Brenda Berg is a professional with over 15 years of experience in business management, marketing and entrepreneurship. Consultant and tutor for college students and entrepreneurs at Oxessays. She believes that constant learning is the only way to success. You can visit her personal blog at Letsgoandlearn.com
Developing a brand strategy can be hard at times. There are so many things to think about and you can never know for sure if your strategy will work until you try it. Any growing company knows that the brand is important but building it is sometimes hard to achieve.
To build a successful brand that will be strong for years to come requires knowledge and understanding of your company as well as your audience.
If you keep getting lost on this path to success, here are the four key elements of any successful brand.
Know your target audience
One of the first things you should do when building your brand is to discover who would your products and services appeal the most to. Without this information, you can easily get lost and create a brand that does not really do anything for your business.
Before you begin, do a thorough research of the market, see who is most likely to be attracted to your products and services and start building your brand upon that.
You can acquire this information by conducting surveys, asking your customers for feedback etc. Target audience is something you should know at the beginning but it is also something that can be incrementally changed and improved. You can also send different messages to different target audiences – on social media, for example, for younger people and in papers or on television for older generations. Email marketing can work in the same way if you segment your subscribers.
Knowing your target audience is essential – if you are selling hair products, you are likely to get the attention of women, for example. Support your decision on the target audience with deep research and then market your services for that group specifically.
Deliver quality content
The path to your audience is paved with quality content. To achieve this, offer new, fresh information displayed in an interesting way – this will most definitely bring more people to your brand and positively affect your business.
Writing content can sometimes be hard, though – you do not know where to start and what to say. If you keep trying but you are never satisfied with the result, you could always easily get some guidance from State of writing and Via writing guides.
Quality content is the one also offering uniqueness, so any plagiarism simply will not do if you want to succeed. Luckily, there are excellent services for this online – Copyscape or Academized to be sure that your content is not accidentally plagiarised and is free of errors and grammar mistakes.
This is a great way to connect with your audience and offer them value at the same time. Make sure that everything you write is consistent with your brand – if your company produces and sells toys, you can create content related to purchasing the right toy for a certain age of the child or what the best toy for a child would be for Christmas.
Build a unique voice
Think about your favorite brands and what they all have in common – unique voice that sets them apart from anyone else. You could choose to be sarcastic, funny, serious or anything else that would represent your company well and appeal to your audience. Try to be relatable and human – this will make people connect with your brand.
Brand voice is the key to creating a good relationship with your clients. For example, Grammarly has built an excellent online presence with their funny posts about grammar and spelling mistakes that often happen. They also post articles on topics like whether you should say Doughnut or Donut and how to have a pirate’s accent. This has created a wonderful reputation for them and readers not only love using it but also engaging with the brand.
Christine Milton, a founder of Big Assignments, shares, “One of the most important things when building a brand voice is to be consistent with it. Use it on all of your social media profiles, your website and anywhere else. This way you will be recognizable and easy to connect with.“
Have a backup plan
Always having a backup plan is a good idea. Your brand strategy might fail and in this case, you need to have another solution to quickly pick up where you left off and find a new way to reach people. Brand strategies fail for various reasons and because of this, you need to keep track of every element of your strategy to know where your plan failed.
Once you stumble upon a problem, make sure that you do thorough research on why this happened. If you discover that the problem is related to content, try editing it, formatting it a bit better or proofreading it. You might need another set of eyes to catch the issue, so you can consider using online tools to be sure that you have done everything you can regarding the content.
Final Thoughts
Building a brand is never an easy job. You can make many mistakes in the process and find yourself lost.
But no matter how hard it is, brand building is one of the most interesting parts of having a business. It’s a great way to engage with your audience and have a response from your marketing campaigns. Without a brand, this might not be true but if you really pay attention to building a brand image people will love, you will set yourself up for success even before you begin. Implement these key elements to your strategy, and you will easily find your path and reach people in a fun and unique way that will most definitely improve your business.
