12 Steps to make your Brand Big

Brands are one of the most appealing prospects of digital marketing. They, on their own, can attract a large number of people towards themselves. But to reach this level, where the people prefer a brand over anything else needs strategy and explicit planning. Brand Strategy is one of the most important areas of a business and if conducted appropriately, it is beneficial. This article is about learning to create a brand strategy, using a 12-step roadmap used by some of the biggest and most loved brands in the world.

Your brand is more than your logo, name, or tagline. It’s the entire experience your prospects and customers get from your business, your product, or your service. Your brand strategy determines what you stand for, the promise you make, and the personality you convey. And while it includes your logo, color palette, and tagline, these are just the creative elements that convey your brand. Instead, your brand lives in your daily interaction with your market.

Value of a defined Brand strategy

When you build a brand for yourself or a client, essentially, what you’re doing is you’re building an entity that’s going to connect a business to a group of people. You need to first understand who the audience is, and what they want, and then devise a plan to show them that your business has what they want in a way that’s going to resonate with them. That’s exactly what the brand strategy is. Well, if you have products or services that you want to sell to ultimately grow your business, then you want to give your business the best possible chance to grow. Now, if you think of any professional team in the world, then they work hard on their techniques, they understand who their competitors are, including their weaknesses, and then they go and devise a plan to go out and beat them. Not every team is successful because they have a strategy. But every successful team does have a strategy. And the same is said for every successful brand in the world. They all have a strategy for success.

12-Step Road map for Brand Success

So to make things clear following is a 12-step roadmap that is essential for a new business to reach the height it has desired off.

1) Develop your internal Brand

This is the very first step in the brand-building process. And even some business owners who do understand the value of brand strategy tend to skim over this quite quickly. But it is a really important step because it provides a solid foundation for your brand. And if your brand doesn’t have a solid foundation, it doesn’t take long for the cracks to appear. So your internal brand includes your purpose, vision, mission, and your values. And these must stem from the leadership team because it is the leadership team that directs the brand. And if there’s not a solid belief behind why the brand exists, then it won’t take long before cracks appear. To develop your internal brand, stemming from who the brand leadership team is, and you’ll have that solid foundation in place.

2) Define your target audience

For any business to survive, and then thrive, they need some kind of value that certain people want. And these certain people are a group. And that is who your target audience is. And it’s your job as a brand builder, brand manager to understand these people as intimately as you can understand everything about them. So use every tool at your disposal to paint a picture of whom they are. Your demographics, your psychographics understand the challenges their pain points and ultimately get to their emotions, because it’s through their emotions, that you’ve got to be able to understand them, empathize with them, and connect with them.

3) Map your market landscape

Now, if there is a group of people that want what you have, then chances are there are a group of competitors already serving those people, you need to understand that group of competitors as well as you can because you need to understand what your audience already has available to them in the marketplace. This is because you don’t want to offer the same thing, you want to be different. You want to give your audience something that they don’t already have as an option in the marketplace. Because if you just go out into the market, and offer the same as what’s already out there, you’re just contributing to market noise. And you’re not giving your audience a reason to turn their heads and look towards your brand.

4) Shape your Brand personality

Once you’ve defined the position that you want to own in the market, you’ll understand the value that you’re going to bring to your audience and the impact that you’re going to make in their lives. So now you need to devise a plan to convince them of that value and show them the impact that you’re going to make in their lives. Now what we say to our audience is very important, but how we say it will have a big impact on whether or not our message is received. Now on a human level, we all connect with people through our personalities through the characteristics that we display, and we connect with other things in the same way we connect with brands. If we see characteristics that we’re attracted to, then we’re far more likely to be open to those messages. To understand who your audience is, the characteristics that they’re attracted to, and then infuse your message with those characteristics. And your audience will be much more open to your messaging.

5) Identify your Brand’s tone of voice

This is an extension of the personality and another opportunity to inject characteristics and personality into our brand. Now, we are in a content-driven world today. And there’s content everywhere. We see advertisements, social posts, content, articles, videos, and each one of those is an opportunity for our brand, to inject characteristics and inject personality so that we can resonate with who our audience is. To understand the personality that you want your audience to be attracted to, that you know, that your audience will be attracted to, and then use your tone of voice to inject more of those same characteristics. And if you use that tone of voice across all of your content, then they’ll feel a connection to your personality, they’ll feel a connection to your brand when compared to your competitors who are out there just creating content that doesn’t have a personality and a tone of voice.

6) Craft your Brand story

As humans, we are fascinated by the story. And this is because it was the primary way to pass the information on from one generation to the next. So it’s built into our DNA. And when we hear stories, we just listen more intently, we’re more engaged. We always want to hear what the next step is, what the end of the story is. So that’s built into our DNA. A story impacts far more effectively than simple fact sharing. And this has been proven by neuroscience. We’re 22 times more likely to remember story-based information than we are to remember fact base information. So if you’re able to show your audience, why your brand is different, and the impact that your brand can make in their lives through a story or series of stories, then they’re going to listen far more intently, they’re going to be more open to that story because it’s part of their DNA.

7) Develop your name and tagline

It might seem pretty late in the process to be creating the brand name and the tagline. And this flies in the face of most brand-building processes because what you’ll find is that most businesses and you know, most brand names are created by the business owner very early in the business development stage. And it’s usually created because they like the name or they’re emotionally attached to it in some kind of way. But if you think about what brand name and taglines are, they’re just another communication tool and another strategic tool to be able to send a message to your audience and plant a seed in their mind. So if you also think about the information that we now have at hand, we know the position that we want to own in the mind of our audience, we know who our audience is, we know why we’re different from our competitors, the personality that we want, the characteristics that we want to deliver the messages, the stories, we have all of this information at hand now. So we’re in a much better position to be able to name the brand and develop the tagline to plant the seed in the mind of our audience as to why our brand is different, what we want our audience to remember about our brand. So we need to take all of the information that we’ve gathered and developed up until this point, and use that when developing the brand name and the tagline.

8) Design your Brand identity

This is where most business owners start the branding process, they’ll go out into the market look for a designer to design them a logo, and then they’ll deem themselves branded, and away they go. But this puts a bit of context into the idea that a brand is not a logo, because, at this point in the stage, we have developed 90% of the brand, all of the work that we’ve done, up until this point, all of that strategic work is 90% of the brand. And now we’re just bringing it to life, visually through the visual identity. And that’s where we design the logo, the typography, the color palettes, and the image style. All of these now put more emphasis on the visual identity on that brand identity before if you’re developing a visual identity as the starting point for your brand, well, then you don’t have all of that strategic information. And therefore your brand identity doesn’t have that strategic input. But now you have all of that information. Now you can develop and design a brand identity that is speaking to who the audience is that is delivering a message based on the personality and characteristics. So through the brand strategy, the brand identity becomes more important because it has all of that information at hand to use in the brand design process.

9) Craft your Brand collateral

Now, this is where your strategy and your identity come together. And this is the dressing room for your brand launch. So everything from your purpose to your typography, your color palettes, your positioning strategy, to your personality to your image style, all come together through your collateral. Everything from your website to your brochures, your business cards, your advertisements, your billboards, your point of sale, any piece of collateral, any form of physical or digital communication from your brand is part of your brand collateral sweep. So you need to develop that in this stage. And at that stage, you are ready to go out and launch your brand. You have all the tools at hand that is laced with your strategy and your identity and you’re ready to go.

10) Devise your Brand awareness strategy

We’ve already done some groundwork with the audience in terms of understanding who they are. At this point in the brand-building process, we’re going to find where they’re congregating. So we need to understand where they hang out online, where they hang out physically, where they congregate, where they go for information about the problem that we have that our brand solves. And where are they going to be most likely to be open to our messages, then we need to prioritize those congregations in terms of where our messages are going to be most effective, and develop specific messages for each of those environments. So that is what the brand awareness strategy does. Yes, we’ve devised how we’re going to communicate to our audience, what messages we’re going to say how we’re going to resonate with them through our characteristics, and our personality and our tone of voice through our brand strategy that we have developed. But now we’re getting more into the tactical side of getting our brand out into the marketplace. And this is where marketing comes into play. So our brand awareness strategy and our marketing strategy are the same. And we need to tactically decide where we’re going to place our messages and where to prioritize those messages.

11) Launch your Brand

So you’ve done all the hard work here, you’ve developed all of your communication; you’ve developed your visual identity and your tactical strategy to place your messages ad into the market. And now it’s about executing. Now, the type of budget that you have will have a big impact on how quickly you move here. If you’re working with a decent-sized budget, and you’ve got Google ads and Facebook ads to play with, then you can reach a lot more people through that budget. But if you don’t have a budget, then your marketing efforts are going to be a lot more guerilla-style, you’re going to be doing a lot more hard work, rolling up the sleeves and getting stuck in there on forums and chats, and trying to put your name out into the marketplace through those free platforms. So depending on your budget will depend on how quickly you can make an impact. But it’s important to keep that perspective. And it’s also important to determine what success looks like within your brand awareness strategy. So as you launch your brand, keep that perspective in mind. If you’ve got a budget, you’re going to make more impact. If you got less of a budget, you’re going to make less of an impact, but keep that perspective so you don’t get overwhelmed.

12) Analyze, optimize and evolve

Now you advantage that business owners have today compared to 15 years ago or even 10 years ago is the available level of data. So analytics is a very, very useful tool. And whether you do this yourself or engage somebody to help you, somebody must understand the power of analytics and to be able to analyze that data. So you can see whether or not the needle is moving or not. And then it’s a case of optimizing, improving, evolving, do more of what’s working, do less of what’s not make those changes nimble, and evolve. And that is how you’re going to find out what it is that your audience is responding to, what they’re not responding to, and then do more of what they’re responding to. So if you didn’t know already, but you probably did, you can see now that a brand is far more than a logo. But luckily for you, 90% of your competitors are still going out into the market, looking for a designer to design them a logo, and away they go. They don’t have any messaging, they don’t have a position in the market, they don’t understand their competitors, their audience, and they’re not connecting with them. They’re not resonating with them.

Conclusion

If you are launching a new brand or a business the primary thing to do is follow this 12-step framework and develop a brand strategy for your brand. This will help in connecting, resonating with who your audience is. You can start climbing the stairs of success by raising that brand awareness, and growing your brand.