What is brand marketing? Find out in this guide to creating a brand marketing strategy

How to create a brand marketing strategy

Crafting an effective brand marketing strategy is a vital endeavor for any business seeking to build brand recognition and thrive in the competitive marketplace. By following these seven essential steps, you can establish a compelling brand identity that resonates with your target audience, fosters brand loyalty, and propels your business to new heights.

Let's delve into the key elements that will guide you in creating a successful brand marketing strategy.

1. Define your brand

Before marketing your brand, you need to define it. Basically, you have to answer the question: what sets my brand apart from my competitors?

Think of popular companies you know that operate in the same sphere:

• McDonald’s vs. Burger King
• Reebok vs. Nike
• Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi
• Red Bull vs. Monster Energy

You can associate Red Bull and Monster Energy with different things, even though they sell the same product.

How did these companies position themselves uniquely in the marketplace, despite selling similar products? They created differentiation by defining their brand.

Here’s how to define yours:

• Identify your target audience. Create a buyer persona — a profile of your ideal customer. Include demographics like age, occupation, income, marital status, and hobbies to fine-tune who you’re targeting .
• Analyze your competition. Competition analysis can help you assess your competitors and determine how you compare. Maybe you have a significant brand purpose that your competitors lack.
• Determine your USP. Your competition analysis will help determine your unique selling proposition (USP). This is the reason customers choose your brand over another. An example of a USP could be your brand’s reputation for fantastic customer experience or service.

2. Set brand marketing goals

Once you’ve defined your brand, consider what you want your brand marketing to achieve. Set short-term and long-term goals, and make them measurable using specific key performance indicators (KPIs).

This will make it easier to track the impact of your overall brand marketing (see step 7).

Here are some examples of brand marketing objectives and how you might measure them:

• Raise brand awareness. You want to get more people talking about your brand. You might measure brand awareness through a KPI like mentions on social media or customer conversions.
• Drive website traffic. You want more people to visit your website. You could measure website traffic by tracking the number of unique organic visitors every month.
• Strengthen your brand positioning. Your brand position is what you stand for — it generates buzz around your brand and helps you capture a larger market share. You can measure brand positioning through customer surveys, asking people with what they associate your brand.
• Boost customer retention. You want to retain customers, meaning they return to your brand repeatedly. You might measure retention by tracking how many returning customers you witness in a set time frame.
• Improve customer loyalty. Brand loyalty is a little bit different from retention. Loyal customers don’t just buy your goods repeatedly, they also champion your brand — for example, by recommending it to others. You can measure customer loyalty with a KPI like a refer-a-friend program. How many customers will take advantage of this option if you offer it?

3. Develop a brand voice and messaging

Once you’ve completed the above steps, it’s time to create your brand marketing strategy. Every strong brand has an equally strong brand voice. This refers to how you convey your brand’s personality.

One way to convey your brand voice is through wording. What tone does your brand have? What language does it use? Would it use formal speech or be more laid-back and playful if it were a person?

Another way to convey your brand voice is through imagery. How is your brand represented by its logo, website, color palette, fonts, and ad images? Maybe you want a black-and-white logo and website (elegant, classic, simple). Or maybe you want a website full of cartoons and colors (fun, silly).

Your brand voice informs your messaging — the words and images you put out into the world to support your brand identity. All aspects of your brand messaging need to be aligned, but you need to define your voice before you can craft those messages. Here’s how:

• Review your mission statement. Identify your brand’s purpose. Your brand voice and messages should consistently convey this mission.
• Audit your current content. If you aren’t sure how you’re presenting your brand now, look at your existing content. What feelings does it inspire?
• Conduct market research. One way to develop your brand voice is to figure out what you aren’t. Do an “Our brand is THIS, not THAT” exercise by analyzing marketplace competitors.
• Survey your audience. Ask consumers for their impressions of your brand’s content and voice. What do they associate with your brand?

4. Create a brand style guide

With the above steps completed, you can create your brand guidelines — the guidebook for which words, images, and messages your brand should use to present itself.

Some people call this a “brand bible.” It’s the guidebook to which every person creating marketing, ads, or content for your company should turn.

A brand style may include guidelines for your brand’s visual identity, like logo usage, typography (fonts), and color palette. It should also include directives regarding rhetoric, like the tone of voice and word choice (for example, instead of using the third person voice, address the reader directly with “you”).

5. Create a content marketing plan

Content marketing involves raising awareness (in this case, about your brand) by distributing content to your target markets.

This content can take many forms, including blogs, thought leader articles, and social media (social media marketing is its own niche but can fall under the “content” umbrella). Don’t forget that search engine optimization (SEO) is a vital part of organically raising awareness.

This template can help you develop your content strategy. From there, decide what types of content you’ll create and make a calendar that maps out when you’ll publish what content.

This calendar can be a basic spreadsheet that covers the following:

• Publishing date and time
• Content format (see “marketing channels” up next)
• The topic of the content piece
• Written copy
• Visuals to accompany the copy

Learn more about creating a content calendar to help you craft quality content faster.

6. Choose the right marketing channels

As you create your content calendar, consider what marketing channels you’ll use to publish each piece of content. Possibilities include social media, paid advertising, and email marketing.

When picking marketing channels, consider your brand positioning and target audience.

If you’re a business brand targeting C-suite executives, you might want to post thought leader articles on LinkedIn. If you’re a humorous media brand targeting Gen Zers, social media posts on a platform such as TikTok might be the right pick.

7. Measure and analyze your results

In the second step, we discussed setting brand marketing goals and identifying concrete KPIs to measure those initiatives. Now that your brand marketing strategy is in place, it’s time to check if it’s working by revisiting those KPIs.

This allows you to determine whether your efforts are working. You want to lean into successful brand marketing tactics. Alternatively, if you aren’t getting the desired results, it might be time to pivot and try another brand marketing campaign.

How you measure and analyze the results depends on the KPI you’ve set.

Say you’d like to raise brand awareness. Then, you would want to track the number of mentions your brand gets on social media platforms like Instagram. Third-party technologies like Social Mention let you automatically monitor this. Alternatively, if you want to increase traffic to your website, you can track that internally.