Having full oversight of a marketing strategy isn’t easy. Marketers often need to spread the load of a campaign across their team, or use agencies to help with certain aspects. Lone marketers often have a tough job tracking every facet of a campaign – from ideation to launch, and subsequent analysis.
It doesn’t matter if you work on your own or as part of a team, it’s important to create a brand marketing strategy that is actually achievable. There’s no point launching something that looks amazing, but is too big or costly for you to manage.
The solution to this is to develop a branding strategy that matches your resources and abilities. From there, you can confidently deliver a marketing campaign and stay on top of the results.
In an ideal world, you’ll be able to replicate your brand marketing campaigns again and again, making improvements to the template each time.
This guide is designed to help marketers understand the steps to building, launching, and analyzing a strategy. It all starts with understanding your brand, budget, and resources. If you don’t have this basic knowledge, then it’s almost impossible to grow a strong brand identity.
In This Guide:
Understanding Brand Marketing
Steps to Creating a Successful Brand
Step 1: Defining Your Brand
Step 2: Setting Goals and Objectives
Step 3: Conducting Market Research
Step 4: Crafting Effective Brand Messaging
Step 5: Building a Brand Marketing Plan
Step 6: Executing Your Strategy
Step 7: Measuring and Analyzing Results
Step 8: Maintaining a Unified Brand Experience Into the Future
Understanding Brand Marketing
Before we look at the steps required to create a brand marketing strategy, it’s worth looking at the basic principles behind one. Your brand identity is often the defining factor that connects you to customers and audiences, and effective brand strategies are crucial for this connection. It’s essential if you are to be a successful business.
You therefore need to work on brand marketing to achieve your aims.
What Is Brand Marketing?
Brand marketing is all about connecting with audiences and customers in a way that boosts a brand’s reputation. Your aim is to help people remember your products and positioning, so that they buy from you or affiliate themselves with you.
A strong brand marketing strategy requires you to create a unique brand voice, visual identity, and a compelling brand's story. It results in people being aware of your brand, recognizing it, and then affiliating themselves with it.
Benefits of Brand Marketing
The whole point of brand marketing is to generate a positive impact on your business. That might be a financial impact – such as improved turnover from increased sales – or it might be a societal impact. Charities, for example, use brand marketing strategies all the time to champion their causes.
By generating brand equity – the value of your brand – it’s possible to influence customers and audiences. They’re more likely to choose you over rivals, and remember you when searching for a product.
What’s more, successful marketing campaigns will also support brand awareness, loyalty, and brand reputation. This is vital if you are to really connect with audiences.
Having a brand that has an excellent reputation, high level of awareness, and a loyal customer base among your target audiences is the holy grail for marketers.
Steps to Creating a Successful Brand
Now let's look at the eight steps you need to take in order to build a viable and achievable brand marketing strategy. We'll show you how to get started, what you need to focus on, and the tools you'll need to oversee everything.
It all starts with looking at your current company's brand and figuring out what you want to say.
Step 1: Defining Your Brand
Brands need a purpose. Customers have to believe they exist for a reason – even if it's to sell things more cheaply than others, or offer an alternative to an unobtainable product or service.
For example, Frontier Airlines is known as a budget airline that usually beats other airlines on price. It might not always score highly for customer service or experiences, but it gets you from point A to B on the cheap.
Define Your Brand Identity and Purpose
So, what's your brand identity? What's the reason you exist? You need to develop this and pinpoint what you want customers to think when they see your logo or messaging. Think about your target audience and why they need you.
Are you a high-end retailer? If so, then you may want to focus on the quality of your products and the sense of elevated escapism that comes with your brand.
Perhaps you're a travel agency. You'll need to work on how you provide value to customers who could easily book a vacation online without your help.
Develop a Unique Value Proposition (UVP)
Once you know your purpose, you can start to craft a unique value proposition (UVP) that stands out from other brands. This might be monetary value, like in the case of Frontier Airlines. Or you might offer people peace of mind, like a travel agent.
You can then create a brand positioning statement that defines your brand’s position in the market.
Your UVP will then be used to craft all your messaging and, perhaps, shape your products and services too.
Create a Brand Style Guide
Your UVP dictates your style guide. Creating a brand style takes a bit of time and a lot of research. It covers your tone of voice and visual identity.
Let's use airlines as our example again. The Irish airline Ryanair is cost-effective and cheerful. It is known as a low-cost, low-thrills airline. Its branding matches that reputation and its messaging is fun, chatty, and informal.
As a brand, you need to ensure your style guide is accessible to all who need it. Your marketing team needs to liaise with your public relations department, your product development team, and everyone else. Only by having everyone on the same page can you truly push a brand marketing strategy forward.
Step 2: Setting Goals and Objectives
While you work on your brand identity, it's worth considering your overall goals for both your campaigns and your business. If you're a new business that's setting out a brand strategy, then your end goals – be it financial or impact-driven – will shape your strategy.
If you're an existing brand, then your goals might be more focused on a particular marketing campaign. Either way, it requires a lot of thought to get right. Here's what you can do.
Establish Clear and Measurable Objectives
Strategic branding needs objectives. These need to be measurable, so you can actually gauge whether or not you’ve been successful. Brands tend to set out their short-term and long-term key performance indicators (KPIs).
From there, it’s important to look at how you’ll measure your KPIs. Will you use your in-house tech or perhaps you need a marketing tool to oversee everything.
Your objectives could be something simple, such as “doubling revenue in Q3”. Or, you might look at something more nuanced, like “improving year-on-year brand awareness”.
Whatever your objectives, they need an effective brand marketing strategy to execute and improve your brand position.
Develop a Brand Marketing Roadmap
Once you have your objectives in place, you can begin to map out a course to success. This is where strategic thinking comes into play. Ask yourself:
What you need to hit your objectives
When can you start
Who will execute your strategy
How will you oversee it
These four areas – what, when, who, and how – will form your comprehensive brand strategy. You've already defined your brand and now you're thinking about how to reach your objectives. The next step is to understand your audience.
Step 3: Conducting Market Research
Market research oversees a lot of things, but the three focal points here are:
Your audience
Your rivals
Your industry
Getting in-depth analysis of each of these means you can develop a far more successful brand marketing strategy. You won't be entering the market blind and you'll be less likely to experience negative reactions when you launch products and marketing campaigns.
So, let's take a look at what your strategy needs from each of these three pillars of market research.
Conduct Target Audience Research
It's imperative you know who you're marketing to. Researching your target audience means you understand your ideal customer’s demographics, behaviors, and pain points.
You can use a tool like CisionOne to create a customer persona that guides your business strategy.
It's also vital that you map out the customer journey and address any touchpoints that stick out.
Research Your Competitors
Next, look at your competitors. What are they doing well and not so well? Where are they spending their time and money? What kind of advertising campaigns have worked for them, and what hasn't?
Using a tool like CisionOne, it's possible to get a deep insight into rival brands and understand their marketing strategies.
You can then identify areas for differentiation and opportunities to improve your own brand marketing efforts.
Analyze Market Trends and Insights
Your target audience and competitors will shape how you go about delivering a marketing campaign, as will the market as a whole. New brands face a particularly difficult entry into new industries that they're not familiar with. There are trends that can greatly affect a brand, and marketers need to be aware of these.
For example, independent retail stores should be aware that eco-friendly, sustainable, and locally-sourced products are in vogue right now. You're missing a trick if you sell candles made just around the block, but aren't shouting about it in your marketing.
Assess your market and look for trends and insights that stand out. Learn what works and what doesn't in your industry, and align your strategy accordingly.
Step 4: Crafting Effective Brand Messaging
Once you've gone through the first three steps of your brand marketing strategy, it's time to look at your external messaging. This is the point where you take all that research and start channeling it into public-facing branding.
Take your time here. Your brand identity needs to align with your research.
Create a Consistent Brand Voice and Tone
Your brand voice and tone will impact everything you do. You could choose a fun, cheeky tone that gets people talking. You may opt for a serious, informative tone that elevates your brand to one that audiences can trust.
No matter your choice, the tone and voice you use needs to weave into your brand's overall story.
From here, you can create a tone of voice document that outlines how everyone should speak about your brand. These brand guidelines mean you have a central place to refer back to when developing fresh messages or products.
Develop Brand Messaging that Resonates With Your Target Audience
Your messaging needs to align with your brand values and show audiences what you're all about. Charities are the best example of this in action, as they have to constantly talk about the cause that is the reason for their existence.
Big corporations spend millions on brand development to align with their target audience. For example, sportswear company Under Armour is pivoting from manufacturing sports apparel – like NFL jerseys – to being a "sportstyle" brand.
It takes time and costs money to pivot in this way. Often, the success rests on developing fresh brand messaging. Your words, your visual branding, and your overall ethos needs to resonate with who you're trying to sell to.
Use Storytelling To Connect With Your Audience
Creating a consistent voice and brand message is one thing, but you also need to understand the art of storytelling. You can't simply tell people you're a great brand to buy from, or offer a really good service. There needs to be an emotive level of storytelling in your messaging to create real brand loyalty.
So, what is your story? Where has your brand come from and, more importantly, where is it going? Do audiences understand your core values and can you convince them to join you on the journey?
You need to encourage brand loyalty through storytelling and turn potential customers into regulars. Whether you do it on social media, through press releases, or via TV and newspaper ads, your story needs a strong narrative that resonates.
Step 5: Fleshing Out a Brand Marketing Plan
Once you have your story, you can begin to create content that aligns with your overall brand strategy. This is the proactive part where you may need to engage with content creators to deliver what you need.
Here are three things to be aware of when you're putting meat on the bones of your brand strategy.
Develop a Content Marketing Plan
Your strategy shows the direction you need to go to succeed – your marketing plan is the step-by-step map to get there. Develop a plan that takes your brand story and implements it on your products, services, and messaging. Keep in mind that everything you produce needs to connect with your target audience.
Every press release, every product's packaging, every color tone on your website needs to align here.
Only then can you confidently launch products and create marketing materials that will suit your business goals.
Create Engaging and Relevant Content
So, what content should you create? From a marketing perspective, most of your content will be disseminated into the media. Whether that's owned media like your website, paid media like ads, or earned media in publications and online – it's important to be in control of it all.
You already know your target audience inside out from the research stage of your brand strategy. Now it's time to align your content with those people.
From press releases to social media videos, hosting events and working with influencers, you need to be strategic with every piece of content you create.
Make sure it's engaging and worth the money you spend on it. Check it accurately reflects your company's brand and carries a strong visual identity. Remember, brand awareness is crucial in marketing, so make sure people come away from your content knowing what you're about.
Use Visual Elements to Enhance Brand Recognition
We mentioned brand awareness just then, and it's also crucial to weave an element of brand recognition into everything you produce. Customer loyalty is often founded on people being able to recognize and remember your brand from some place before.
Perhaps it was a magazine ad, or maybe a funny TikTok video created by an influencer. Whenever your brand is out in public, it needs to be visually on show.
That's why car ads always have the manufacturer's logo in shot, even if the main focus is the car itself. People become attached to brands more so than individual products.
Step 6: Executing Your Strategy
Now it's time to send your content out into the world and deliver on your strategy. This isn't easy and you may well need help. Here are some tips for executing a solid marketing strategy properly.
Stay True to Your Plan
Any brand development strategy is only as robust as those behind it. Branding takes time, so don't be put off by early shocks or if you get low engagement at the start of your campaign. Of course, if it looks like you're not getting any response after a while, then naturally you will need to look at changes.
However, for the opening stages of your campaign, trust your research and your instincts. Some strategies just take a little longer to resonate than others.
Use Tools or External Help
There are plenty of tools out there that help marketers tell their brand story. CisionOne, for example, brings your entire strategy into one place, so you can develop, deploy, and assess every piece of content you produce.
Agencies are also worth looking into, if you are stuck on how to get a marketing strategy off the ground. They will work with you to develop brand guidelines and look at your core values, before moving on to assess your products and services, and how you can attract potential customers.
Use Social Media Wisely
Brand reputations can rise and fall on the back of their social media usage. One bad post can undo an entire campaign, while steady, consistent posting can form the backbone of a social media strategy.
Use your marketing plan to allocate roles for each of your social media accounts. X might be where you deal with customer interactions, while Instagram could be your shopping channel. Facebook and TikTok might be where you place ads.
Social media marketing isn't straightforward but can be really beneficial if you get it right.
Step 7: Measuring and Analyzing Results
You'll only be able to fully understand the success of your brand marketing strategy if you can quantify the results. To do this, it's important you have a tool like CisionOne that can crunch the data and reveal insights into what's working and what isn't.
With this in mind, here are three areas of analysis that need to be woven into the final chapters of your brand strategy. You've gone beyond the planning and execution stages now. It's time to look at your results!
Track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Remember those KPIs you set at the beginning of your strategy? It's time to bring them back up again and assess your progress. Using the right software means you'll be able track these KPIs and evaluate your strategy.
You might notice that income from online sales is rising just like you planned, yet the majority of brand mentions are going from just two of your six marketing channels.
Noticing things like this means you can make tweaks as you go and shift resources to where they're needed most. This isn't about overhauling your strategy at this stage, but nudging it to stay on course.
Analyze Results and Adjust Strategy
Of course, you can also dig deeper into your data and unearth the real successes and failures of your marketing strategy. You will need a tool for this, as Google Analytics and social media platforms can only show you a limited amount of information.
We mentioned earlier that your data can inform the progress of your KPIs. Well, it can also reveal everything you need to know about your brand positioning.
Look at things like customer loyalty, sentiment, engagement levels, and the health of the wider industry to fully understand how your brand is doing.
Use Data to Inform Future Brand Marketing Efforts
You used research data to create your brand marketing strategy, now it's time to weave your most recent findings back into the plan and develop it for the future.
Create a document that highlights all the core data points, and how this links to your KPIs and overall business strategy. Pull out successful moments from within the strategy and dig deep into the unsuccessful ones.
You'll soon have a document that contains the results of your entire brand marketing strategy from start to finish. You can then share this with your team, your bosses, or your clients to highlight the need to evolve.
This evolution is what goes into your next brand marketing strategy. You still need to present your brand values and tell your story – but this time you have even more data to make smart choices.
Step 8: Maintaining a Unified Brand Experience Into the Future
Finally, it's time to look into the future and think about how you can build a brand story that can last for decades to come. Individual brand marketing campaigns come and go. Some are great, some are terrible. Some define a brand, some slip by almost unnoticed. They all need to have a unified voice that runs through each one.
Take McDonald's as an example. Since the 1980s, the brand has almost always been depicted as fun. Its restaurants have bright colors, its food is low-cost and cheerful, its advertising is uplifting. McDonald's brand marketing works by selling the idea of having fun when you eat.
Think about your brand. What is its ultimate message? Is it to save the planet? Is it to deliver impact? Is it to sell amazing food? Or is it simply to be a cheaper alternative than the market leader?
Whatever your brand vision is, make sure it's something that can be woven into future campaigns.
If you need to pivot – perhaps because you discover new customers elsewhere – then it's possible to do this without sacrificing what your original brand represents.
Those brand values can last decades and help you create far more effective brand marketing campaigns. Just make sure you stay true to your original aims and audiences will love you for it, even if your marketing changes.
