INSIGHTS
We’re passionate about our craft and love to share our knowledge, so here are some free nuggets of wisdom we hope you find helpful.
What is a brand strategy?
Your brand strategy must include key elements which help to shape and define the strategy and develop the foundations for how your business will reach its short and long-term goals. This will feed into and guide your marketing strategy and plans and ensure your Visual Identity reflects your business and engages the right audience.
You need to define:
Your Why – This is where you start. It’s your purpose.
To find your brand purpose you need to ask yourself: Why does my business exist? It’s what sets you apart from everyone else and what inspires you to take action.
Your why is not just to earn a living (this is the result – hopefully!) but it’s what inspired your business idea in the first place. Did you see a problem that you could solve to make your customers lives easier, better, happier?
Our Why at CreativeHutch is to give our clients the confidence and tools to achieve their vision and take their business to the next level through knowledge and strong purposeful foundations. Our purpose is to enable rather than just create and go.
A good tip to really understanding HOW to define your Why (apart from contacting us to guide you through this) is by listening to anything Simen Sinek has to say on Finding your WHY. Here is a great video from Simon on A quick way to finding your why
What your brand stands for – It’s Values
Your brand values are your guiding principles that feed into every aspect of your business and should direct your business decisions on a daily basis. Your vision, mission and positioning may change over time but your values are solid. These should never change. They are the beliefs that you stand for that will create connections to your clients whose beliefs align.
Our Values are to:
- Be Empowering: We empower our clients to achieve their goals, feel confident in their business and, for many of them, to go and do the work themselves.
- Be Inspirational: We inspire businesses to be ‘best in show’, in their brand but also their ethos and mission. We want to help clients understand how they can ensure their business reflects their values, in everything they do, both internally and externally.
- Be Genuine: We genuinely want to help our clients achieve their goals and offer guidance to them. Every experience a client has with us is genuine.
- Be Guides: We don’t just ‘do and go’. We work in partnership and also help our clients to learn strategies and skills to allow them to grow the business themselves.
How you position yourself in the marketplace
Positioning is key to your brand and helps you to understand what your brand’s tone of voice, visual identity and personality should be based on this.
This can take a little bit of work but is essential for you to reach the right audience that will engage and become clients or customers. You need to spend some time researching and analysing your competitors how they fit in the marketplace and what your differentiation is from them.
You also need to analyse your ideal clients and create a core client persona (or two), this helps you understand how to speak to them, where they engage on and offline and how you can create awareness in their lives. We have a free Persona download if you contact vicky@creativehutch.com we can send it through.
What promises your brand makes to customers
This tells your customers what they can expect, it’s a critical part of your brand identity. Setting the value of your brand in a customers mind and lets them understand the experience they should expect when interacting with your brand service or products.
For example, our brand promise is that every client feels enabled and confident to move forward towards their goals. By guiding them with genuine and honest solutions.
What personality your brand conveys.
Brand personality is about familiarity – like a friend. If you have a personality that feels familiar or attractive to your audience, you’ll make a connection. If you have defined your brand positioning and researched your audience this should come easily. Are you champagne or larger, are you friendly or serious… We have a super fun way to define your brand personality which helps us to craft the right tone when writing your messaging and content across all marketing – let us know if you would like to do this together!
See if you can figure out what our brand personality is! 🙂
There is much more that can go into a Brand strategy but the above are the core elements that will truly help you build the right foundations. We developed a process over the past decade working with clients in crafting a strong strategy based on their goals and values. Guiding our clients to define their Why and understanding what their positioning, brand promise and personality should be.
I am doing a one-hour online taster session for my Brand strategy workshop. This will cover the above, and more in detail. Including examples and a few templates to get you thinking about your strategy and what you need to help you achieve your vision. It’s over lunch and free so give it a go – Click here to register
