BRAND STRATEGY
Long-term business thinking to developing a strong brand
Brand strategy involves careful strategic planning and execution that ensures your brand is a true reflection of who you are both online and offline. Having a consistent message across all your customer touch-points is key in developing a successful brand.
WHAT IS BRAND STRATEGY
A brand strategy is a long-term plan for developing a successful and lasting brand.
To understand what brand strategy is, we first need to understand what a brand is. First, lets clear the misconception: your brand is not your logo neither is it your name. Your brand is the perception of who you are in the minds of people who interact with your business. It defines the intangible aspects of your business such as how people feel when they interact with your brand.
BRAND TOUCH-POINTS
In the last decade, there has been tremendous change about the subject of branding. In this digital age, how people find and interact with your business has made it a daunting tasks for businesses to build strong brands. Needless to say, making a brand appear trustworthy to the right audience is no simple task.Developing an effective brand strategy means that you need to look at all your brand touch points from a single perspective and evaluate how effectively they work together to reinforce and grow your brand message. Identifying, evaluating and measuring the effectiveness of all your brand touch-points is key in this process.
Some questions to ask while evaluating your touch-points include:
Brand Identity
- Can your audience relate to your logo ?
- Are your brand materials consistent across both digital and print mediums ?
- What is the tone of your brand ?
- Does your website domain connect to your brand name ?
Content
- What images are you using across your branding ?
- How effective are you using video content?
- How effective is your written content ?
Website
- Is your website easy to navigate?
- How good does it look on mobile ?
- Is your brand identity applied correctly across the whole website ?
- Does your website appeal to its target audience ?
- Is your website S.E.O friendly ?
Value Proposition
- What do you do ?
- How do you do it ?
- For whom do you do it ?
- What makes you different ?
Social Media
- How responsive are you on social media ?
- Are your social media channels branded correctly ?
- Is the content you sharing with your audience relevant ?
- How is your social media strategy ?
Customers
- Who is your customer ?
- What do they want ?
- What is their character ?
- What keeps them awake at night ?
SUMMARY
Brands now extend far beyond the localities over which they operate. Any complaint about the brand now reaches far beyond close friends and company representatives. With so many brand touch-points, companies and organizations have no choice but to adopt new brand strategies that effectively address the changes in how brands are managed.