Marketing trends are changing quite rapidly. That’s why newly founded brands struggle to keep up with these trends, following the most viable branding and marketing strategy for their companies. In this article, we will take a closer look at the core fundamentals that each brand should have and discuss various branding strategies, so you could select the appropriate one for your case.
Key elements of an effective brand strategy
Here are the key elements of and effective brand strategy.
1. Brand purpose
A clear understanding of the purpose of your newfound brand is pivotal to building a successful business. Before announcing it to your customers, you and your team have to be aware of what your business is made for. Actually, it is not about what your company does or what service it provides, it is related to an explanation of why you started a business and why your brand is decent and unique. When the purpose is defined, it is high time to start building the branding strategy.
2. Brand vision
The concept of your brand must be future-proof, meaning your business idea will be in demand for many years. When the vision of your company is specified and clear to your team, the process of setting global and temporary goals will be much easier. Brand vision shows the long-term perspective of your business development and sets a path for reaching this development by your team.
3. Brand values
Selecting company values determines the perception of your brand on the market. Brand values define your attitude toward your customers, your team, the quality of your services, culture, and other spheres. This value policy expresses your public opinion on many things, so make sure these priorities correlate to your target audience and industry.
4. Target audience
Target audience is the key to successful business development. Customers have to be of your top priorities, whose needs you have to adjust to. Your products or services need to be relevant to your target audience, and your team needs to be aware of the issues they struggle with and the solutions that your brand can provide. You need to understand your audience well so that you can address their problems and needs with relevant solutions. Knowing your customers, like their locations, concerns, lifestyles, etc., helps you create a suitable position for your brand.
5. Market analysis
You would probably not find a niche that is not overwhelmed with numerous brands. Your task is to analyze the industry you are going to grow and find the elements that are lacking and fill them in with your brand. Knowing your differentiators and strong sides will help you keep up with the changing market trends, competition, and customer requirements.
Branding strategies for new businesses
There are common branding strategies or better say, methods to start a business. The selection depends on the vision, goals, and other specifics of your business. In addition, each new newly minted brand requires promotion, so branding and marketing strategies come complete and determine each other.
1. Corporate branding
A corporate branding strategy entails the perspective of growing your business globally. To build a strong corporation, your vision, your goals, and your values must be clear to your team as well as clear to your customers. Each action, marketing activity, and the business decision has to correlate with your priorities and your tagline. Overall, your brand must be recognized by your logo/product/service without even mentioning the brand name. That includes corporate branding methods.
2. Minimalistic branding
If corporate branding is all about brightness and different ways to make your brand memorable, the minimalistic or no-brand branding method focuses on delivering high-quality products to customers instead of promoting your brand first. This type of branding method selects customers as the core value, so such companies will produce more expensive products, rather than expensive packages, and other add-ons.
Customers will select the product instead of paying attention to what the brand is. So the marketing strategy has also to be focused on revealing the benefits of the product to users rather than the success of your company and why they should choose your company – you have to prove it with your product quality.
3. Personal branding
Personal brands can be more powerful than large corporate companies. You could have probably heard the expression “make yourself a brand”. It tells us about uniqueness, creativity, and personality. As for the most popular example of a personal brand, we can take a look at bloggers or influencers. These people, who have gained millions of followers all over the world, create themselves as a brand.
They are recognized by their behaviors, decisions, communicative style, etc. Influencers also keep their audience as close friends, which gives them a huge impact on their opinions. That’s why many small businesses pay for promotion not to huge marketing agencies, but to bloggers on social media who have an influence on a scalable audience.
4. Product branding
Product branding is the branding strategy that primarily focuses on customers and their needs. Foremost, you need to verify the idea of your product through market and target audience research to specify their problems and demands. The second step is product launch based on the customer requirements and the third is most important – evaluating the outcome due to your initial plans and collecting feedback from customers to know if the product meets their expectations, or not.
In case of negative results, you need to analyze the customer feedback and change your product according to new requirements. Surely, all your customer surveys and product changes must be announced on your social media, website, or mobile app to keep your product promoting and showing value to customers. 77% of customers buy products from brands that share and promote the same values as theirs.
5. Online branding
Online branding is one of the common branding methods we can use these days on social media and the internet overall. As an example, an online brand is an Instagram store, e-commerce platform, and other businesses that offer their product or services exclusively online. Proper marketing strategy is pivotal for online branding management. Business owners use different marketing channels like corporate websites or e-commerce sites, social media, and paid advertising.
The main task for an online brand is to correctly specify the target audience. Thanks to marketing campaigns managers on social media, it is quite easy to do as you can adjust your advertising according to the audience and filters you need. The level of online visibility of your business defines your success.
6. Retail branding
The retail niche has a separate branding strategy for effective sales and standing out from competitors. There is no other way to become a successful retail business than to produce your own product or products. It has not to be something 100% unique, but it has to have unique or improved options than your competitors offer. The main task is to determine the retail direction, whether you will offer multi products or a single product for your customers. Retail branding is also applicable for companies that sell their own product as well as goods from other manufacturers to cover a wider audience.
7. Geographical branding
Geographical branding embraces a scalable area of activity. For example, each country or globally famous city has its reputation, associations, and stereotypes. Using this type of branding management, this opinion can be changed in another direction, which is quite relevant for the tourism industry, for instance.
Geographical branding requires much time and effort to change the imagination about the entire city or country. So your statements must be proved with real facts of change of those locations, feedback from citizens or guests. This can be done on the level of a travel firm to convince the clients, or on the governmental level to convince people globally.
8. Co-branding
A co-branding strategy means joining two independent brands into one. The main condition of a successful merger is having the same or very close values, vision, goals, and attitude to the services, quality of products, and approach to customers. It is essential to ensure you and your partner are on the same page and both of you will be in profit from the cooperation. Surely, your brand needs to be from the same or similar industries to create a logical and clear merger for your teams and customers.
9. Service branding
According to statistics, 73% of customers choose a certain brand because of helpful customer service. Service branding requires a long-term perspective in building trusting relationships with customers. If product branding is something your customer can see, touch, and try to know whether it is good, the services are invisible and can be noticed not immediately.
To prove the quality of services, you need to constantly get in touch with target customers, listen to their feedback, and make changes according to what they don’t like in your brand. Commonly, service branding entails such marketing activities as mailing and cold mailing, social media outreach to be in touch with customers as well as looking for potential new clients.
10. Offline branding
Offline branding is the old and traditional branding strategy that remains quite popular among different businesses and niches. Offline branding is in complete opposition to online branding. It entails traditional marketing channels like billboards, business cards, flyers, newspaper advertising, radio, TV, etc. The target audience might be tight, but it doesn’t prevent rapid business development and success. For example, we can see numerous ads for medications on TV. You will not find a social media page or website of these brands, but you definitely find them in the local pharmacies.
