Introduction to Brand Strategy: Part One
So, what's brand strategy, and why do I need it?
I started my career in a field that focused on putting out fires and being reactionary, as opposed to focusing on long-term strategy. In my experience, brand strategy provides a roadmap for your organization, showing how you can represent yourself to the world in a foundational, organized manner. And it helps you feel more legit about your business, too.
When any business begins, there’s a lot to figure out, and brand strategy doesn’t always make the cut. But when you don’t know what your brand is built on, you’re allowing others to fill in the blanks instead of controlling the narrative yourself. If you already have an established business, a few questions to get you thinking about what your current brand strategy looks like:
What’s the narrative you’re telling your clients and customers through your website, social media, and other marketing platforms? Does it differ from platform to platform?
Is it a narrative you’re controlling, or is it subjective for each and every person?
How do we control that narrative, as to ensure that your brand message is consistent and clarified?
The way to control the narrative is by having a single, centralized brand strategy. A brand strategy defines your organization’s mission, audience, values, your brand voice (how you talk about yourself), and your brand tone (how you talk about yourself to others). In the coming weeks of this newsletter series, we'll be tackling ways to audit your existing strategy (whether or not you consciously created it), and how to align your strategy moving forward with the future of your business.
The benefits to creating a brand strategy - whether doing it yourself or hiring a strategist to do it for you - are:
to ensure you’re speaking the same message across all platforms, and
to ensure that as you expand your business, all employees and stakeholders are speaking from the same foundation.
If you’re the owner of your own business, I’ll be diving into ways you can start asking yourself the questions to form your own brand strategy on some other platforms in the future.
“When writing the story of your life, don’t let anyone else hold the pen.”
This was originally published in Building Your Biz, an email series providing tangible, simple ways to begin creating a brand foundation that your business can be built on.
This series will cover everything you need to know about creating your own branding, from strategy, to design, to marketing. It's for DIYers and dreamers who are creating their own business and want to be efficient, gain clarity, and do something that matters.