Your Brand – Part II
Your Brand – Part One gave you guidance towards building your brand and developing the various parts needed to create a brand specific for your company, your products or services, and your voice and values.
The next step is to determine your brand strategy, identify your customers, and write your story as only you can do.
Remember, you don’t own your brand, it resides in the mind of the people you’re communicating with when creating your brand. Your goal is to bring your company top of mind and that starts with your brand.
Your Brand Strategy
A brand strategy is a long-term plan for developing a successful brand presence in order to achieve your specific goals. Developing those SMART goals is a task you should have completed from week 15. Take a moment to review your 1yr, 2yr, and 3yr goals. Are they SMART? If not, take a break and spend the necessary time writing new goals, or revising existing goals. If you are having trouble writing goals, look to your brand story.
What’s a Brand Story?
Brand storytelling uses narratives to create an emotional, value driven connection between your customers and your brand. The most powerful stories are authentic and connect back to your why and brand values.
How Do You Write A Brand Story?
- Identify your target audience. List their key demographics.
- Focus your story on your Target Audience.
- Brainstorm using a storytelling framework.
- Write, Review, Refine.
- Test your story on your customers. Include your employees if you have any.
- Share your story strategically.
Brand Credo
The next step is to build a brand Credo.
Build a unique credo that permeates through the company, but will also be heard quoted by others, including family and friends.
To build your brand credo:
- Start with your idea. Turn it into an inspiring promise statement.
- Use your brands’ core point of difference to outline the expectations of how everyone can support and deliver the point of difference. A great exercise is to get every department to articulate its role in delivering the brand idea. You’ll be amazed at the variety of responses and ideas they deliver.
- Connect with your people by tapping into the personal motivation for what they can do to support our brand purpose, brand values, land core beliefs. Make it very personal.
- You’ll find more on this at BrandFolder.
Now that you have your story and your goals, you are ready to create your value proposition.
Your Value Proposition –
Is centered around having the strongest and clearest voice to share -
- What you do
- How you do it
- For whom you do it, and
- What makes you different.
Value Proposition = Who your customers are, knowing their needs and goals, and being the best qualified to meet their needs.
Client/Customers want to know you understand their business, and want to know how you’ll solve their problem, outperform your competition, and have case studies to prove it. Just starting out you may not have a case study, but be sure you have a personal reference or two, and if you’ve done any work for clients try to acquire a testimonial.
Most of All – don’t get discouraged if your brand doesn’t go viral the first year. Brand building takes time and the key to your brand’s success is consistency.
Brands we love align with our lives and solve our problems.
Brands we respect, we know they’re going to be there when we need them.