How A Brand Strategy Connects With Your Audience (Way More Than A Logo Ever Will)
Starting anything is hard, but for the sake of this blog post we are talking about building a BRAND. In the beginning phases of business your focus is generally based on selling your product or service to bring awareness to it and rally customers and clients that will rave about your business to others. Word of mouth is powerful and forever will be, but it’s not sustainable if that is your only method of connecting to new audiences when you’re trying to scale your business.
So let's say your business is doing well, maintaining a certain average of customers and clientele to keep you afloat, but you’re not connecting with new audiences. You now need to create a BRAND.
Branding is an entire system including strategies that then help the development of your brand visuals and an ongoing brand identity, personality and voice. Branding is all about how people feel about your brand. Brand strategy is a long term relationship with your audience. Establishing and crafting a strategy that is unique to your business will help you:
Identify your audience
Establish effective and clear messaging
Develop unique brand visuals
Create a branded customer experience
Confidently communicate the value of your product or service
People don’t like to be sold to 24/7, and they aren’t enticed to spend their money with you if you’re just constantly pushing your services or products on them. This is where knowing your audience comes in. Knowing who needs/wants your product and why (their problem/frustrations), their age, income, what they value and more will help you know what type of brand personality they will organically connect with. Brand strategy helps you shape how you will be perceived by your audience. Trust and believe that your audience can tell when you don’t have branding in place. They can see it in your content, on your website and feel it in their customer experience.
You can’t market to anyone without an established brand direction and understanding of how to implement it. The elements of your brand strategy are the tools that you need to execute marketing. Because marketing and branding are very different…but that's a conversation for another day!
Kristian Thompson is a brand strategist and designer who works to help elevate the brand presence for Black and minority owned businesses. You can reach her at https://www.raevisioncreative.com/