What is Brand Development?

The strategic process of establishing and improving a brand's identity, perception, and recognition in the marketplace is referred to as brand development. It entails developing a distinctive and alluring brand identity that connects with the target market and is consistent with the brand's values, vision, and mission. A variety of components, including brand strategy, positioning, message, visual identity, and communication channels, are included in brand creation. It focuses on creating a powerful and consistent brand presence that sets the company apart from its rivals, encourages client loyalty, and forges a deep emotional bond with customers. In order to maintain the brand's relevance and growth in a competitive marketplace, brand development is a continual process that calls for constant evaluation, adaptation, and innovation.

10 Steps Brand Strategy for 2023

Certainly! Here are ten steps outlining an effective brand strategy for small businesses in 2023:

Define Your Brand Identity: Clearly articulate your brand's mission, vision, values, and unique selling proposition (USP) to establish a solid foundation for your brand strategy.
Conduct Market Research: Understand your target audience, their needs, preferences, and behaviors. Identify market trends, competitors, and gaps in the market to inform your brand positioning.
Develop a Brand Persona: Create a distinctive brand personality that aligns with your target audience and resonates with their emotions and aspirations. This persona should guide your communication and visual elements.
Craft a Compelling Brand Story: Develop a compelling narrative that communicates your brand's history, purpose, and the value it brings to customers. Your brand story should evoke an emotional connection with your audience.
Design a Memorable Visual Identity: Create a visually appealing and cohesive brand identity, including a logo, color palette, typography, and visual elements that represent your brand's personality and values.
Build Consistent Brand Messaging: Develop clear and consistent messaging that communicates your brand's value proposition and key messages across all channels, including website, social media, advertising, and customer interactions.
Establish Brand Guidelines: Create brand guidelines that outline the proper use of your brand assets, tone of voice, and visual elements. This ensures consistency in all brand communications, both internally and externally.
Embrace Digital Marketing: Leverage digital channels to reach your target audience effectively. Develop a comprehensive digital marketing strategy that includes social media marketing, content marketing, search engine optimization, and paid advertising.
Foster Customer Engagement and Loyalty: Focus on building meaningful relationships with your customers. Encourage engagement through personalized experiences, excellent customer service, loyalty programs, and customer feedback.
Monitor and Adapt: Continuously monitor and analyze the performance of your brand strategy. Stay updated with market trends, customer feedback, and industry developments to make necessary adjustments and optimizations to your brand strategy.

Remember, a successful brand strategy is an ongoing process that requires regular evaluation, adaptation, and innovation to stay relevant and competitive in the dynamic business landscape of 2023.

Why is Brand Strategy so Important?

For small businesses, brand strategy is essential since it acts as a road map for creating a distinctive and memorable brand identity in the marketplace. A clearly defined brand strategy aids small businesses in standing out from rivals and capturing the interest of their target market in a competitive environment where consumers have many options. It enables small businesses to effectively convey their value proposition, mission, and values to clients, helping to increase their trust and credibility. The development of a consistent and cohesive brand experience across all touchpoints, from the logo and visual components to customer service and marketing initiatives, is another benefit of a good brand strategy for small businesses. This reliability encourages client loyalty and produces favorable word-of-mouth recommendations, which increases customer acquisition and spurs revenue development. Moreover, a successful brand strategy

When you hear the word “brand”, what comes to your mind? Probably, the first thing you’ll think about is a logo. If you see someone wearing shoes with a check design, automatically you know it’s Nike. Or if you see a laptop with an Apple logo, it’s easy to identify it as Apple. The golden arc of McDonald’s is also an iconic logo that everyone in the world knows about. Yes, logos are a big part of a company’s branding, but truthfully, it’s more than that.

So how should we define a company’s brand? We can define it as the company’s overall reputation with the customer’s overall experience. If you want your comp any to thrive in longevity, you would want your brand to be seen by customers as worthy of their patronage, time and money.

With that, it is very important to know that a branding strategy needs to be in place in order to achieve a great reputation as a company. A branding strategy will help ensure that your brand will always be aligned to the company’s mission and vision and how you convey it to the world.

Here are 10 things you need to know when it comes to developing a brand strategy for your company:

1. Re-assess your company’s values and purpose

Before you start with any kind of brand strategy, you need to go back to the root of your company that answers the following questions:

WHY does your company exist? (Vision)
WHAT does your company do? (Mission)
HOW does your company do what it does? (Core Values)

Any company should have a clear vision, mission and set of core values that will set the foundations of the branding strategy. It would be good to check and see if the existing vision, mission and core values need to be tweaked or can remain as is. Also, prior to developing a branding strategy, you need to check if all the current content out there is clearly conveying your overall identity.

2. Research your market competitors.

Competition is always fun, but you can be on the losing end if you don’t try to study and research your competitors and see how you can stand out. Your mindset should always aim for relevance to the ever-changing landscape of customers. A good way to check on your competitors is to compare your similarities and differences. See why customers flock over to their products and services and think of ways on how you could possibly change their minds, opting to choose your company over your competitors. This will be a major factor in how you develop your brand strategy.

3. Develop a social media persona.

Let’s face it: social media is the single most important platform in the world today when it comes to exposing your brand’s identity. A company that is dedicated to social media would really look at maximizing its presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. One of the best things you can do as a company is deciding on a social media persona that you would want your customers to engage with online. If you were to put a human aspect to your brand, would it be male or female? What would be the tone of voice that will be consistently used to convey your company’s message? Will you sound formal or informal? These are very important questions to answer as you assess your target market and your current customers.

The persona will help provide a personal touch to your brand and it has to be decided on very carefully. Here are samples you can look at as you build a social media persona that will carry the voice of your brand:

Professional
Informative
Friendly
Authoritative
Informal or Natural
Fun

4. Don’t be afraid to find out how people see your brand.

Social media has become such a powerful voice that complaints about a company or a service can easily be posted online, and it can become viral, leading to a lot of engagement that can only hurt your brand. But truthfully, you need to see these comments. You need to read these complaints. One way to help in developing a branding strategy is to see how people perceive your company. You are to always strive to be better and look for ways to improve every single day. Look at reviews of your company online, go back to the complaints you get over email, do some focus group discussions, create surveys – do what you can to find out everything you need to know. People’s perceptions should bring you back to the drawing board and respond accordingly.

5. Revisit your brand tagline.

Pause for a moment and revisit your brand tagline. Does it need to be changed or modified? Is it too long or too short? Does it encapsulate the overall identity of your brand? These are questions you need to look at in order to check if you have the right tagline moving forward as you develop a branding strategy. Taglines are important so make sure you really have a good one.

6. Revisit your brand logo and visual identity.

Logos can be iconic. If you ask about the most popular logos in the world, I am sure Nike, Adidas, Apple, Google, and McDonald’s will come to mind, to name a few. Revisiting your logo will help you assess a few things:

Does our current logo express our overall identity well?
Does our current logo need tweaking and modification to stay relevant?
Do we need to change the logo and rebrand it totally?

To add to that, revisit color schemes and other visual elements you add to the logo (icons, photography styles, fonts being used, etc.). These are important facets that will help give clear direction to the branding strategy.

7. Involve your employees.

What you are looking at is consistency in all areas when it comes to developing a branding strategy for your company. You cannot just roll out a strategy without informing all of your employees. Their knowledge of the branding strategy should be instilled in their DNA. For example, you cannot be conveying a fun persona on social media and then when customers decide to call your hotline, they are welcomed by a lifeless voice that’s not eager to help. Right then and there, a big discrepancy has surfaced.

Make sure that employees are fully aware of the overall identity of the brand; they will carry this into their work space so from the very beginning their involvement is crucial.

8. Work on your website.

More often than not, customers do check if your company has a website. It is the one-stop shop of everything a customer needs to know about your brand, product and services. In relation to developing your core identity and visual elements, the website is considered the most valuable brand development tool you’ll ever have. A well-informed and well-organized website will help your brand strategy in a tremendous way.

9. Get ready to be an advocate for the brand.

There’s something definitely wrong if you’re not a customer of your own brand.

If you work for Nike, you shouldn’t be seen wearing Adidas or Puma. If you’re working for Samsung, you should be the perfect salesman to an Apple user to switch to Android. Sell, sell, sell. Spread the word. Be passionate about your brand products and services. Your belief in your own brand will resonate with employees and it will build a better culture to support the brand strategy.

10. Set targets to achieve.

In any company, it’s good to have targets to achieve so that when implementing a brand strategy, you have a clear understanding on how to plan and prepare in order to achieve those targets. Decide on how you want to approach it – a 5-year target, a yearly target, quarterly target, or monthly target. Just decide on a target and commit to achieving it. When creating a brand strategy, it helps when you have numerical goals to look at so you would know if the strategy is working or if you need to make improvements along the way.

Every company’s goal is not only to be successful in terms of profit from products and services, but also to be able to create a culture that engages a community that fully respects and values what you do.

Always remember that before you develop a brand strategy, there are a lot of preparations needed to make sure it is effective and well-executed. Every company’s goal is not only to be successful in terms of profit from products and services, but also to be able to create a culture that engages a community that fully respects and values what you do. That should be the mindset of your company as you study your brand. The competition out there is tough, but your goal is not to destroy them. You just need to be a cut above the rest, and that involves creating a successful brand strategy that will convey a message that brings out the values, mission and vision of your company.

If you are not certain where to start or you need help branding your company, feel free to book a 30 min. consultation here.

Learn More!

10 Steps to Creating a Brand Strategy in 2023