What is brand strategy and why is it necessary?

Your brand is the relationship you build with your audience. The experience you create. The way your clients feel about you.

This means your brand is a big factor in the kind of impact you can make with your business — both for your clients and for you, as a business. The income you can make. The rate at which you can grow.

All that makes it sound like being strategic and intentional about growing your brand is a smart business move, doesn’t it? Right. So in this post, I’m getting deep into the details of brand strategy. What it is and how to create one.

And by the way, if you’d like to work through this step-by-step, check out the Branding Intro Workbook. It’s a free guide to all the foundational components your brand needs to get started.

What is brand strategy?

A brand strategy is a plan for how you will build the brand you want to own. It is driven by a brand goal and outlines the core foundation components that must be kept consistent in order to create cohesive branding.

(Confused about the distinction between “a brand” and “branding”? Check out: What is branding and why is it important?)

A good brand strategy also considers the audience of your brand and how your brand will relate to them. As you define your values, your purpose and the attributes of your brand (more on that below), think about how it helps to create a strong connection between your brand and your target market.

Examples of brand strategy goals

Following are just a few examples of goals you can focus on. No matter what kind of business-related aims you may have, strengthening your brand will help you close in on them. These are some of the ways you can do that.

Raising brand awareness

This is about improving the recognisability of your brand and it helps with “getting your name out there”. This is what you want to do when you’re establishing your business in a new industry, or aiming to gain a wider reach in the market.

For raising brand awareness, having a consistent message and identity design throughout your marketing is crucial. It takes multiple impressions before a person will start to take note of your brand and you want to make sure they can make a connection between those impressions. There should be a clear uniformity in the look, sound and feel of your branding.

Earning brand loyalty

This is so important when it comes to building lasting relationships with your clients. It’s also a key part of building a thriving community of people who like and follow your brand.

Repeat clients are far easier to market and sell to, compared to an audience who are new to your brand. You want to build a brand that encourages people to stick around and continue gaining value from your business even after they’ve made their first purchase. People who are loyal to your brand also make great brand advocates and this can go a long way towards building trust quickly with new prospects and gaining more clients.

Improving brand equity

Brand equity refers to the overall image of your brand and the value this brings to your business. Positive brand equity helps your business be more profitable, while negative brand equity hurts you.

Having strong core values and sticking to them, as well as delivering on your promises are important parts of strengthening your brand equity. It can help to establish things like a sense of high quality that allows you to charge premium prices and attract high-end clients. Very positive brand equity makes your brand look like a more valuable choice over your competition.

How to create a brand strategy

Including defining your goals, there are three elements in total that I like to outline with clients when I work on their brand strategy. The other elements are: client needs and brand foundation.

So here are the three components of brand strategy (according to me, at least)!

Goals — As I mentioned in the earlier section, your goal sets the target for your brand strategy. It’s what you’re aiming to achieve with the objectives you implement through your brand strategy.
Client needs — Your clients are such a vital part of the health of your brand. In the end, you’re building your brand for them (not for yourself).
Brand foundation — These are the core components of your branding. The values, traits and vision that sets your business apart and is underlying everything you do. Learn more about defining your brand foundation here.

Essentially, every time you create a new piece of branding or really any decision related to your business, you can use this framework to determine whether the decision is right for your brand or not. Whether you’re trying a new marketing campaign, creating a new piece of content, changing your logo, targeting a new type of client — whatever it is you’re doing! — you can can assess:

Is this going to get me closer to hitting my goal?
Does it fulfil the needs of my clients?
Is it in line with my brand values, purpose and personality?

If it’s “yes’s” all round, then you know you’re on the right track and are making progress in a way that is aligned with your brand strategy.

Also read: Brand strategy questions to ask when discovering your brand direction

An example of how a lack of strategic branding hurts businesses

Let’s say your business has a beautiful, sleek website where you sell high-end luxury goods, but then potential customers are faced with a clunky-looking checkout system. What’s the likely result? Chances are you’ll lose customers. Why? Because the brand experience from your website and the experience from the checkout don’t match. The customer is left unsure of whether your brand is really for them at all.

This is exactly what you can avoid if you develop your business with a brand strategy in mind. Maybe having a very basic design allowed you do cut costs. But what about the cost of damaging the impression of your brand?

With a good brand strategy in place, you’ll be able to make business decision in a more calculated way. You can measure whether or not your brand is adding value to your business or whether it could use more work. You can analyse whether your checkout system (or sales strategy, or logo design, or next social media post) is a good fit for what you’re trying to communicate with your branding. Everything will be driven by a common goal, helping you to create a smooth, consistent experience for your clients.

Last thoughts

So, what I want you to take away from this post is: be strategic with your branding.

You might think building a brand is all about having a nice logo with pretty colours and professional photos, but unless all those things are created with a strategy in mind, then there’s no real way to know if they will actually help your business to grow, attract more ideal customers, and make you profit.

To get started with your brand strategy, check out my free branding guide: the Core Brand Pillars Workbook.