Many businesses overlook the value of their brand strategy and in the process disengage customers.
Here’s some top tips for getting your brand strategy on point, and making sure your door is wide open to your target audience:
- Ensure you make good choices about your brand
- Ensure your brand strategy defines a destination
- Ensure your team understands the brand
- Ensure your brand is relevant to your different audiences
- Ensure you brand strategy is an open door to your products and services
Let’s look at what this means….
1. Ensure you make good choices about your brand
Your business is most expert in your brand and that means it’s your job to make decisions about how you define your brand. It’s not your web designer, marketing consultant or media agency – they are not as qualified nor knowledgeable as your business. You are the master of all choices about your brand and how it should be defined your brand.
2. Ensure your brand strategy defines a destination
Your business needs to define its destination – where is it heading, what is the vision? And this is part of really understanding your brand, if you don’t know the destination – how do you know when you get there. This will lead to asking – how can my business get there, what resources do we need, what are our limitations, what are the barriers to your destination. Think about the drivers and enablers that will help your business reach closer to its destination. It may be a need for additional skills within the team, financial investment or more funding, an updated website or engaging social media content. These are assets you can use to help you move towards your destination. Brand strategy delivers alignment, along with direction. But it also delivers business efficiencies, saves you money, and saves you time, because you’re not continually having to reinvent the wheel.
3. Ensure your team understands the brand
Your business brand strategy is written for you….your team is the number one audience for your brand. It’s simple – if your team gets your brand, your target audience will get your brand. But if you don’t get your brand, your target audience have no hope. So, brand strategy is written for the team whose job it is to execute it.
4. Ensure your brand is relevant to your different audiences
Of course, it’s important that we understand who our customers are, to know what makes them different. Not the deep dive that you may do with a marketing plan, but it’s a good idea learn about the different audiences the brand needs to address. We can then understand what brings all those different audiences together. What needs do they all share?
You only have one brand, and that one brand has to be relevant across your different audiences. And the way you do that is by ensuring that you understand the shared needs of all your customers.
5. Ensure your brand strategy is an open door to your business, its products and services
By developing a brand strategy, you are essentially ensuring the door to your business and its offerings is wide open to your target audiences, and customers can easily engage with your brand. Write in plain language, no jargon, ensure your website is up dated and focus on the brand’s features not benefits (how we do things), to prevent any obstacles in the doorway to your brand. If there are obstacles and find yourself needing to help customers navigate the difficulties they are experiencing, your customers are likely to disengage and just walk past your business because the just see the obstacles and not your brand.
Consider these tips to building a successful brand strategy which will help you to unlock your business and ensure customers can seamlessly engage with your brand.
