This month, I am going to explain some brand strategies to boost business growth and how they work together to help you build a long-lasting relationship with customers.
1. Consistency!
Yes, this old chestnut again. Consistency is key in what you say, how you say it and how your brand identity is portrayed across marketing channels, so your audience recognises your brand.
Trust: Consistency helps to create a perception of dependability, reliability and trustworthiness.
Recognition: Make it easy for potential customers to identify, recognise, and remember your brand by being consistent across every touchpoint.
Identity: Consistency helps you to carve out a unique identity to strengthen your brand and differentiate it from competitors.
Experience: Touchpoint consistency ensures customers know what to expect. Building reliability and trust increases customer satisfaction and loyalty, reinforcing a connection with the audience and building long-term value.
2. Define your Target Audience
This is one of the important brand strategies to boost business growth.
Understanding your audience’s preferences and how they communicate ensures brand messaging addresses their needs and pain points.
Focus: Knowing your audience allows you to focus on the most effective marketing tactics to reach them. Optimise your efforts with messages that resonate with them.
Brand positioning: Identifying what makes your brand unique means you can position your brand to appeal to the right customers by addressing their specific needs.
Loyalty: Building an emotional connection depends on understanding the needs of your target audience in order to create a consistent experience, fostering customer satisfaction and promoting long-term loyalty.
Resource allocation: Streamline marketing costs and increase ROI by focusing on specific needs, rather than the market as a whole.
In addition, increase competitive advantage by gaining insight into needs that are not yet being met, developing new products and services that align with target audience pain points.
Connections: Understanding what motivates your audience allows deeper emotional connections, driving long-term customer loyalty.
3. Create a brand identity
People buy from businesses whose values are aligned with their own.
Establishing a brand identity, vision and core values are essential steps for engaging potential customers. They are the founding principles for building everything else.
I have written lots of advice on creating a brand identity in these articles/blogs:
The key elements of brand identity
The importance of brand values
4. Social Media
People live their whole lives online.
If you want to connect with potential customers and build brand loyalty, a social media strategy is a crucial brand strategy to boost business growth.
It has more specific targeting options than traditional marketing activities and can be implemented on a comparatively small budget.
Awareness: Increase your brand’s visibility and reach your target audience through well-crafted messaging and content.
Engagement: Social media allows two-way conversations. Constant interaction and consistent messaging make your brand more relatable.
Reinforce messaging: Communicate through consistent content aligned with your brand identity and values to build trust and loyalty.
Increase website traffic: Share links and promotions to encourage followers to take specific actions, e.g., signing up to a newsletter, making a purchase, reading a blog or any other website activity.
User-generated content: Showcasing customer feedback, experiences or testimonials boosts the feeling of belonging and followers can become powerful brand advocates.
Credibility: Sharing useful content and responding promptly to enquiries improves brand credibility and demonstrates trustworthiness.
5. Influencers
An effective social media strategy helps you to connect with influencers who promote your brand to their followers.
Collaborating with influencers aligned to your target market, leverages their established trust and connection with their followers to enhance brand credibility and build a ‘buzz’ around it.
Wider audience: Your products/services are exposed to a wider audience who may not already know your brand.
Influencers may work across more or different social media channels, promoting your brand to an audience that you don’t currently reach.
Influencers encourage user-generated content via challenges or hashtags, boosting brand visibility, giving you access to followers’ networks, and offering the potential for viral posts.
Authenticity: Influencers are a trusted source of information, offering personal recommendations to followers. This more authentic form of promotion increases credibility and social proof.
Engaging content: Influencers are skilled at creating content and can present your brand in a way they know will engage their followers.
Brand ambassadors: Partnering with influencers can help to establish credible and authentic brand ambassadors.
Search Engine visibility: When an influencer mentions your brand, their strong online presence can improve your brand’s search engine ranking, making it easier for new customers to find you.
6. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO is one of the essential brand strategies to boost business growth.
Visibility: Use both organic and paid for SEO to increase visibility by making sure that your website appears when anyone types in a search using keywords related to your business, products and services.
Credibility: The higher your brand appears in search results, the more trustworthy it appears to be.
Google rewards websites that load quickly, are mobile-friendly and provide trustworthy, engaging and original content.
Organic SEO: Although paid ads generate traffic to your website, local and organic SEO is free and helps your website to become a trusted source of information, increasing visibility and brand recognition.
Consistency: Being consistently returned in searches helps potential customers to recognise and remember your brand.
7. Content
Your content plays a major role in brand strategies to boost business growth. It influences how your brand is perceived, how you build a connection, and whether your values resonate with your target audience.
Brand Voice: Content brings your brand’s personality to life. Consistency builds brand recognition.
Audience engagement: Content should address audience needs and pain points to build an emotional connection, while encouraging two-way conversations and interactions. Shared connections foster customer loyalty and contribute to longevity.
Visibility: Quality content can improve your SEO, driving more traffic to your website and increasing brand visibility on search engines.
Actions: Encourage your audience to act! Showing them how to progress to the next step by including calls to action in your content increases conversion rates.
Customer experience: Providing useful and interesting content helps customers to make informed decisions, enhancing their experience of your brand.
Educational blogs, webinars or e-books empower your audience and establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry.
Personalisation: You can tailor content to different audience segments, making their experiences and interactions feel more personalised while creating a memorable brand experience.
You can read more about personalisation in branding in my recent blog.
Brand Strategies to Boost Business Growth
All brand strategies require effective measurements to make sure that you are employing the right strategy in the right way to boost business growth.
Remember that building your business is ongoing, and brand strategies require constant refinement.
Here are a few methods you can employ:
- Surveys and polls to measure brand awareness
- Analysing website traffic to see whether potential customers find your website direct or via other sites or social media platforms.
- Use Google Analytics to see how many people find you via your brand name or keywords.
- Social media metrics measure engagement rates, brand mentions, track hashtags and highlight how your followers grow over time.
- Google Search Volume monitors the number of searches for your brand name or related keywords, to see whether the search volume increases as your brand becomes more recognisable.
- Use tools like Hootsuite Insights or Brandwatch to understand how your brand is perceived across social media platforms and forums.
- Track referrals from influencers to understand how this strategy is working.
- Customer feedback and reviews provide valuable insights into how people see your brand.
- Track sales and lead generation following campaigns or a new strategy. Have leads increased following a new influencer collaboration or a product promotion, for example?
Remember that you don’t have to do this alone!
Make a Brew is here if you need help creating or implementing brand strategies to boost business growth. Simply book a brew to discuss your options and find out how I can help your business to grow!
