Everybody seems to have a different understanding of what a Brand Strategy is, how to develop one, and how to implement one. Some people think it’s a marketing plan, and others believe it’s little more than your logo and color palette. In fact, it’s something we find ourselves clarifying on a very regular basis. So let’s spell it out here in nine straightforward steps.

At Balanced Brands, we prescribe a decisive Brand Strategy Action Plan to help businesses make deeper connections, attract more loyal customers and forge long-lasting relationships. We begin by defining a genuine set of values and beliefs and identifying a unique position in the marketplace. Following these criteria, we develop a brand persona that speaks a certain way and adopts a certain image, to best resonate with our target audience. Understanding our ideal clients, we are able to find them, reach them, and emotionally connect with them, thereby generating better leads and closing more sales.

The Brand Strategy Action Plan

1. BRAND ESSENCE

This section defines your Brand’s Purpose (your “WHY”), Vision, Mission, and Core Values. You and everyone on your team need to be clear on why you’re doing what you’re doing, where you’re going, and how you’re going to get there. Defining this will tint everything you do a certain color. This is the foundation of your brand. And having thought about this, written it down, and talked about it with your team will build brand authenticity and ultimately brand loyalty.

2. POSITIONING STRATEGY

This is absolutely critical. It’s the bare minimum you need to do when thinking about creating a brand – Who are you talking to? Who else is already talking to them? How is what you offer different, or why does it matter?

3. BRAND PERSONA

Once you figured out 1 and 2, you can develop a brand persona that is based on your audience persona. We can create a brand personality that is attractive to our ideal client and at the same time looks different from our competitors. To be able to do this we have to know what our audience desires and what kind of help from what type of person they’re looking for. And we have to have done some research into our competition to make sure we don’t look and sound the same. You can’t really do this part properly without having done 2.

4. VERBAL/VISUAL EXPRESSION

After we have figured out the brand persona archetype our audience is attracted to, it will be a lot easier to figure out the verbal and visual expression of that personality. A Caregiver archetype sounds and looks different than an Explorer archetype, for example.

Your brand archetype is expressed verbally through your brand name, tagline, core message, and the story of your audience’s journey. The visual expression includes your logo, brand colors, fonts, textures, icons, the images you use, etc. Most people start here. As you can see, trying to create a logo or color palette without being clear about what you’re trying to say and to whom can’t really be very effective.

5. MARKETING STRATEGY

Through the research we have done into our audience and competition we now know where to find our audience and how to best reach them. From here we can create a powerful marketing strategy. Some more research might be needed at this point. For example, when current circumstances might change our audience’s behavior (like a pandemic, for instance). Here we decide what kind of website we need, who to build relationships with, and what other marketing strategies make sense (blog, podcast, direct mail, social media platforms, etc.)

6. ONLINE AND OFFLINE PRESENCE

Once you know where you need to be, you can develop your online presence (website, social media profiles) and your offline presence (business cards & collateral, forms, signage, office decor, etc.).

7. ARTWORK AND CONTENT

This step will become SO MUCH EASIER because you already know what it should look like (visual expression) and what it should sound like (verbal expression). Any content you will create will be based on the strategy you’ve built so far. Here we create graphics for social media posts, videos, lead magnets, email templates, landing pages, etc.

8. ADS & SEO & CLICKFUNNELS, PAID LEADS

We now have content and we know who to target and where to find them. Now we can talk about effective Facebook or Google Ads, referral strategies, affiliate marketing, and more – turning the content we have into a funnel.

9. SALES

The happy ending. 

If you’re not getting enough sales, you might have a closing problem. You got plenty of leads, but you can’t convert them to new customers. Or you might have a marketing problem. Maybe you’re an excellent salesperson and closer, but you’re just not getting enough leads because you don’t have a marketing strategy. But more often than not, people actually have a branding problem. Their visual identity and their content are based on what they like best or what they’ve seen others do. But it’s not based on a solid brand strategy, so it’s not attracting the ideal, quality customers.

Stay on top of your Brand Strategy

Need additional guidance? The Brand Strategy Workbook will give you a good starting point to answer some questions regarding your brand. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out for a Discovery call or join our online community. It looks a bit confusing and overwhelming, but if you take it one step at a time, it all makes sense in the end. You got this! 

• Schedule a Discovery Call with Pacha
• Join our brand strategy Facebook Community: Balanced Brands
• Get professionally designed and curated content for your social media channels: Sign up for Social Stream

Dive digger and take a look at these related articles.

• An Introduction to Brand Archetypes
• Adopting Brand Personas
• Speaking with Brand Voice
• Brand Strategy Services