Building a brand that resonates with your most important audiences is critical for success in today's crowded, noisy, competitive markets.

Creating a brand strategy is where you should begin, as it is the must-have foundation of a successful brand. Here are a few areas that can help you build your brand strategy.

Define Your Brand Identity

Your brand identity is not only your logo but the words, tone, style and behaviours separating you from your competitors. You must understand your target audiences and thoughts to define your brand identity. Creating a brand personality, often based on one of 12 archetypes, is a central strategy differentiating you from competitors. Distinctly differentiated brands are brands that have a greater chance of success. 

Develop a Brand Messaging Platform

How you communicate with your target audiences is central to your brand and is your brand's messaging tone, language, and style. Consistency across all channels helps reinforce your brand identity and builds trust with your audience. At a minimum, this platform should include your vision, mission, positioning and promise. 

Define Your Brand Style

Defining a brand style involves developing a guide that outlines your brand's visual and written foundation elements, such as your logo, colour palettes, imagery, templates and tone of voice. It ensures consistency across all audience touch points, from your website to social media channels.

Build a Strong Market Presence

You don’t have to be everywhere, but if you are not where your audiences are, you are nowhere. A strong market presence is crucial for building visibility and capturing a share of the audience's mind. Your website is the centrepiece of your online presence and should be visually appealing, easy to navigate, and optimized for search engines. You should also have a carefully considered social media presence. Your offline presence can be everything from a storefront, signage and networking to the vehicles that deliver your products.

Focus on the Brand Experiences You Deliver

Brand experience is how audiences interact with your brand, including everything from customer service to quality, responsiveness and communication to the packaging of products, website functionality, people and policies. Providing a consistently positive brand experience across multiple touchpoints helps to build trust and loyalty with your audience.

Create Brand Champions

Purposefully creating a network of brand champions is a powerful tool for building brand awareness and preference. These are people, and sometimes companies, who are influential with the target audience, and these influencers can help your brand reach a wider audience than you could on your own. B2B brands often call these champions referral partners or brand advocates. 

Manage Your Brand 

Effectively managing a brand requires strategic planning, consistent execution, and ongoing monitoring and evaluation of decisions and activities to ensure the brand remains robust and relevant in the market. Who manages the brand should be made clear, as should the role of everyone on the team in building a solid brand. Senior leadership plays a central role in supporting a brand management approach. 

Measure Your Brand Performance

You must regularly measure your brand's performance to know if your branding strategy is effective.  Measurement should include tracking metrics such as website traffic, social media engagement, customer research, online surveys, market share and revenues. These metrics and insights will help you understand what's working and what's not, so you can make informed decisions to improve your brand’s performance.

Brand Strategy before Brand Tools and Tactics.

Too many organizations start in the wrong place when considering the kind of brand they want to have. Starting with a logo or social media presence puts the cart before the horse. 

Building a strong brand is only possible with a brand with a strategic foundation. Starting with a strategy based on your business goals and plan will take your brand to where you need to go and be central to success.