In the business landscape, a brand is defined as your business image and reputation in the marketplace. However, there’s more to it than meets the eye. Your brand has a lot to do with how your business will grow, thrive, and succeed in the long run.
When planning to grow and expand your business, you have to set a solid brand development strategy. Brand development entails creating, developing, and strengthening your business identity to ensure it resonates well with people. It involves three stages—setting your business objective, knowing your target market, and implementing your branding strategy.
Here are five steps to take when establishing your branding development strategy:
1. Know your business needs, goals, and strategies
Before you jumpstart your brand development strategy, you must understand your business more deeply. It’s not just about knowing what your business is, what products or services it provides, and who it caters to. It’s also about knowing your business core values, ideals, and philosophies.
It’s about understanding what it needs and how you plan to position your business in the industry. From there, you’ll be able to determine your business needs, set goals, and start developing effective strategies. Overall, it helps to go back to your business core before it expands.
2. Determine your target market and research its demographics
Once you know your business, it’s crucial to have a deep understanding of your target market as well. You may want to reach out to a wide range of consumers to see what demographics are more likely to patronize your brand. Then, you have to understand consumer behaviors based on their needs, goals, motivations, and demotivation.
Finally, you can develop a buyer persona—a research-based profile that describes who your ideal customers are. After all, your business exists because of these consumers. Therefore, you give them what they want by creating business value.
3. Develop your brand positioning and messaging
Now that you know your business and understand your target market, you can develop your brand positioning and messaging. Brand positioning is all about finding your place in the market. It’s how your brand occupies the minds of the customers and how it is distinguished from other competitors.
With this in mind, you can develop your brand messaging, by which you communicate with your target market. It is your brand value proposition that will motivate and inspire your target market and influence them to buy your product or service. Ultimately, effective messaging can resonate well with people and can kick your business up a notch.
4. Create and execute your brand development strategies
You can now get into the specifics of your brand development. Below are strategies you can start creating, developing, and executing:
- Brand name, logo, and tagline: Use a name that upholds your business identity and resonates well with people. The same is true for your brand logo as it has to represent your business and communicate with your target consumers. As for your tagline, make it reflective of your brand and so compelling to your target audience.
- Website development: Your website isn’t just an online representation of your business. It’s a digital hub where you can market your brand, promote your products or services, and connect with your target market. Apart from these, it serves as the online platform where you can transact business with your customers. For these customers to trust your website and your business in general, leave no room for doubts and confusion about your brand.
- Graphic designs: Your graphic designs should have brand consistency across all digital platforms. Whether on social media such as Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn, in e-commerce platforms, or on your website itself, these designs should be reflective of your brand. Brand consistency in your graphic designs applies to print materials, such as flyers, brochures, newsletters, and banners. Even traditional marketing, such as TV and radio advertising, should have consistent branding as well.
- Content creation: Content creation is key to your brand promotion. Whether texts, images, or videos, they can help market your brand in various platforms and print materials. For instance, you can produce a video promoting your products or services or an infographic showing how your business started and how it has come a long way. Just make sure that your pieces of content remain relevant to what your brand is all about.
- Digital marketing: There are a handful of digital marketing strategies you can implement to promote your brand. These include SEO, PPC, email marketing, and print marketing. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization that aims to improve your online presence and drive organic traffic to your website while PPC stands for pay-per-click designed to display your ads where you pay for every click it gets. Email marketing entails communicating with your regular customers and prospective ones by way of marketing your brand while print marketing may be in the form of flyers, brochures, newsletters, posters, or banners.
5. Monitor your strategy and make some adjustments
The final stage entails tracking your brand development strategies and making some changes as necessary. It’s best to set key metrics to gauge your strategies’ performance, and you can use tools to do this. If you see some challenges in your brand development, you may need to tweak some of your strategies and see if there are improvements in your performance.
Brand development doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a long-term process that needs a tweak here and there until you get the right formula and yield desirable results. You have to be patient, a little creative, and motivated to keep your brand development going.
Conclusion
Brand development is crucial to the overall success of your business. To get it right, you must know your business, determine your target market, develop your brand positioning and messaging, implement your brand strategies, monitor your plan, and make some adjustments where necessary. Who knows? You’ll be surprised at how all these can kick your business up a notch in no time—from a simple startup to a growing business up to a bigwig brand known globally!
Are you ready to develop and boost your brand and take your business to the pedestal of success? We’re a digital marketing agency in St. Louis that provides digital marketing solutions such as SEO, PPC, social media management, and yes, brand development. Connect with us today and let our digital marketers help you out!