Branding is extremely important for any kind of business because it helps you define your brand, stand out from the crowd, find a loyal audience, and so on. Here are 10 Branding Strategy Tips To Help Your Business Survive.
Table of Contents
1 Determining Your Target Audience
First and foremost, you need to determine your target audience. This is the first step towards pretty much any kind of marketing beginnings you might want to undertake. In fact, it is essential for you to understand who your target audience is to be able to continue building your strategy based on that information.
There are different ways you can determine who your target audience is. Firstly, you could do your own research by collecting the necessary data on the Internet or looking back at your past customers. Secondly, you can consult with the experts in your field asking them about who your target audience might be.
Thirdly, you can analyze your competitors to understand what their target audience is like because it will probably be just like yours.
2 Researching the Market
Now that you know who your target audience is, you will need to research the market. In many ways, determining your target audience and researching the market are similar to each other and need to be done simultaneously for the best results.
This is why it is better to complete these two steps together at the same time.
Researching the market helps you understand how much demand for your particular products currently exists and whether or not it will be profitable for you to be selling your selected products. Perhaps you might need to remove some from your product list and maybe add others that are within your niche.
This way, you will still have a complete product line that focuses on a particular group within your industry while every product has enough demand.
3 Defining Your Brand Image
The next step is defining your brand image. This is an abstract concept, but the gist of it is that you need to create a certain personality or character for your brand that you will present to the public and use to attract your target audience.
With a defined brand image, it will be much easier to create a working digital strategy and improve your branding.
For instance, you will probably use your brand image in your content. When you hire a copywriter you will present them with the main characteristics of your brand image to explain what kind of voice you expect them to use in their text, what tone they should adopt, what phrases and words they should avoid, what format you want them to use, and so on.
4 Creating A Framework
Creating a framework for your brand is closely connected to defining your brand image. To put it simply, your framework will help you to maintain consistency and make sure that all the content you create and publish online maintains that particular brand image you are going for.
In other words, defining your brand image is the decision part, and creating a framework is the practical part when you translate your decisions into words.
The best way to document your framework is by compiling a content creation guide where you list all the content types you will be creating, how you will be formatting these pieces of content, what quality standards you have for every type of content, what topics you will be covering, which channels you will be using to publish the content, etc.
5 Standing Out from the Crowd
Your brand image is a way for you to stand out from the crowd. However, many businesses try to imitate other similar businesses when it comes to language tone, visual style, etc. For example, trying to appear “human” and being as friendly as possible is now the biggest trend in content.
Yet, there are some brands like Wendy’s who like roasting competitors and replying with snappy one-liners to their customers.
Of course, it is much safer to be friendly – but that doesn’t mean that you can’t alter this friendly tone to create your own brand image.
For instance, if you sell essential products at accessible prices, you could start using jargon and slang in your content to show that your content is created by real people and you want to find a connection with your audience.
6 Publishing Content Consistently
Speaking of content, the next step is to start publishing content consistently. You need to make sure that everything you create is created by certain deadlines and published accordingly.
In other words, you want to have a schedule for the content you put out for your audience rather than posting it once in a while “when you feel like it”.
To maintain this consistency, you can hire writers who will be creating your articles, social media posts, and other text content as well as illustrators who will be creating illustrations, diagrams, infographics, etc.
Writers, for example, can be found with the help of a review site like Pick The Writer which allows you to compare writers based on their reputation, prices, ratings, experience, skills, and so on.
7 Building an Online Community
Once you start publishing content consistently, you will start building your online community. You need to understand that this will take time and you shouldn’t expect it to happen overnight (though going viral is still a possibility), so be patient and methodical with your digital marketing strategy and your progress.
The best platform for building an online community is obviously social media. Decide which social media sites will have the biggest share of your audience and create social media profiles for your business. You can also use your blog and website for building your community.
If you choose this approach, you will need to ask your readers to subscribe to your mailing list to be able to reach them regularly.
8 Developing Long-Term Relationships with Customers
By growing your online community, you will already be doing a lot. However, you still need to remember that your relationships with customers still matter, even if you decided to focus on getting as much exposure as possible without most of this audience purchasing anything from you.
Developing long-term relationships with customers is vital because selling to existing customers is much cheaper than acquiring new ones.
One tactic that you can use to constantly keep in touch with your customers is email marketing. Another one is social media marketing.
But to really encourage your past customers to make purchases again and again, you will need to host sales, introduce a loyalty program, offer gifts and discounts, and provide special offers.
9 Rephrase Your Messages
Rephrasing your messages might seem like a very small step on your way, but it is very important. More often than not, you will be using one or two messages within a certain piece of content – or maybe even within an entire campaign.
These can range from “Follow our social media accounts!” to “Buy our latest hand cream!”
The problem, however, is that you can’t really use these messages over and over again in the same form. If you do this, it will be too obvious and even annoying for your audience.
This is why rephrasing your messages and making them sound less obvious will make your words sound more genuine and your content less sales. By the way, these messages are pretty much your calls to action.
10 Finding and Integrating Innovation
Last but not least, finding and integrating innovation into your branding will be very useful for everyone who wants to develop rather than staying on one stage without any kind of improvement. And development is more important than you may think. It ensures that you maintain your competitive edge.
The first way to integrate innovation is by following the latest trends. Another way is by using tactics and technologies from other industries.
You can also try to find new ways to use the technology you are already using in your strategy. Basically, “new” is the keyword here no matter how you look at it.
Final Thoughts
We hope you have enjoyed these 10 Branding Strategy Tips To Help Your Business Survive. All in all, developing a branding strategy by following the steps in this article will help your business survive and grow.
Make sure to create a detailed plan that you will follow and stick to it as closely as possible. If you’re serious about learning brand strategy, we highly recommend learning brand strategy online with the Brand Master Academy. It’s an awesome course that is highly enjoyable, and jam-packed full of knowledge.
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Author Bio
John Edwards is a writing specialist who is looking for ways of self-development in the field of writing and blogging. New horizons in his beloved business always attract with their varieties of opportunities. Therefore, it is so important for him to do the writing.