Questions You Need to Answer When Creating Your Brand Strategy

Brand strategy is one of the crucial things that most marketers don’t think about on a daily basis. This makes it easy to lose sight of the general direction of a company’s marketing efforts. Sure, a strategy impacts the daily tactical activities, but it isn’t often that you take a step back to review the underlying strategy.

Whenever you create or adapt your brand strategy there are a few essential questions you need to answer every time.

Who are we?

The answer to this question is the foundation of your whole organization. Often it is easier to think of your company as a human character. If your company were a person, what type would they be? What would they be interested in? What are their dreams and goals? What makes them happy or sad?

The more you know about who you are as a business, the better you will be able to communicate that to your prospects and customers.

What makes us unique?

Once you have a clear picture of who you are as an organization, you need to identify how you position yourself among other businesses. For an effective brand strategy, your brand should demonstrate unique attributes or values in comparison to industry competitors.

The answer to this question shouldn’t be a recount of your product features or services. It should comprise the things that set your business apart, e.g. what your team can do better than any of your competitors.

Who Are We Talking to?

Understanding your target market plays an equally important role as understanding your own brand and product. Without knowing who your brand is talking to, the product development and marketing strategies will likely be misaligned with what your audience needs. Identifying a specific target audience and understanding what their interest are and what they care about will guide your marketing efforts.

What Are We Doing?

A mission statement is another important component of any brand strategy. It clearly outlines what the company and its product aims to accomplish and why. What do you hope to achieve as a brand, both now and in the future? The daily business activities will stem from these central goals.

How Do We Communicate?

An effective brand communication strategy can be built only after you can answer these central questions. After you’ve identified who your brand is, why it exists, what you’re doing and for whom, you can devise a communication strategy and underline the tone and voice of the brand.

When you define your communication strategy you should also decide on communication channels that you should use to reach the audience. You can then develop communication guidelines for each channel.