7 ways your brand strategy should improve your marketing efforts.

A brand strategy is the foundation of all marketing efforts. It defines who you are as a company, what you stand for, and how you want to be perceived by your customers. Without a strong brand strategy in place, your marketing initiatives can become inconsistent and ineffective. At Quill Creative Studio, we specialize in creating effective brand strategies that deliver results. In this blog post, we will discuss how our brand strategy deliverables can be used time and time again throughout your marketing campaigns to achieve better results.

Brand Strategies: Develop brand voice for impactful and consistent marketing campaigns.

Since consistency is king when it comes to proper branding, we'd be remiss to not start there. As part of our brand positioning and brand strategy process, we work to develop a voice and messaging platform that makes your brand stand out in a sea of competition that's creating noise to capture everyone's attention. Highlighting your core brand promise in creative ways throughout every marketing touchpoint may seem like an easy task, but it can quickly go astray without an established framework. This is where we come in. We help you to not only refine your voice and core messaging, but also to create guidelines for how they should be used moving forward for more successful, effective marketing campaigns.

Brand Strategies: Create a more recognizable brand appearance.

In order for customers to remember your brand in your marketing campaigns and beyond, you need to have a recognizable appearance. This includes everything from your color palette and typography, to your imagery and the layout stylings that tie it all together. At Quill Creative Studio, our team works to create an appearance that is not only visually appealing but also reflective of your brand's personality. For instance, you shouldn't need your logo on every social media post for someone scrolling to recognize your brand. On average, it takes 5 to 7 impressions to create recognition, and that number can grow rapidly if there's inconsistency in your visual appearance from one day to the next.

Brand Strategies: Improve marketing team’s efficiency.

It's hard to know you're going in the right direction without a map – especially if there are multiple resources working together within a marketing department or if outside vendors are involved. Having a brand strategy framework or brand guide readily available will allow your marketing team to quickly validate new ideas, which can save hours spent working on rogue marketing campaigns. With the proper guidance, your team will develop ideas that are coordinated with your brand promise so you can move further, faster.

Brand Strategies: Eliminate guesswork.

It's a safe assumption that if you knew more about your customers (their wants, hesitancies, past experiences, etc.), it would be easier to craft more effective marketing campaigns that persuade them. As part of our brand strategy process, we do a deep dive to understand your audience so we can meet them where they are. This, in turn, guides messaging and visuals to focus marketing campaigns and increase returns on marketing investments. It will always be necessary to run A/B testing with campaign assets, but we believe it's better to cast a narrow net where we know there are fish rather than throw a big net and cross our fingers.

Brand Strategies: Build trust.

A brand promise is only a sentence if you don't give everyone reasons to believe. Throughout our brand strategy process, our team of brand strategy professionals will uncover what makes your organization unique and provide guidance on what you can do to prove it. Branding is an emotional game and we all know it's easier to do business with someone we like and trust. Therefore, if we know that your brand stands for something special, we'll provide the framework and guidance to make it stand tall.

Brand Strategies: Develop loyal customers.

A strong brand will inspire trust and loyalty from your target audience. If they feel confident in your product or service, they're more likely to return and recommend you to others. A well-executed brand strategy will result in a community of customers that are not only engaged with your brand but also act as advocates for it. We call this the flywheel effect and go more in depth on that concept in a previous blog.

Brand Strategies: Establish metrics to measure brand success.

Gone are the days when marketing success was based on a "gut feeling." With technology and data, we now have the ability to measure brand awareness, equity, and sentiment. But it's not just about having access to this data – it's knowing how to properly interpret it so you can make marketing decisions that will positively impact your brand. Prior to a re-brand, we can survey the community to get baseline data and measure changes over time to see if the new brand is having the desired effect.

The best time to invest in a brand strategy is before you need it. By that, we mean before your business has launched or before you're ready for high-growth. This is because once you have customers, they'll immediately begin to judge and categorize your offering in comparison to other options. It's always easier to start off on the right footing rather than redirect an established perception. You need to make sure that your internal team and any external vendors are all working from the same playbook in order to make the most of your marketing efforts and maintain consistency.

If you're interested in learning more about how we use creative problem solving and strategic thinking to establish impactful brand strategies, contact Quill Creative today.