What Is

Brand Marketing Strategy — What It Is and How to Build Yours

In today’s crowded digital space, brand marketing helps you distinguish your business from competitors and gain new, loyal customers. That’s why it’s essential to develop a brand marketing strategy to help you integrate your marketing efforts and brand image to establish a positive brand perception among your target audience.

But what exactly is a brand marketing strategy, and how do you create one that works for your business? This article addresses these burning questions, so read on and find out.  

Here’s a brief overview of what we’ll cover:

• What is a brand marketing strategy?
• Branding vs. Marketing
• What is the goal of a brand marketing strategy?
• How do you create a brand marketing strategy?
• Brand marketing examples

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What is a brand marketing strategy?

A brand marketing strategy is a marketing technique that seeks to strengthen the brand’s foothold in the market and the consumer’s overall impression of the brand through different digital platforms, campaigns, and tactics. 

A successful brand marketing plan gains steam over time, strengthening its position among its targeted market as it builds on and expands upon its track record of success.

Branding vs. marketing

Knowing the difference between branding and marketing is crucial to grasping the concept of brand marketing. We’ve already established the need to set your company and its offerings apart from the competition in today’s cutthroat marketplace. That’s where branding and marketing connect — you need both to outshine your competitors.

On the one hand, branding is the process of creating and shaping a positive brand perception in consumers’ minds through the development of your brand image. This image may include factors like a company logo, tone in writing, and values you promote. 

On the other hand, marketing seeks to actively promote your business through online advertising, emails, social media, and search engines. To create a brand marketing strategy, you must first establish a brand identity and develop promotional materials that conform to the brand.

What is the goal of a brand marketing strategy?

A brand marketing strategy aims to build relationships with your customers to remain loyal to your brand whenever they need your product or service.

Unlike some short-term marketing strategies, the goal of a brand marketing strategy is to create sustainable growth, credibility, and reliability over time rather than to gain an immediate boost in revenue. After all, building a trustworthy reputation through branding is crucial for retaining a steady flow of repeat customers.

How do you create a brand marketing strategy?

Creating a brand marketing strategy involves four main steps:

1. Craft your brand identity

2. Identify your audiences

3. Develop marketing strategies

4. Run, test, and analyze campaigns

1.  Craft your brand identity

Consistency is the backbone of successful brand marketing strategies, so your business must establish a distinct brand identity. Having it documented as a guide ensures that all your marketing team members know how to represent your brand.

Here are some core components you can include in your brand style guide: 

• Brand tone and voice: How your brand sounds. Does your brand sound serious and professional, neutral and conversational, or fun and playful?

• Typography: Typefaces you use to express your brand’s values and personality. Do the fonts and font sizes you use convey the tone and mood you want to associate with your brand?

• Logo: The symbol or visual image that identifies your business and reflects your offering. Does your logo grab attention, make a solid first impression, and separate you from the competition?

• Color palette: A combination of colors you use when designing your business’s user interface (UI) or promotional materials. Does your color combination set the mood of your brand’s expression and cultivate strong emotional connections with your customers?

• Imagery: The images that depict your offerings, workspace, activities, or employees. Are your images consistent with your brand colors and themes? Do they mitigate customers’ natural inclination to base decisions solely on price and increase their appreciation for your offering’s quality and benefits?

• Brand story: Your brand story develops your company history, the experience that customers have with your brand, and more. Does your brand storytelling evoke emotions in your audience and build credibility?

Simply put, a distinct brand identity can elevate customers’ value to your offerings and helps garner customer loyalty, boosting sales and profits.

2. Identify your target market

Who are the customers that buy your product? Several distinct groups may come to mind, but you must clearly define each to gear elements of your brand identity and marketing strategy toward that audience. An effective strategy for honing in on your business’s ideal clientele is to create different customer profiles and divide up your clientele into distinct groups using customer segmentation.

Here are the four types of segmentation to get you started:

1. Geographic segmentation helps you target customers based on their location. Where is your ideal target audience located? What are the local, state, and national variances in your ideal customers’ consumer tastes, purchasing patterns, and worldviews?
2. Demographic segmentation helps you divide a market into subsets defined by characteristics such as consumers’ genders, racial backgrounds, marital status, occupations, ages, income levels, and household compositions. Which demographic group does your niche offering cater to?
3. Psychographic segmentation helps you narrow down the individual traits of your ideal customers. What are your target audience’s guiding beliefs, personalities, interests, and motivational factors?
4. Behavioral segmentation helps you target customers based on their perceptions and emotions that drive their purchasing decisions. How does your target market feel about and interact with your brand or other similar brands?

Identifying your audience involves looking at your current customer base. Consider different aspects to get a complete picture of each customer segment. 

3. Develop digital marketing strategies

Once you identify your audience, you’ll work within your established brand style guidelines to create marketing messages that appeal to each group. The best approach is to incorporate several digital marketing strategies to monitor your campaigns’ daily effectiveness, allowing you to determine which channels yield the best return on investment (ROI) and which are not.

Some of the best digital marketing strategies to get you started include:

• Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising promotes your brand or offerings by displaying ads at the top and bottom of search engine result pages (SERPs) and third-party websites. It’s an online advertising model in which you pay a publisher every time your ad is clicked on.
• Content marketing builds and retains an audience by distributing a steady stream of original content such as articles, videos, podcasts, and more. It helps you build trust as an industry authority, raise brand recognition, and ensure that your company is top-of-mind whenever a potential customer is ready to purchase.
• Social media marketing uses platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn to spread awareness about your offerings, expand your reach to a particular demographic, generate more leads, and ultimately boost revenue.

Using the brand style guidelines and the market research findings, you can create distinct strategies for each platform and audience while maintaining a clear brand identity. 

4. Run, test, and analyze campaigns

After implementing a few strategies, the key to maintaining brand marketing strategies is to stay consistent with your brand while tweaking your campaigns to see where changes bring growth.

For example, if your content marketing campaign isn’t seeing the growth you’d like, you can set up a blog and maintain a consistent tone across articles. Then, you’ll want to:

• Stick to the same brand voice
• Adapt other elements 
• Try out different content types, content lengths, headings, and images
• Keep track of crucial digital marketing metrics to gauge your success

Over time, you’ll figure out what works best for your business and adjust your brand marketing strategy and efforts as your brand evolves and expands. 

Brand marketing examples

Let’s look at how consistent branding in marketing campaigns has brought these top brands successes:

• Apple: This brand is popular because they maintain uniform imagery and writing to promote the image they want customers to see. Apple is known for its minimalistic apple logo and clean, white designs. Their written branding focuses on the company’s drive toward consistent innovation and imagination.

• Nike: The central part of Nike’s branded marketing strategy is the attitude they promote. Their “Just Do It” slogan promotes a mindset within their brand, pushing customers to be brave and change themselves and the world around them for the better.

• Jeep: Jeep’s marketing strategy focuses on exploration and traveling to new places. Their video advertisements show vehicles traveling on rugged terrain and embarking on new adventures. Their written content uses words like “explore” and “uncharted territory” to drive home that adventurous mindset.

These three companies show that consistency is the bedrock of effective brand marketing tactics, highlighting the importance of creating a unique brand identity for your company.

Build brand loyalty with WebFX

Need help building and promoting your brand? WebFX can help you create a consistent digital marketing strategy to build loyalty among your customer base. 

We don’t do guesswork. Instead, we use data to determine what works and yields the best returns for your business. So far, we’ve driven over $3 billion in revenue for our clients and can also help you achieve measurable results.

Contact us online or call 888-256-9448 to speak to a strategist about your business’ brand marketing strategy today.

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