What is Brand Marketing and How to Build an Effective Brand Strategy

Creating strong brand recognition and long-lasting customer loyalty is crucial to the success of any modern business. But brand marketing extends beyond your logo, tagline, website, and products.

It encompasses the entire experience your customers have with your company.  In this comprehensive guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about brand marketing

Let’s dive in.

What is Brand Marketing & Why It’s Important

Brand marketing is about actively promoting your business’ identity, vision, values, and personality to shape customer perception. It focuses on building awareness and recognition of your brand as a whole, not just specific products or services.

Branding and marketing are interrelated but have some key differences:

• Marketing is promoting your business, whether it’s specific offers, products, services, or even your brand as a whole. The goal is to attract interest and drive action or sales.
• Branding is shaping how people perceive your business. It’s about identity, personality, logo, design, customer experience, and more. Your brand goes beyond any one marketing message or product.

So brand marketing uses marketing techniques specifically to promote and build your brand, rather than individual products or offers.

Why does brand marketing matter so much? Here are some key reasons:

• Builds Trust and Loyalty: Customers connect with brands emotionally and are more likely to repeatedly purchase from ones they trust.
• Increases Purchases: Research shows 82% of customers prefer buying from brands with a mission or purpose they can align with. Brand marketing highlights your vision.
• Improves ROI of Marketing: Promoting your entire identity rather than just a single offer creates more memorable, impactful marketing campaigns.
• Attracts Talent: 80% of job candidates won’t work for a company with a bad brand reputation. A strong identity draws top talent.
• Stands Out From Competitors: Anyone can duplicate a single product, but a unique brand identity is much harder to copy. Brand marketing is a competitive advantage.

In essence, brand marketing helps form lasting connections between customers and businesses. When done right, it transforms you from just another company into one they want to engage with, buy from, work for, and enthusiastically promote to others.

Now that we’ve covered the basics of brand marketing and why it’s crucial for success, let’s look at how it differs from marketing in general.

Branding VS Marketing: What’s the Difference

Branding and marketing have distinct roles but work closely together:

Marketing focuses on tactics for promoting and selling to customers, whether your:

• Products
• Services
• Overall brand identity
• Specific offers or events

Its goal is driving desired customer actions, often purchases. Marketing is outbound focused on pushing messages out to attract and convert buyers.

Types of marketing activities include:

• Email marketing campaigns
• PPC ads
• SEO initiatives
• Social media posts
• Sales collateral materials
• Packaging design
• Events, webinars or trade shows

Branding, on the other hand, is about shaping customer perception and experiences. Branding is inbound focused on pulling customers to your company by building relationships.

Branding encompasses your:

• Business name
• Logo design
• Visual identity
• Tone of voice
• Messaging
• Personality
• Customer experience

Its goal is positioning your company in customers’ minds as their top choice over competitors.

Branding and marketing work together by:

1. Marketing exposes more people to your business, products and offers through promotions across different channels.
2. Branding makes your business more memorable and trusted once customers engage initially from marketing tactics.

For long term success, you need both strong marketing campaigns to acquire new customers AND excellent branding to retain them as loyal promotors. One without the other limits your growth potential and ability to compete.

This interplay is where brand marketing comes in…

Brand marketing specifically uses marketing tactics to promote your overall brand identity, rather than individual offers or products alone. The goal is actively shaping how customers perceive your business to drive loyalty, word-of-mouth and repeat purchases over time.

Now that we’ve clarified the difference between general marketing vs branding vs brand marketing, let’s look at how to develop an effective brand marketing strategy for your company from the ground up.

How to Build an Effective Brand Marketing Strategy

Creating an effective brand marketing strategy takes research, planning and consistent execution across many touchpoints.

Here is an overview of the 6 key steps. Let’s explore each phase in detail:

1. Conduct Market Research

Start by thoroughly researching your target customers, competitors and overall industry landscape. Key questions to answer include:

Customers:

• Who are your ideal target demographics and buyer personas? Age, gender, location, interests, pain points and preferences?
• What underserved customer needs exist competitors haven’t solved yet?
• What are the most important values your audience wants to align with?

Competition:

• Who are your direct competitors? What are their strengths and weaknesses?
• What existing brand identities and positions have competitors already claimed? What’s still open that your business could own?

Market Trends & Forces:

• What are current growth opportunities or threats driven by underlying economic, technological or regulatory trends in your industry?

Conducting comprehensive market research ensures you build your brand strategy around what matters most to your audience and where you can create competitive differentiation from other players.

2. Define Your Brand Identity

With research completed, start shaping your ideal brand identity aligned to your target customers using these elements:

• Brand Story – What’s your company mission, vision, founding backstory and core values? Stories inspire customers more than simple facts about features or quality.
• Brand Personality – What attributes describe your business if it was a person? Friendly? Bold? Witty? Detail oriented? Choosing brand personality traits that resonate with your audience is key.
• Visual Identity – What immediately visible elements like your logo, tagline, typography, color palette and imagery represent your brand? Consistent visual identity drives brand recognition across touchpoints helping customers easily recall your business.
• Tone of Voice – What’s the style, vocabulary and cadence used in all branded communication from your team to infuse your brand personality in customer interactions?
• Brand Positioning – Given competitive landscape insights from your research, what unique, ownable space can your brand fill either rationally, emotionally or both to stand apart in your industry? Refer back to this core positioning regularly as you craft all branded elements and touchpoints.
• Defining these 5 foundational identity elements creates a North Star for you to build memorable and differentiated branding around.

3. Establish Your Brand Positioning

Now with your brand identity defined, you need to narrow in on defining exactly how you will you position your brand in the mind of customers differently than competitors.

Start by choosing your brand’s core focus area:

• Emotional positioning tugs the heart strings by highlighting how you elevate people’s lives. Think TOMS Shoes empathy driven one-for-one donation model.
• Functional positioning showcases measurable efficiencies gained choosing your solution. Think FedEx’s speed and reliability promises.
• Hybrid positioning blends both emotional and functional elements that set you apart. Most B2C product brands like Nike leverage hybrid positioning.

Then finish this sentence:

“For (target customer) our (company name) brand brings the benefit of (key differentiation promise) that makes us a better choice than (main competitor options).”

Be specific in defining a crisp positioning statement. This guides your identity, messaging, experience design and marketing channel content choices moving forward extracting maximum impact from brand building efforts by zeroing in on what makes your business one they’ll remember.

4. Develop Your Brand Marketing Mix

Armed with your clarified brand identity and positioning, integrated marketing brings your brand strategy to life reaching and resonating with your audience.

Consider what branded touchpoints and channels make the biggest impact at each stage of your customer’s journey:

Awareness Stage: Help audiences even know your brand exists

Potential Channels:

• PPC Ads
• Guest Content Articles
• Social Media Content
• PR Mentions
• Influencer Partnerships
• Branded Swag or Giveaways

Consideration Stage: Move audiences closer to a purchase decision

Potential Channels:

• Product Content & Reviews
• Free Trials
• Customer Testimonials & Case Studies
• Branded Webinars or Events

Purchase Stage: Enable audiences to buy from your brand

Potential Channels:

• Website UI/UX Optimization
• Multi-channel Purchase Platforms
• Special Offers or Bundles
• Loyalty Programs

Retention Stage: Keep audiences loyal and continuously engaged

Potential Channels:

• Customer Surveys
• Post Purchase Check-ins
• Loyalty Programs
• User Community Building

Map what combination of owned media, partnerships and paid advertising makes the most sense balancing brand goals and marketing budget across each stage of your buyer’s journey.

5. Build and Maintain Your Brand Reputation

Now it’s time to start executing your brand marketing game plan across the channels you mapped out. As you begin promoting your brand identity and positioning externally, focus on:

1. Brand Launch Execution: Rollout your visual branding and messaging consistently everywhere to maximize exposure and adoption with style guides, design templates and brand asset distribution.
2. Monitor External Brand Perception: Listen on social media, review sites and sales conversations for real-time external feedback about if your desired brand identity and positioning resonates or needs adjustment based on how customers interpret your branding. This ensures you keep external brand perception aligned with your goals.
3. Reinforce Internally: Make sure every team member in your company understands and lives up to your brand promise consistently across external touchpoints like sales, marketing, product development and service interactions. Internal brand adoption is just as crucial to avoid diluting carefully crafted branding work.

Ongoing brand reputation management builds authenticity and trust as you deliver consistency between marketing messages and real customer experiences.

6. Continuously Monitor and Evaluate Your Strategy

Finally, brand marketing requires constant optimization tailored to how target audiences evolve so always keep a pulse through:

• Customer sentiment monitoring
• Brand studies and surveys
• A/B messaging tests
• Traffic, engagement and sales conversion tracking

Cultivate your brand marketing strategy like an always growing garden instead of a rigid masterpiece. The changing tides of customer perspectives, new innovations and competitors entering your space requires agility and continuous updates while staying true to your core identity.

Review overall program results quarterly by sharing metrics reports and customer feedback widely with both marketing and company leadership to keep improving.

Evolving with the times raises the likelihood of building an iconic enduring brand your audiences stick with through decades like Nike, Coca-Cola and Apple have achieved by obsessing over understanding customer lifestyle shifts even more than peddling products alone.

Key Takeaways

Here are the most crucial points to remember about brand marketing:

• Brand marketing promotes your business’ identity and positioning, not just products.
• It builds awareness, trust and loyalty through consistent emotionally-resonant touchpoints.
• Cohesive branding and marketing is crucial for growth and competitiveness.
• Research target audiences and map the buyer’s journey to target branded touchpoints accordingly.
• Monitor real customer perceptions continuously and keep brand messaging fresh, evolving with changing tastes over decades.

Strong brand marketing positions a business for enduring success as both buyer preferences and competition inevitably shift. Keep these principles in mind as you build memorable and profitable brand experiences.

If you have any other questions on this topic or want help crafting your custom brand marketing strategy, reply back and let me know!