To watch it as a 8-minute video
To listen to it as an 8-minute podcast
Brand positioning is a prerequisite for reaching the right audience with products and services that resonate with their needs, goals, and values. Without brand building strategies, a brand cannot be positioned competitively, just like playing a football game without a game plan. Only after firmly establishing what a brand stands for, can brand stories, images, and other digital marketing efforts subsequently convey the brand’s essence.
Brand building strategies give your buyers a clear and consistent brand persona that reflects your authentic voice and values. Is your brand practical and reliable? Is it on the cutting edge? Is it modern or old fashioned? Is it environmentally friendly?… Brand building strategies develop themes to reinforce these feelings and associations, in order to connect with your target audience across multiple channels and platforms.
To show that your brand belongs in the conversation, articulate the brand’s values, purpose, and vision. The personal journey of a company’s founder who created the brand can be the best way to introduce your brand, its values, and mission.
Tell how your brand aligns, resonates, and amplifies the values of your target audience. Highlighting brand culture is a good way to tell your story. If your brand has a “killer app,” or offers a unique product or service, make it the focus of your brand story.
Learn to use your target community’s own language to tell your brand story and don’t be afraid to be outspoken – “safe” and bland messages rarely make an impression.
Brand image is like the cover of a book, and we all judge a book by its cover. Do your brand logo, color, font, video, podcast, and visual images sum up your brand? Or better, amplify it?
Examples of vivid brand images include the Nike swoosh, the one-bite Apple logo, or the Starbucks mermaid. Each of those images conjures up their own worlds of associations and feelings. Creating the meaning behind the images is your brand narrative, the story that tells customers what your brand stands for and what makes it unique.
The Harvard Business School writes, “Brands create their images over time as consumers buy and use their products and develop personal relationships with them. Simply put: Brand image is the backbone of brand equity.”
According to the same HBS article, brand equity has two parts: “Brand awareness” is the consumer’s level of familiarity or recall of your brand. “Brand knowledge” includes consumer thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and relationships with the brand.
Over time, a brand can accumulate measurable brand value and brand equity that can increase EBITDA at least four times, which can be leveraged for valuation, even as collateral for loans.
Raise your brand’s stature through promotions and initiatives that educate your customer base about your brand’s unique value propositions.
Finding the community. Step one in creating a “community flywheel” is to identify the communities most closely aligned with brand values, mission, and vision. McKinsey calls this the “community flywheel” because it’s designed to build and sustain momentum through positive customer interactions. In the past, this kind of affinity marketing was based on demographics like age, education, income, and the like. These days, people gather in digital communities with shared values or interests – or “shared relevance.”
Building brands through digital communities. Digital communities make it possible to identify very specific groups who may have an interest in your brand. They may be fitness enthusiasts aged 18 – 25, or pet lovers against animal cruelty, or churchgoing moms in Utah. Each of these groups has values that respond to different brand messages and stories. Tailor your messaging to engage each audience, but never be “all things to all men”. Stand for something.
Identifying and building like-minded digital communities is an increasingly important way to implement brand building strategies. The above McKinsey author writes: “Today’s fastest-growing brands participate in digital communities to earn engagement and loyalty—and do so with high returns and low risk by harnessing agile test and learn.”
All of the strategies above are moot unless the brand sticks in the minds of its target audience. It is like after a composer creates a piece of music, the final judge is the listener, not the composer.
As your brand creates content and engages with its digital community, be prepared to measure audience response and engagement. Click through rates and sales conversion figures are just the tip of the iceberg. Brands should pay attention to all forms of user reactions, such as comments and replies to their social media posts. Ask users about preferences, and monitor brand excitement and “buzz” in the community to test and learn.
Brands can use the feedback they receive to improve their products or services. Be open to new ideas or products based on community feedback.
An excellent way to begin your brand building journey is to conduct a brand audit to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of your brand, where its messaging can be improved, and how best to differentiate your brand from the competition. To refresh and re-define mission, vision, goals, value propositions, and target audience, brand building strategies serve as a starting point, as well as a roadmap.
A brand building strategy makes you stand out from the competition with powerful value propositions, a unique identity, and exceptional customer experience. It builds trust and loyalty among your existing customers and helps you reach new customers, and sustains the growth and longevity of your business brand.
These are just a few of the ways to create brand building strategies to grow your business. If you would like to learn more, please contact us through 10PlusBrand.com. Thank you.
©Joanne Z. Tan all rights reserved.
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