Your brand is best understood as your business’ reputation and it’s visibility in the marketplace. The strength of your brand can be measured as Reputation x Visibility. Brand strength = Your reputation X Your visibility. There is another important dimension of your brand as well: how relevant it is to your target client audience, but more about that later. This is why brand development is so immensely important.
Brand Development Defined
- The first phase is getting your brand strategy right and aligned with your business objectives.
- Second is developing all the tools you will need to communicate the brand, such as your logo, tagline and website.
- Finally, there is the phase of strengthening your newly developed or updated brand.
Your brand development strategy is how you go about accomplishing these tasks. To make the task a bit easier, we’ve broken the brand development strategy into 10 steps.
A 10-Step Brand Development Strategy
1. Consider your overall business strategy.
A strong, well differentiated brand will make growing your business much easier. But what type of business do you want? Are you planning to grow organically? Your overall business strategy is the context for your brand development strategy, so that’s the place to start. If you are clear about where you want to take your business, your brand will help you get there.
2. Identify your target clients
3. Research your target client group
4. Develop your brand positioning
5. Develop your messaging strategy
6. Develop your name, logo and tagline
7. Develop your content marketing strategy
8. Develop your website
Further, your website will be home to your valuable content. That content will become the focus of your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts so that your prospects, potential employees, and referral sources will find you and learn about your business. Online content is central to any modern brand development strategy.
These days, professional services websites come in two varieties. The first is a branding site. Such a site tells your story and conveys who you are, who you serve, and what you do. In short it conveys your brand message. The other variety does the above and also generates and nurtures potential new clients. We call these High Performance Websites.
9. Build your marketing toolkit
10. Implement, track, and adjust
Did the strategy get implemented as planned?
What happened with the objective measures, such as search traffic and web visitors?
How many new leads, employee applications and partnering opportunities were generated?
Only by tracking the entire process can you make sure you are drawing the right conclusions and making the right adjustments.
And there you have it — a 10 step brand development process to drive the growth and profitability of your business.