Branding strategy is a plan for the successful development of a brand in order to achieve the company’s specific goals. A well defined and nicely executed brand strategy helps all the aspects of a business and is directly related to the consumer needs and emotions under the competitive trends prevailing in the market. Millions of people are trying to make a name for themselves, so having a strong brand is very crucial for businesses to stand out from the crowd. An excellent brand strategy is necessary in the long run. The stronger branding strategy, the higher will be the brand equity of the company.

What is a good branding strategy?: A good branding strategy must address the following:

• What's the objective of your brand
• What is it that your brand promises to the customers.
• The strong message which your brand should convey through proper marketing.

The one metric for a successful brand strategy is the sentiment of the brand. How do you measure sentiment? As it’s very hard to measure sentiments that doesn’t mean you should dismiss it. It may not be as easy to measure, but it’s very easy for customers or people to dismiss the qualitative or the hard work put in branding, if it doesn’t’touch the hearts of people. Branding is very critical for your brand’s existence and success.

Why branding strategy is important?: Brand strategy is important as it helps in distinguishing your brand or products from your competitors and makes your brand recognizable to the customers. In order to communicate with your customers more clearly, having a cohesive brand strategy helps you immensely. The more consistent and impactful your message is, the more likely you are to attract and retain the loyal customers. The brand strategy should so impressive that it creates a deep impact in the minds of the customers and they register it in their minds and keep it in their memories for a long period. In addition to just being memorable, a good branding increases the value of a company and provides employees with the right direction and motivation in acquiring the new customers easily as well. In short, a good branding strategy helps to create a brand identity. A brand identity is all about what your brand’s message is, what your values are and how’s the way you communicate your product to the customers. Ultimately, your brand identity is the personality of your business and your promise to the customers.

Basics of a good branding strategy or how to create a good branding strategy

In order to prepare a good branding strategy you have to follow some basic steps:

1. Research your audience thoroughly and study the competition: The first step in creating a brand identity is to conduct a thorough  market research. You should understand and analyse these five factors.

 Target the right audience: You can’t target a product to a teenager in the same way you would target the product to the middle aged people. Learning exactly what your audience wants from a business is vital to creating a brand people will love.

• Value proposition & handling competition: What are the things that your products can offer and your competitors can’t? Knowing the difference between you and your competitors is crucial in developing a successful brand. Always, keeping an eye on your competitor’s products and activities will also educate you on what branding techniques you need to adopt and would work well.
• Clear mission: You have to be sure to have a short and simple mission statement which describes your vision and goals. In other words, you need to know the purpose of your business as you can't create a good personality for a business unless you know what that business is all about.
• Create a strong personality of the brand: Although, you're not necessarily branding an individual, but that doesn't mean that you can't develop the personality of a brand or create the brand image to put it in other words. You can use your own types, colours and imagery to represent what the brand is, then you can improve on that visual representation with your tones to create an impressive personality.
• Doing a SWOT analysis: It is always beneficial to conduct an analysis of strength, weakness, opportunities and threats to better understand your brand. Studying the characteristics of the brand will help in finding the characteristics which you want to portray in your brand.

Strengths: The positive sides of your business which gives you an advantage over your competitors.

Weaknesses: The improvement areas which you need to work upon or which might be a disadvantage for your business.

Opportunities: The changes and trends in the industry which offer a lot of opportunities to your business. You need to quickly grab the opportunities and reap the benefits.

Threats: The elements in the industry which might cause problems to your business and brand.

1. Design the perfect logo and a template for your brand: Now as you have done all the research and analysis it's time to bring your brand to life. How can you bring it to life? By creating a beautiful design and following these steps:

• Logo Design: A beautifully designed logo is one of the most important elements of a good branding strategy. It's on everything starting from your business card to website upto your online ads or digital identity. With a nice logo on all of these, your branding is bound to look very impressive and sync altogether.
• Packaging design: The packaging design  should also have a very important part of your branding strategy. The packaging of your product and the way you present your products; all play a big role in creating your brand identity. Representing your business well in everything you do leads to consistency and helps in building a familiarity with the consumers. An interesting form is easily recognizable all over and creates a long lasting impression.
• Use beautiful colours & types: A good colour palette goes a long way to create a strong brand identity. It provides you with a variety so that you can create unique designs for your business while being faithful to the brand identity. In your logo, on your website and on any documents that your business has there should be consistency of the typography.
• Use perfect templates: You probably send emails, type letters or hand out business cards to the potential customers on a daily basis. So, creating nice templates will give your business a more professional look and feel.
• Maintain consistency: Consistency is very essential to create a brand identity. It can either make or break it. So, use the right templates and follow the design choices you've decided upon for the brand in all theareas of your business to create a harmonious brand identity.

1. Use language which can be used to connect and advertise on social media: Now as you've established your brand within the company and have taken all the required steps to develop it, you're now ready to integrate the brand into your community.

One of the most successful ways to accomplish this is that your brand should provide quality content. It's your salesperson, your story and every piece of content you publish reflects on and defines your brand. So, if the content is great, the brand becomes great.

• Use proper language: Use of a proper language is a must to create the right image of your brand. Always use a very professional language; if you want to create a very high end brand identity. The language which you finally choose for a brand has to be used throughout all the mediums to advertise your products and business. Therefore, it's very important that you carefully craft the message or slogan in a way that it has a strong impact and conveys the right message to the customers.
• Establish connections & right emotions: People love to hear stories that move them emotionally and touch their hearts. A strong brand identity should be able to establish an emotional connection with the customers. This will help to build a solid brand identity and create a lasting relationship with the customer.
• Advertise well: Designing good advertisements is the most efficient way of introducing your brand to the customers. It's a great way to get the message of your brand through to everyone and heard by all your target audience.

Use the social media effectively: Establish a connection with your consumers through the social media. The various platforms on the internet offer you to establish engagement with your audience. Now social media is very important when it comes to interacting directly with your customers and creating an affinity for your brand. If you're mentioned in a tweet, status, or a post (if the customer has a concern), make sure to give your brand a good reputation by responding quickly and efficiently to the customers.

1. Know what to avoid: Till now you know what to do to create a strong brand identity. You must also know what to avoid. If you make any of the following mistakes, your brand might fail.

• Don't ever copy your competitors: Your competitors might have a splendid branding and you're also dealing with the same products or services, you might also want to do the same what is working well for them. But, you should never do that and you have to always keep that in mind. You can only take into account what they do and give it a twist to make your business stand out in the industry.
• Don't mislead your customer’s by posting anything: You need to know what you have to say and use the perfect language and visuals to express it. Just because it looks good to you doesn't mean it will be good for your customers too.
• Don't lose consistency ever: Sometimes, your medium of communication might be different than the online platform, but your colours, type, theme and message should always be consistent.

1. Monitor your brand all the time to maintain its brand identity: It's very difficult to know what you're doing right and what you're not, without tracking the key performance metrics. Take the help of various surveys, Google Analytics, comments, social media discussions etc. to monitor your brand all the time and get a sense of what people talk about your brand and how they interact with you. This will give you the opportunity to make changes to improve your brand as and when needed. Creating an impressive brand needs a consistent use of type, colour, images and language, but it's worth it. When consumers recognize instantly who you are and what you stand for all based on a logo, then you've become much more than just a name and a symbol.

Our approach and mantra towards helping business for creating their brand strategy

We specialise in developing a brand strategy which clearly identifies the business goals, all the communication channels and the impacts on the brand equity. A clear brand message is the key to bridge the gap between the brand strategy and the brand messaging. So, the brand message is created in such a way to make sure that it is aligned with the mission and values of the brand.

First, we learn about you and your company and what makes your business unique. We look at all your strengths and weaknesses, competition, target audience and the opportunities. Thereafter, we perform a comprehensive review of your marketing communications to evaluate your existing brand identity. We then review the brand’s value proposition as well as it’s positioning. We identify the attributes which set your brand apart from your competitors and find out ways to leverage these attributes to gain a competitive advantage for your business. We use our understanding of digital, social and mobile marketing as well as the traditional marketing in order to develop a perfect brand message which is consistent with the overall brand strategy. We review the visual identity elements such as logos, taglines and colours to make sure that they align with your business goals. We then develop a comprehensive branding strategy and a new brand identity incorporating all the changes identified by the brand audit and discovery sessions.

Finally, we make sure that your marketing strategy is aligned with the branding strategy, which augurs well for your business.

Let’s connect to discuss in details: @ 9811477138