Ahh, brand strategy. The ever mysterious hot topic among entrepreneurs. What is strategic branding anyway? Until you've gone through the process yourself, it's a bit hard to get a grasp on. Which is why I want to walk you through the brand strategy elements that I focus on with my clients. To be honest, this blog is a resource I started giving brand strategy clients to help them optimize how they used their strategy. We have a lot of ground to cover, so let's dive right in.
THE GOAL OF A BRAND STRATEGY
The goal of any brand is to build trust. For your marketing and your brand experience to be truly effective, you need to focus on three things: memorability, relatability and possibility. I call this the Holy Trinity of Branding, which I dive into a bit more at the beginning of this blog.
Your brand strategy has many different elements that are designed to keep you aligned as a brand. The more aligned and consistent you are, the easier it is to stay true to your mission and foster trust with your audience.
For every offer you develop to every piece of content you produce, filter it through your brand strategy to ensure it aligns with the heart of your brand.
In particular, you want to pay attention to the language that’s used across the elements of your brand strategy. To improve memorability around your brand and stay top of mind, the language we craft inside your brand strategy is cohesive, concise, and designed to be easy to remember. Using this consistent language will make it easier for your audience to both understand and remember who you are, what you do, and what you stand for.
UNDERSTANDING THE ELEMENTS OF A BRAND STRATEGY
It's worth noting that every brand strategist's will have a range of various strategic elements that they focus on. In this blog, I am highlighting the key players in my own approach to strategic branding.
The List of Brand Strategy Elements
Golden Circle
Purpose Statement
Mission Statement
Brand Voice
Core Values
Value Proposition
Key Benefits
Brand Positioning
Messaging Architecture
Content Pillars
Audience Overview
Audience Persona
Problem + Solution
Priorities
Journey Map
Emotional Impact
Golden Circle
To enrich the narrative around what it is you do, we start with why you do what you do. This concept is from Simon Sinek's book Start with Why.
The golden circle helps us discover the magic of your brand story. Familiarizing yourself with the language around your why, how, and what, allows you to keep that magic alive and infuse more emotional branding into your narrative.
Staying connected to your why and leading with that in your brand storytelling and marketing will make your brand more relatable.
Brand Purpose
Your brand purpose is as much for you to stay aligned with your brand as it is for fostering an emotional connection with your audience. Research on brand purpose in marketing shows that consumers are more drawn to brands that lead with a clear purpose.
Use your brand purpose when speaking about your brand to new audiences, include a version of it in your about page, and keep it at the forefront of your mind as you grow your business.
Mission Statement
Your mission statement clearly communicates what you’re aiming to do as a business, for whom, and to what end. Your mission statement will evolve with your business but serves to guide your business and keep it focused on a particular impact for your audience.
Use your mission statement, along with your purpose, to inspire you as you grow your business. Should you add members to your team, this statement serves to unify the collective mission for all.
Brand Voice
Having a clear and consistent brand voice—like a good friend—will allow you to become a trusted, dependable brand. The type of language you use in your website copy, social captions, call-to-action (CTA) buttons and even email sign-offs should all be filtered through the lens of your brand voice and characteristics.
Core Values
Your core values are the guiding principles of your business and will often overlap with those of your target audience. They become the compass that guides your decision-making, actions, and storytelling. By infusing your values and beliefs into your brand messaging, you will attract more like-minded people and more aligned clients who share your beliefs and value your perspective.
You may wish to include your core values on your website and share them on social media from time to time to further communicate who you are and what you stand for.
Value Proposition
Your value proposition is your brand promise. It clearly communicates what you offer, to whom, and the emotional benefit it brings them. A value proposition will often appear near the top of a website to make visitors know they’re in the right place (and that it’s worth sticking around). It’s also a great statement to use for social media bios because it tells people what's in it for them. Your value proposition is a succinct summary of your value as a brand and business and, when used repetitively, will lead to your business becoming associated with this promise.
Key Benefits
Among your brand strategy elements are key benefits. These offer you a reliable source of clearly defined benefits to promote through your marketing that go beyond the more obvious functional benefits. These include a list of functional, emotional and self-expressive benefits your ideal client will experience.
Use the emotional and self-expressive benefits of your business regularly in your brand messaging to really connect with the needs and desires of your target audience. By speaking to the transformation that exists on the other side of hiring you, you make it easier for your ideal clients to imagine what’s truly possible for them.
Brand Positioning
Brand positioning is the distinct space you wish to occupy in the mind of your target audience. It summarizes what you do, for whom, and how you’re different. Staying in touch with your brand position is how you distinguish yourself from the competition. Being confident in what makes your business unique and consistently communicating this in your marketing is how you shape your reputation while offering your audience something new that may be better suited for them.
Messaging Architecture
Messaging architecture identifies three of your unique selling points along with evidence for how these show up in your business. When it comes to marketing and communicating your unique value as a business, regularly speaking to what makes you different from other businesses in your industry will go a long way.
Be repetitive with the elements of your messaging architecture to amplify what you bring to the table that your competitors do not. This is key for marketing and positioning your business as the more appealing option for the right people.
Content Pillars
Your content pillars are the overarching themes for your content marketing and social channels equipped with a list of topics for each content pillar. Focusing your content around consistent, key pillars builds familiarity and trust as you shape your reputation as a brand, what you offer, who you help, and how you do it.
It’s important to remember that people in your audience will each be at different phases of your content marketing funnel:
awareness
interest
consideration
decision
Regularly revisit your content pillars to ensure you’re always delivering a consistent brand experience and are creating content that supports your audience at each of these phases.
Audience Overview
Your audience overview is a broad look at your target audience. It summarizes who they are, what they’re struggling with, and what they’re seeking as it relates to your business. Your audience overview helps paint a picture of your target audience and introduces language and key details that can be used in your marketing.
Audience Persona
Your audience persona is a nuanced look at one unique persona that represents your ideal client. It details both the demographic and psychographic characteristics in a way that brings to life a real individual you are trying to reach through your brand and marketing. Your audience persona should be regularly referred to as you craft offers, messaging, and content within your business.
Problem+Solution
A personal favourite of all the brand strategy elements is the problem-solution scenarios. This offers you a detailed look at the scope of your ideal client’s problems and the direct solutions you have to offer. These problem-solution scenarios are a perfect source of inspiration for content creation and marketing. Regularly addressing these problems and solutions will communicate to your audience that you understand what they’re going through and are able to support them in solving their problem(s).
Priorities
The priorities are an evaluation of what’s important to both you and your potential client. For you, it reminds you what you’re aiming to achieve as a business. For them, it reminds you what they’re looking for as it relates to hiring a business like yours so you can optimize your offers and your marketing. When you understand where they’re coming from, what’s prevented them from solving their problem so far, and what factors influence their decision to buy, you can support them even more so they feel confident about hiring you.
Use these priorities when creating and marketing your offers to acknowledge their unique needs and improve conversions.
Journey Map
Your journey map delineates the six stages of your client’s journey:
awareness
consideration
purchase
delivery
use
loyalty
Not only does it describe the goals and activities of your client but it also outlines the goals, activities and KPIs of your business. Regularly revisit this journey map to ensure every stage of their journey is being optimized for best results.
Emotional Impact
Branding is all about emotion, relatability, and bringing a human element to your business. Your emotional impact showcases how your unique story can serve as a bridge to connect with your ideal clients. When it comes to your brand story and brand messaging, you want to speak to these emotions as often as possible because it’s our emotions that inspire us to take action.
In addition to all of these brand strategy elements, I will typically include a brief section for a market analysis and, if the client needs a brand identity, the end of the brand strategy guide will focus on the creative direction.
Hopefully, reading through these various brand strategy elements helps paint a picture for how truly beneficial brand strategy is for marketing your business, growing your business, and simplifying your business.
If you want to know what a tailored brand strategy will achieve for your small business, join me for a free Brand Realignment Call and let's see what strategic elements your business will most benefit from.
Jenny Henderson Studio develops memorable brand experiences and strategic brand foundations to improve recognition and revenue for service-based small businesses.
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