Better Brand Strategy,
No BS
A DIY Guide (for those with the time) to proper positioning & reaching the folks who matter most
Brand Strategy Gets the Goods
Setting a course for successful marketing
Brand is not just the product you sell or the service you offer; your true brand is the emotional connection you form with your customers…
It’s the promise (or expectation) of an experience…
It’s the immediate and visceral reaction a person has when they encounter or interact with your org.
So the question at hand is, how do you go about creating and reinforcing the kind of connection you want?
Brand Strategy
Holistic Brand Strategy
Brand strategy is about more than a logo, more than visuals & design, more than your marketing even.
It’s about aligning the resources of your business to attract, engage and delight the people you’re best at serving.
- When the customer’s needs intersect with what you want them to do (your Goal), value is created (and revenue enters the picture).
- When your resources are aligned to effectively and efficiently fulfill on the expectations you’ve set (Execution), profit is made.
- And when customers interact with your Resources (anything from your website to your reps to your deliverables), their Experience – and what they then tell others about it – is what generates your reputation and your true brand.
The name of the game is to have people have such a great experience, they naturally spread the word and help attract even more right-fit customers.
So where does one begin in all this?
Well, as the saying goes, “no customer, no business”. So that’s where we start.
Identify Your Ideal Customer(s)
Juggalo or no, you’ve gotta be down with your ICP
A business that knows its ideal customer is like a magnet. How do they work? They’re designed to attract the customers who need them.
Finding your ideal customer starts by asking the questions that put your business in their hypothetical shoes. Look within and ask:
- Who are our best customers?
- Who are our products and values in the best position to serve?
- What qualities make the best customers?
- Who are our worst customers?
Answer enough of these, and you’ll start to uncover a particular type of person. Then it’s time to ask more specific questions:
- What is this person’s profession and income?
- What age range are they in?
- What are their interests and values?
- How do they prefer to communicate?
- What kind of education do they have?
Then of course, the game is identifying – specifically and accurately – the true transformation they’re seeking (or would be seeking if they knew it were possible and achievable).
Where are they now, and where do they want or need to be? What do they have now (conditions/circumstances, emotions, thoughts, etc.) , and what would they have if their problem were solved?
Ready for More?
Dive Into Our ICP Post
Brand Persona
Create a Compelling Character
Brand Persona gives your ideal customer someone to connect with
Crafting memorable marketing and communications has a lot to do with storytelling. For customers to take an interest in your business, know what it stands for, and what they can expect from it, ask yourself: in the storytelling that is your marketing and communications, what character is your brand?
That character is your Brand Persona. People respond to what they can relate to; tying your brand to an archetype they already understand makes this possible.
A three-dimensional brand persona balances these three essential elements:
- Core Values
- Persona Archetype
- Tone of Voice
Engineering your brand’s persona means clearly defining your values, fitting a relatable archetype, and communicating in the tone of voice that speaks to your specific audience.
Core Values (but like, really)
More than jargon-laden aspirations, your values should be visible in your everyday actions
Core values don’t exist to make your business sound good; they demonstrate what makes it good.
To find those values, look within – what unique qualities do your business’s leaders, contributors, and stakeholders practice and believe in? Core values aren’t an ideal to strive for; they’re what your business demonstrates every day.
Once you’ve outlined a solid set of core values that represent your business’s beliefs, message, and mission, don’t stop there – use each day as an opportunity to embody and express those values in new ways.
Setting the Right Tone (of Voice)
Guidelines & guardrails so your message doesn’t go over the edge
Once you know what your brand should communicate, the next step is deciding how it sounds (and how it shouldn’t).
Is your brand passionate? Irreverent? Matter of fact? – Do you want a sense of humor? Tone is more than just the words you choose to communicate your services and values; it’s how your business communicates its personality. Setting an appropriate tone of voice determines how your business makes potential customers feel, and establishing clear guidelines can help keep that voice on-brand.
Once you’ve refined the right tone, keep it consistent. That tone should be reflected in everything your business does and everywhere it can be seen, from its webpages to its social media posts, brand videos, ads, and more.
Your Brand, Tapped into the Collective Consciousness
Brand Persona Archetypes tell customers who you are, not just what you do
All personalities are unique, and so is your brand’s – condensing your brand into a recognizable persona helps customers understand who your business is, and from there, how it fits into their lives and needs.
How do you distill everything that represents your business into a relatable core persona? Shape your brand persona into a recognizable archetype.
Common brand archetypes include “The Hero”, “The Creator”, “The Rebel”, and many more; archetypes can even be combined if that’s what will suit your brand the best.
To find the right brand persona archetype for your business, consider your core values, what you do best for your customers, how you go about doing that, and of course the needs & preferences of your ideal customer persona.
Finding an intersection between these four elements can help pinpoint which archetype authentically represents your business and would likely resonate with the type of person you want to attract.
Check out our blog post on Positioning, Persona, and POV
First Things First
Effective messaging starts with knowing your priorities – this is what the messaging hierarchy is for.
The foundation is your Positioning Statement: a concise description of what you bring to your target market that no one else can match.
Next is the Brand Promise. In the right hands, it’s way more than just a catchy tagline; it expresses the value your customers can expect every time they engage with your organization – from a brief website visit to a sales presentation to a customer support convo and beyond.
Then comes your Brand Story. A good brand story establishes where you’ve come from, what you do best (and for whom), why you do it the way you do it, and what you’re committed to going forward. This is not some indulgent mini-manifesto, this is an accessible story that allows people to understand your brand – and it serves as a powerful template for applications like homepage copy, content scripting, and more.
From there, you approach your Marketing Messaging with a bit more of a silo’d approach, identifying the key points (benefits, features, supporting evidence, etc.) of particular offerings and intended audiences.
Visual Brand
Identity
Make Your Mark (and More)
Your visual brand identity (VBI) is a collective of all the elements that make your brand work as a cohesive whole. A solid VBI communicates who you are as clearly as what you do.
The ultimate goal of every brand identity is to create something distinct and quickly recognizable to customers. Your brand identity should clearly convey your brand’s verbal and visual elements, coupled with a distinct personality that really ties the room together.
Oh the Places You’ll Logo
Looks matter. Because your VBI is what will catch people’s eyes first, you want to ensure it leaves a pleasing and memorable impression. You can’t have that without a good logo.
The logo is the essential icon that drives the rest of your brand design. Being the primary thing customers will see and associate with your brand’s identity, a logo should clearly communicate how your business feels and what sets it apart from the competition.
The best logos manage to convey that while remaining timeless, easily recognizable, and versatile in how they’re applied. A truly effective brand logo needs to both make a lasting impression and seamlessly integrate itself into your customer’s environment.
A Good VBI is Like Voltron
What do we mean? A well-rounded visual brand identity is the synthesis of five parts; a good logo is the body, and these are the limbs:
- Color Palette
- Typography
- A Brand Style Guide
- Brand-Specific Elements
Color Me Intrigued…
Colors can convey subconscious feelings that, well, color our impression of what we see. A good brand identity capitalizes on this by using colors that can evoke the emotions you want customers to associate with your business and its offerings.
Don’t Be Sans Script
Don’t dilute your carefully crafted message with poorly presented typography. After all, that’s what your audience will see before they even read it.
The effect of good typography shouldn’t be overlooked, and in that spirit, consistency is critical. Choosing a few core fonts that best represent your brand can help create a stronger, more cohesive overall visual identity.
Between different font types, like serif, sans serif, script, and display fonts, finding the right combination is key to a coherent and compelling visual identity.
Guide in Style
Having a strong, cohesive style for your brand is important, but it only works if your identity is also applied in a consistent manner across your materials and media.
A brand style guide is a comprehensive document with explicit reference materials and application instructions, organized to help you keep everything from your visual assets to your tone of voice synergized together, wherever it’s used.
You Do You
While all good VBI’s share common elements that are key to their success, there’s no one way to craft a brand identity that suits every business.
A great VBI understands that no two businesses are alike, applying its elements in a unique way that best showcases a business’s strengths and addresses the needs of its audience.
For example, if your company is selling a tangible product, it needs a language of clear visual imagery. For a service-oriented company, the qualities of its brand may be best told through testimonials or blog posts.
Knowing is Only Half the Battle
Crafting a visual brand identity can be intimidating; with so many moving parts, knowing your own business isn’t enough to communicate that to your audience.
This is why so many smart people trust this task to talented designers and creatives when they have the ability to do so.
A trustworthy third-party examining your business from the outside looking in can construct a comprehensive VBI with all the insights you can’t see on your own – and probably faster too.
Ready to dig deeper?
Check Out Our VBI Post
Go Ye Forth and Amplify
Attract, Engage, and Connect with the People Who Matter Most
Once you’ve clarified your messaging, identity, and intended audience, it’s time to hatch a plan to make sure they all meet up.
This is your Go-to-Market Strategy.
A well-rounded GTM Strategy should start with your growth-related objectives and specific metrics you’ll use to gauge how effectively those goals are being met, aka the “OKR’s approach” (Objectives & Key Results).
And keep in mind, this varies! A new brand rollout, a rebrand rollout, and oh I don’t know, an updated “marketing plan for next year” would all have very different objectives involved, let alone the relevant metrics.
Once your overall intended outcomes are clear, you want to decide on channels, platforms, and areas of tactical focus. This might be harder than it seems at first glance. Why? Because the right answer to tactical questions like “should I be on ___ platform?” is always “well, it depends!”
- Where is your audience spending their time (online or off)?
- What are they looking for while they’re there?
- What message – and in what format – is most likely to resonate with that particular audience and in that particular environment?
- Also, what kind of content (text-based, graphics, video, audio, etc.) would be most effective and efficient for you to produce reliably?
Take SEO for example. This is a classic go-to, and a term that even non-marketing executives tend to know – so it often gets asked about directly. But anyone who’s done any kind of relatively high-volume search on Google in the last couple years can attest that users are presented with an AI-generated answer, multiple ads, a “snippet” or two, and even different questions to ask before getting to any “organic results” at all… So unless your business is bringing the massive budgets and/or “black-hat” tactics of the major players in a given space, trying to rank on (a nonexistent) page 1 with old-school “organic SEO best practices” just ain’t gonna work out the way you want it to.
That’s not to say that SEO has no value ofc, it certainly does. It’s just a very different situation than it was even a few years ago, and you have to approach it with strategy-based nuance, not plug-and-play “best practices” from a 10-year-old playbook.
Same goes for social. Yes, social media is where your audience is, with increasingly few exceptions. But executing organic social media efficiently and effectively (grows in reach, gets good engagement, leads to users taking additional actions, etc.) is difficult, and needs to be grounded in a sensible approach that accounts for your brand (messaging and overall identity), your intended audience’s desires and behaviors, and your capacity to execute consistently. And the noisier the space, the harder it all is – especially if you’re not willing to take calculated creative risks (and most execs and business owners are just not willing to be very creative or risky when it comes time for it, no matter what the vibe is early in the process).
Sooo yes, the answer to “how?” is “it depends”. And your array of available options is already overwhelming, and increasing by the day. But here are a few channels, applications, and/or tactics to consider when thinking it through – keeping in mind ofc that sound strategic thinking must be applied to any and all that you choose!
- Website – your central source of truth. Showcase your identity, drive your message home, and deliver a great user experience – no matter where they arrived from. Oh, and write for readers, not robots – your site content should be value-focused and SEO-informed.
- SEO
- SEM (Search Engine Marketing / Google Ads)
- Social Media (Organic, Paid/Ads)
- Traditional Media (TV, radio, billboards, publications, etc.)
- Event Marketing (trade shows, conferences, special hosted events, etc.)
- Seriously, we could go on for days with this list. So we’ll stop here for now, but this isn’t anywhere close to exhaustive.
And once you’ve narrowed your options, it’s time to take your strategy for a spin!
Concept some campaigns, sort out the objectives & metrics for each of them – don’t be the silly goose measuring conversions on awareness-building campaigns or gushing about ad impressions on a landing page conversion campaign – and lay out your timelines for production, execution, and optimization.
Mike Tyson famously said, “everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth”. Heed that warning. No matter how sound your strategy, you’ve got some uppercuts coming your way. It’s just part of the game. Learn the lesson, dust yourself off, and get back out there.
We Love it When a Plan Comes Together
It’s as rewarding as it is rare
Welp, we covered a lotttt in this thing – and it truly is still a cursory overview of a well-executed Brand Strategy process. Bringing your brand into existence – and then into the world – is an undertaking well worth the thought, discussion, planning, and course correction that goes into it.
But it is definitely worth the work. And it can’t be done alone.
If you’re taking this on in earnest, we hope this guide helps – AND we highly recommend seeking support. If not from an expert or agency, at least get some input from trusted peers or advisors along the way. Nobody is an expert in every single thing we’ve covered here, and anyone representing as such is selling something (perhaps themselves, in an interview). So ideally you’d pull from multiple sources of feedback, each competent in the area you’re working on, and also take on some input that challenges your assumptions. Marketers and business owners have a knack for being a little too close to our “babies” and therefore being blind to both obstacles and opportunities more easily identified by others.
Ok, that’s enough for now. You’ve got a lot to do!
Good luck out there, friends.
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