As we move into the new year, it's important to take a look at your business, ensuring you have the essential brand foundations, a clear strategy and plan in place to set yourself up for future success.

Here are six essential tips for you to consider when implementing strategic brand management.

Define your purpose, goals and target audience

When starting a business or launching a new brand, it's important to first define your purpose, goals and target audience. Why do you exist? What do you hope to achieve short/long term? Who do you hope to serve? Once you have a clear understanding of your goals and target audience, you can begin to create a plan to reach them.

Identify your brand's unique selling proposition

When it comes to your brand, what makes you unique and memorable? What is your unique selling proposition (USP)? What can you offer that no one else can?

Your USP is what will set you apart from the competition and attract customers to your brand. It's what will make people choose your product, or service over others.

There are many different ways to create a USP. You can focus on your company's history, its culture, a brands unique features and benefits for products/services, or even customer service. You can also highlight your company's values, or bring to life your brand personality.

Whatever you choose, make sure your USP is something that you can back up with evidence. Don't just claim that you're the best – show your customers why they should believe you.

Create an identity and brand style guide

Creating a style guide, often known as brand guidelines is an important step in developing and maintaining your brand identity.  This provides a consistent message across all of your marketing materials, including your website and product packaging. A style guide can help ensure that all of your communications are on-brand, and that your colleagues, customers and clients have a consistent experience when interacting with your business or brand.

Your style guide should include all of the rules and standards for your brand’s visual identity, from the colours you use to the fonts you select. It should also include guidelines for your company’s writing style or brand personality, including rules for punctuation, capitalisation, and word usage.

If you're working with a graphic designer, or marketing agency, be sure to provide them with a copy of your style guide so they can create materials that are consistent with your branding.

Develop a marketing strategy and plan

Marketing is essential for any business. You need to reach your target audience and create a strategy that will resonate with them. There are a number of methods you can use to market your business, and it’s important to find the ones that work best for you.

One of the most important aspects of marketing is creating a strong brand. Your brand is what sets you apart from your competitors and helps customers identify what you offer. It’s important to make sure your brand is consistent across all channels, from your website to your social media profiles.

You also need to create a marketing plan that outlines your goals and how you plan to achieve them. This plan should be updated regularly to ensure that you’re staying on track and hitting those all important KPI’s (key performance indicators) and allocating your budget in the right area.

Marketing can be a lot of work, but it’s worth it when you see the results when aligned to your marketing strategy and plan. By using the right methods, you can reach more customers and increase your sales and/or brand awareness.

Do you have a marketing strategy or plan in place for 2023?

Content Creation Strategy 

One of the most important things you can do to engage your audience is to create content that is interesting and relevant to them. This means going beyond the basics and thinking outside the box to come up with fresh and innovative ideas which relate back to your brand and its key messages. It also means taking the time to understand your audience and what they want to read and needs which address the problems you will solve as a brand.

One great way to come up with content ideas is to think about current popular topics, trends and how your brand will provide solutions and help target audiences. You can also look to your audience for inspiration and ask them what topics they would like to see you cover. Once you have some ideas, it's important to start planning and organising your content in a way that makes it easy to read and follow.

One of the best ways to engage your audience is to keep your content relevant and fresh. This means regularly updating your content and adding different types of content across channels as well. You can also try experimenting with different formats and styles (video content works better than written on some channels), and see which ones work best for you and your audience. With a content strategy you'll keep your audience engaged and interested. 

When was the last time you reviewed this and your key brand messages?

Marketing data analytics

Now that you have started your ongoing marketing activity or campaign (aligned to your plan!), it’s important to monitor and analyse your results. This will help you to determine whether your campaign is successful and identify areas that need improvement.

To monitor your results, you should track the following data:

-The number of website visitors and which channels are driving new and returning visitors

- The amount of engagement on your website across different pages and events

-The number of conversions which can be leads generated or the amount of revenue (depending on your goals and objectives)

You can track this data using Google Analytics or other specific analytics tools for social media and email.

This will help you to make changes to your marketing campaign that will improve its effectiveness.

Do you have a clear brand strategy and plan in place for the New Year? You may have some of the above covered but not all.

We love talking about all areas of strategic brand management and provide a 30-minute consultation, let’s chat now!