When you build a brand, your brand strategy should be part of a hierarchy with the business strategy at the top – its goals and aims are delivered by the sales and marketing strategy – whose goals, in turn, are provided by the brand strategy.
Sales, marketing and the brand should work together at all times to deliver the results – this means that the way that Sales and Marketing interact with the prospect at every stage of the buyer's journey needs consideration when developing the brand.
Measurement and feedback need to be built in at every stage of your brand management process so you can work with an agile strategy that responds to an ever-changing environment and customer demands. This capability for iteration and refinement will allow you not only to cope with change but to make the most of fleeting opportunities.
Probably the most crucial element of brand development is brand positioning – how you want to position yourself in the market in the eyes of your customers and prospects.
Your market, your offering and your business strategy will determine the limits of the market landscape within which you can place your brand – but here are some general, and simplified examples of brand positioning statements about what might make your offering different:
- The cheapest
- The most expensive
- The best quality
- The easiest to use
- The most featured
- The most efficient
- The greenest
The goal of brand positioning is to ensure that your customer's perception of what you stand for, matches the brand perception you are aiming for. You can use market research to determine the nature and amount of any positioning gap.
Every brand has a value – whether that value is high or low, or even harmful. It is your brand equity and comprises the mix of customer perception, experience, and opinion about your brand. Brand equity can have a direct impact on your reputation and sales. Again, good market research can give you an idea of your brand's equity with the market as well as eliciting direct feedback from prospects and customers.
A low value for brand equity or a mismatch in brand perception should be addressed as part of your brand management process.
Social Media.
Any work you do with social media has to be informed by the knowledge you have of your customers' habits and preferences, the most important of which is knowing what social media platforms they are likely to be engaged with.
There is no point in spending time and effort developing content for channels where your audience is not present. The first step is, therefore, to identify where you will find your audience.
Your brand content should be all about appealing to your customers and potential customers. Base everything on the buyer personas you have developed - what interests them, what they respond to, and what makes them sit up and pay attention.
It's also important to recognise that prospects may be at different stages in the buyer's journey – so developing social content that reflects that stage is another critical capability to master.
Finally, your social content should deliver on-point messages that will help you to achieve your overall brand strategy.
In social media, your brand's personality is a vital element of getting your audience to engage, as well as differentiating you from the crowd. Your tone of voice and character should be an expression of your brand's culture and values – and is all part of building the brand. Ideally, you should have brand guidelines that layout clearly what type of posts you should be creating and with what attitude.
Being helpful and informative should also be a natural part of your brand, but the way you go about that should again be tailored to your brand's personality.
Don't forget that imagery and design are as crucial in social posts as the words you write – maybe more so. Choose your images and graphics with care.
Ensuring your social media is a good fit with your brand is an essential part of brand management and should not be treated lightly or done without thought.
Finally, and most importantly, don't forget to benchmark, measure results and refine your efforts. Only by measuring your social impact against key performance indicators will you know what works and what doesn't. A constant iterative process of experimenting, measuring and refining will allow you to align your social content and its results with your brand strategy and overall aims.