyse, optimise and evolve
Understand what success looks like to you. Consider what metrics you will use to track and measure your success, then do more of what is working and stop and doing what isn’t. Simple right?
Have you found this helpful? Let us know in the comments!
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