How do you develop the best brand marketing strategy? You start by identifying your brand, defining your goals, and identifying your target audience. Then you figure out how to create the perfect marketing mix to reach that audience and sell your product or service to them. Once you’ve done that, you can follow our five steps to turn your strategy into an actionable plan, so you can get the word out about your brand and make sure people know why they should buy from you!
Start by analyzing your brand
This step is where you’ll analyze your brand, why do you exist? What is your mission as a business? What do you want your brand to mean in people’s minds? These answers will help determine what marketing tactics you should start with. From there, it’s a matter of developing a must-do brand strategy list: A list of things that are critical to making your business successful from day one and creating ongoing momentum for years (or decades) after. This includes everything from getting found on Google and social media platforms, to building partnerships with other companies that create value for both parties, and generating PR opportunities with local news outlets or bloggers who share your mission.
Define who your target audience is
The first step in developing a brand marketing strategy is to determine who your target audience is and create their persona. Your target audience is a group of people that you want to attract to your brand. However, not every member of your target audience will fit exactly into their persona, which means that you’ll need to take some time to think about what makes them ideal customers. You can start by identifying how they see themselves or by taking note of what would make them identify with your brand, but it’s best to consider both sides when creating your persona.
Things to consider include:
- Is your customer a man or woman?
- What is their age range?
- What’s the best way to reach them?
- How much money do they make?
- Where do they reside?
- Why would they spend money on your service or product and how often?
- Why would they not want to spend money on your product or service?
Run competitor analysis
Most businesses will compete with other brands, and you must understand how your competitors are approaching their customer base and what kinds of tactics they are using to reach them. If you’re considering how to develop a brand marketing strategy that does not already exist within your market, it can be particularly valuable to look at what your competitors are doing and do something similar but better. A better product or service is often enough to build an entirely new segment of customers who have been waiting for someone like you to come along. The key, here, is analysis—not only of your competitors, but also of your existing data—to determine which parts of their approach resonate most with customers, and then figure out why it works so well.
It’s also good to note that knowing who your indirect competitors are is just as important as knowing your direct competitors, especially when building your strategy.
Create an attractive website
When it comes to building a brand and marketing your business, your website is one of your most valuable assets. As a whole, it should look professional and have an attractive design. Creating a user-friendly and attractive website will increase sales while making it easy to use for returning customers. Tools such as Google Analytics are great for quickly tracking which areas of your site are most visited, what kinds of devices people use (mobile versus desktop), how much time they spend on specific pages, etc. This will help you fine-tune not only site design but also target content. When building your website, keep SEO in mind. The more you’re able to optimize your content, the greater your ROI will be when it comes to traffic-generating campaigns and web searches. This Ecommerce SEO guide will help you identify, prioritize, and optimize.
Build a great presence through content
Even if you’re using an e-commerce platform such as Shopify, content is by far one of your best resources for building a brand. After all, it’s often your first impression with new clients and prospects. What’s more, is that content becomes an important communication tool that you can use for announcements and special announcements. With today’s growing list of social media platforms – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and more – that means there are always opportunities for interaction and engagement with your target audience. As far as developing your brand marketing strategy goes, content is always at the top of any must-do list. If you already have a website up and running with original content, kudos to you! If not: now would be a good time to look into some Shopify SEO tips to implement in your strategy.
Once you’ve implemented your brand strategy you must keep track of the performance. Factors such as audience awareness will help guide you in making decisions when it comes to your ROI and whether or not your strategy is working (or if you need to make some changes). That’s why it’s important to gather as much data as you can about your audience and the traffic that you’re receiving. From there, it’s just a matter of fine-tuning your strategy to stay relevant and ahead of your competitors.