A Step-By-Step Guide To Creating a Branding Strategy

Your branding effort is at the heart of your overall marketing approach. It supports your marketing plan and determines how and what materials you need to develop or update. This simple process is the basis for a Th!nk branding effort. Not only will you come away with focused branding tools, but also with data and analysis that will help sustain your current marketing plan.

Marketing Plan

Your marketing plan is your playbook. A means of visualizing the success of your company and its products. While there are many components to a marketing plan, the following key factors are paramount in your branding effort.

• Identify your audience, both internal and external. 
• Identify your marketing mix. 
• Identify your package mix by evaluating existing products and considering removing, repositioning, or recategorizing. 
• Establish the expected life cycle of this plan. 

Your branding strategy is part of your marketing plan. Our approach can be visualized as a pyramid. Each step in the process supporting the previous step by incorporating its goals and findings.

Branding strategy

1. Vision

• Differentiate yourself ourselves from not only the competition, but also in buyer and influencer perception.
• Consistently create and distribute marketing materials that support your Corporate Image Statement throughout the life cycle of our marketing plan.
• Grow by forming new relationships with identified audiences or in new markets.
• Establish market ownership by permeating the lexicon of industry insiders, employees and influencers.

2. Mission

• Increase the product and company recognition. 
• Popularize your product.
• Educate customers, influencers and employees.

3. Objectives

• Establish a brand platform/product offerings.
• Establish a brand architecture/sales model.
• Implement sustainable branding and sub-branding strategies.
• Increase sales, increase market share, increase consumer preference, build brand loyalty, raise relative price.

4. Actions

• Market research: discovery/inventory, internet visibility/presence assessment, SWOT analysis.
• Analyze research: establish findings.
• Concept and development.

5. Core Values

• Your core values are your corporate image
• In many respects, your corporate image is determined by your core values—whether intended or not. This process often reveals core values we didn’t know we had. 

Having a solid approach to branding strategy is key to growth in any company. Follow these steps to find a solid foundation for your marketing plan. 

Adaptive Design Means A Website With High Usability

Websites today are all about ‘authority’. A site’s authority can be measured in many ways; from traffic analytics to third party indices to social media approval to organic rank to conversions, aka sales. Ultimately, the value of an organization’s site is measured by its stakeholders’ performance expectations. It’s the site’s authority on the web, however, that gets you there.

Whether it’s known to them or not, companies considering rebuilding their corporate site are likely dealing with authority issues. Low authority on the web can be caused by many factors such as aging infrastructure, site architecture, usability issues, content issues or all of the above. It all boils down to providing a good quality user experience. 

Delivering A High Quality User Experience

The first step in delivering a quality user experience is knowing your audience. This means we must not only attract our target audiences, but we must retain them on our site. If your target audience visits your site and there’s no spark, there’s no retention. And if there’s no retention then your goals and the expectations of your stakeholders will not be met. If there is one thing we know about most audience, it’s that they love attractive visuals. Engaging these audiences through stunning creative is the key.

Beautiful creative, however, is only part of a quality UI design. The design must also provide a fantastic experience across multiple devices with varying screen sizes and resolutions. This is where Adaptive Design concepts should be applied. If you don’t have a mobile-optimized version of your web site then this is not only a problem from a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perspective as stated by Google (i.e., lower organic rank), but it can result in usability issues on mobile devices such as small tablet devices and smartphones. These usability issues generally result in higher bounce rates and less time on site for mobile visitors. Higher bounce rates also contribute to lower authority.

Solving These Issues With Adaptive Design

Adaptive Design seeks to dynamically adjust you web site’s page content based on the size of the screen or the type of device visitors are using. This methodology results in a smooth user experience regardless of the device being used, plus it adheres to Google’s best practices for high organic rank in mobile searches.

Combining a great user experience with superior functionality is the golden ticket when it comes to achieving authority with your web design. And Adaptive Design is one of the best ways to accomplish this goal. 

The Internet: Addictive Nuisance or Global Opportunity?

The internet will celebrate its 25th birthday this March, and it has left no one unaffected. Ask almost anyone, and they will be able to list the pros and cons of living in such a connected world. For marketing professionals, the advent of the internet has provided both new challenges and fantastic opportunities. So, what does your audience think? Are they as impressed by this brave new world? The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project has the answer. 

Who Is Using The Internet?

Pew issued a survey which found that 87% of Americans use the Internet in 2014. This percentage has increased every year: up from 14% in 1995 and 46% in 2000. We have reached near saturation with internet usage in the US. This is a great thing for marketers, because we can be certain that we will find our target audience somewhere on the web. These numbers get even higher when we look at the users with the most buying power. In fact, 99% of those with household incomes of more than $75,000 are frequent internet users.

And Are They Happy With What They Find?

Most internet users plan to continue their habits for the foreseeable future. 53% of internet users claimed that it would be “very hard” to stop using the internet. This is a larger number than the 34% who said it would be “very hard” to give up television, a flip flop from past years. Internet users are integrating streaming, communication, news, and social sharing into their internet experience. Other individual services are losing their importance. 

You could argue that this is because of the “internet addiction” so often bemoaned. However, most users have a different perspective. 90% say the internet is good for them personally and 76% say that it’s good for society as well. 

Conclusion? Your target audience is using the internet, enjoying the internet, has plays to keep using the internet, and has a positive impression of the internet. It’s no wonder that it has so drastically changed the way we market our brands. 

photo credit: Martin Deutsch via photopin cc