The importance of branding in marketing strategy

A strong brand is key to a successful marketing strategy.

A well-crafted brand motivates customer loyalty and trust, helping to foster long-term relationships with clients and enhancing the overall consumer experience. When designed properly, brands can become powerful allies in building brand awareness, fostering customer engagement and driving commercial success.

Firstly, what is branding?

In the simplest terms, branding is the identity of your company and the values you wish to uphold as a business. Goals for good branding means recognisable iconography, memorable colour pallets and messaging that lingers in the heads of those who encounter it. Finding solid footing for your marketing means you need to reflect on your business as it is currently, and what you want it to become in the future. Find out more why branding has never been more important for businesses.

Your company has objectives on what they want to provide to customers and what they want their impact to be. This needs to be made clear through branding. Everything from the colour of your logo to your tagline can give people a subtle first impression of you before they have even learnt anything. Every aspect of your branding needs to be a reflection of your company. What is your internal company culture? How would existing customers describe working with you? What separates you from the competition? What experience do you want your products/services to provide? These are all questions that you should ask yourself. The answers to these questions are the foundation upon which you should build your brand.

What is marketing?

Now that you understand branding importance, it will be easier to explain that marketing is the communication of your branding. If your brand is a heavy, compact parcel with a lot inside to unpack, then marketing is the courier who gets it to the recipient. A strong marketing strategy can make sure you are DHL and not Evri.

Making sure you roll out an effective campaign means understanding your relationship to your customer base. For example, providing them with updates on products, services, terms and conditions – the whole thing! Audiences want the best services available to them. As such, keeping your cards close to your chest will only result in a negative reception. Letting audiences know everything you can provide to them, and what’s coming down the pipeline maintains interest in your company.

Branding importance is built through marketing communications but the truth of it isn’t as simple.

Branding goes hand in hand with your marketing strategy

Marketing and branding need to remain synchronised in order to have the strongest impact on your target audience. If your branding is weak, then no matter how good your marketing strategy, audiences will see a poor representation of your business. The same goes for the opposite too, if you aren’t able to communicate your well-made brand to audiences effectively, then you will reap poor results. 

The aims of brand marketing strategy

This may seem daunting, especially if you aren’t sure why all this work is necessary. There are so many details to focus on when rolling-out a new brand marketing strategy but we start at the end. 

End Goal

The first place we start when developing brand marketing strategy is with what we want to achieve – the end goal. If you know what you want out of this, then you are able to work your way backwards and find the best route to reaching the finish line. This also means that if everything goes to plan, then you won’t have to spend time worrying about what the outcome of your campaigns will be. Not having an end goal can make you nervous, overthinking every step you take and unable to see the bigger picture. Meanwhile, having that target makes your campaign feel like a jigsaw. Going in, you know what image you need to make. You just need to figure out how the pieces fit together.

Plan

Time to put everything out there. Bring together your team, it’s time to brainstorm. Creating a plan of action to follow will keep you on track to achieving your end goal. Planning can keep you from colliding with any bumps in the road, helping you execute your plan as smoothly as possible. This is the stage which takes the longest, as it is important to meticulously plan your marketing, considering everything that could possibly go wrong. From there it’s on you to eliminate those possibilities before they happen, or prepare a solution so you are ready, if it does.

Understanding your target demographic, writing copy, creating solid design, scheduling a campaign rollout are all key steps on the way to unleashing what months of hard work has built up to.

Execution

So now you have your branding marketing strategy, now time for the marketing execution. The process that kick starts your strategy at full throttle. Letting your baby bird leave the nest can be worrying at first. How well will it do? Will the reception be positive? Will people understand what you were going fo? What happens if there are any mistakes? Well you prepared for that already. In this stage, everyone on the team should know exactly what they should be working on when they start work every day. There should be a symbiotic connection with everyone on the project, clear communication should occur so everyone knows what the progress level is for the project.

Analytics

The world has now seen what your hard work has led up to, so what was their response? Branding is often seen as unmeasurable. However, there are many tools to measure your brand. Brand listening tools on platforms such as Hootsuite, can analyse what is being said about your brand, products and services. It will help you find information in relevant online communities of how you are being perceived. Social media provides a platform to reach a huge audience. Being able to see not just how many people saw your output, but how many people commented, liked, shared and disliked your posts is crucial for your future.

Improve for the future

You will begin to dive into more and more strategies and campaigns over the years, so it’s important to use the data gathered from each and everyone to help improve your marketing. Starting with finding your end goal for each project, you will be moving in a cycle of finishing and starting a new brand marketing strategy. Each rotation in this cycle will allow you to refine your strategy, as you will have more knowledge on what works best than you did last time.