10 Simple Steps for Brand Development
- Develop your brand story. Your brand speaks about your products/services, your corporate culture, your identity, how you care about your customers, and how you are different from your competitors. Consumers always need a compelling story that matches with their requirements. If your products or services won't deliver that vital value to them, they won't care whatever you do.
- Consider your business strategy. Your business and brand are inseparable. They are like body and soul. While formulating your branding strategy, don't forget to include some of your business strategies. For example, if your company is planning to reduce the price of a product, then ensure that this specific information be a part of brand communication.
- Identify your target customers. This is the most important part of brand strategy. First, find out who are your target customers. Everybody can't be your customers, if you are not selling products like salt and sugar. You must carry out extensive research to clearly identify your target customers. For example, if you are selling diamond necklace, your target customers should be women with high income group. When your focus becomes narrower, you can ensure faster growth. Be specific while addressing your target audience.
- Build your brand positioning. Once you define your target customers, the next step you need to execute is categorizing the customers. You should know which customers groups need your services or products the most. If your competitor is targeting a specific customers group, you can create your own and address them with specific benefits that they would receive. A typical brand positioning statement comprises three to five sentences and captures the essence of what you wish to deliver. Just remember, you must deliver what you would like promise.
- Develop your messaging strategy. Messaging is the most powerful tool that translates strangers to you customers. Your messaging should address to your various target audiences such as potential clients, potential customers, opinion leaders, employees, and other stakeholders in you business. While defining your core messaging strategy, you should consider the interest of each audience group. For example, the messaging for your employees should be different from that of your customers.
- Develop your corporate identity. This comprises your company name, logo, and tagline. If you are an established organization, you need not to change your name or logo; but if you are a new entrant into a business or at the stage of merger and acquisition, this is very important. For any major business transition, you need to redefine these identity parameters. Remember, while doing all these tasks, ensure a semblance between what your business does and how these corporate identities satisfy the ethos of your business.
- Develop your content strategy. Content is king, and always it remains. Content is not just written text, this also includes images, graphics, audio, video, and other multimedia elements. Apart from the type of content, the breadth and depth of content should include the interest of target audience. If the target audience doesn't perceive any worth in your content, your strategy fails. Depending upon the medium, your content structure should change and it must drive your brand visibility.
- Develop your web and social media strategy. With the rapid surge in internet population, websites and social media sites are becoming indispensable tools for a business. Your website is the gateway to your products and services. Your audiences generally visit your website to explore everything about you – who you are, what you do, how you do, and for whom you do. Other than your website, your social media sites talk a lot about your activities, and the conversation there goes viral from a loyal customer to the external world. With technology innovation, you can even do wonders through your social media sites. But remember one thing: any wrong message will completely destroy your brand in seconds. So, the content strategy should be the central to your web and social media strategy.
- Build your marketing collateral. When your website is ready, you need to publish various sales-driven information to engage your customers and clients with your brand. This task is achieved by marketing collateral, which includes brochures, case studies, feature lists, data sheets, videos, and multimedia presentations. While developing these, keep your brand positioning clear and intact. Never dilute your brand in any sense.
- Monitor and modify. This is the last step in the brand development process. While you execute previous nine steps with a great deal of research and deliberation, you never know how the real world would react to all these activities. Now, the step 10 exposes how your brand strategy is performing, how your target audience is reacting, and how your customers are accepting you. At this stage, you need to monitor the performance of brand, and if there is a gap in your strategy and real world needs, you should rectify here and implement the next version of your brand strategy.
