Marketing strategies that ground your product information in simple, clear messages help customers remember your claims and understand their significance. Businesses use these strategies to help consumers form lasting, positive impressions of both their products and their brand.
Here’s how brand marketing works, why it is important for a successful business, and how to build an effective strategy to make your brand memorable.
What is brand marketing?
Brand marketing is the process of promoting your company’s brand to create customer loyalty and awareness. Unlike product marketing, which informs the public about how specific products or services meet consumer needs, brand marketing communicates your brand’s values, value proposition, and vision to drive consumer engagement.
What’s the difference between branding and marketing?
Branding and marketing are separate and distinct activities. Understanding the difference can support branding and marketing efforts—and help you build a strong brand marketing strategy. Here’s an overview of each:
- Branding. Branding is establishing a distinct identity for your company and its products or services. It involves defining your brand’s voice, values, promise, personality traits, and visual identity.
- Marketing. Marketing is focused on communication with your target audience. It includes activities like social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO).
Branding helps you define who you are, and marketing conveys information to your target audience. Brand marketing is a specific type of marketing that communicates information about your company’s brand.
Why is brand marketing important?
An effective brand marketing strategy can help you increase the value of your brand name, also known as your brand equity. Having strong brand equity means consumers hold your brand in high regard. They may choose your products more often, or be willing to pay more for your product over competitors.
Here’s an overview of three elements of brand equity—and how good brand marketing can support each:
- Brand awareness. Brand awareness measures consumer familiarity with your company. Marketing can boost awareness by improving brand recall and brand recognition. It can also encourage word-of-mouth marketing.
- Brand loyalty. Brand loyalty measures your customers’ likelihood of doing repeat business with your company. It’s strongly correlated with customer loyalty because more loyal customers tend to make more frequent purchases. Brand marketing boosts loyalty through messaging around brand story and brand vision, which can encourage an emotional connection.
- Brand preference. Brand preference is your brand’s strength relative to your competitors. Brand marketing helps by improving your brand reputation and highlighting what makes your company unique.
How to build a successful brand marketing strategy
- Conduct target audience research
- Research your competitors
- Revisit your brand identity
- Develop brand marketing messages
- Plan your brand marketing campaign
Brand marketing is a long-term strategy. Whereas product marketing strategies like offers and discounts seek immediate conversions, brand marketing aims to improve your brand’s position in your target market, setting you up for ongoing success.
These five steps can help you design and launch a solid brand marketing strategy:
1. Conduct target audience research
The first step in building a brand marketing strategy is researching your target audience (or updating existing target audience research). Identify demographic factors, needs, values, beliefs, decision drivers, and media consumption preferences shared among your customer base.
You can also use buyer personas—fictionalized representations of a business’s ideal customers—to support this process.
2. Research your competitors
Identify key competitors and take note of their brand positioning—or how they market themselves. Pay special attention to brand promise, which is an implicit or explicit statement of the value a company offers. You can also take notes on design elements, brand voice, and key personality traits.
Because this research is focused on a company’s consumer-facing identity, it’s relatively straightforward. You can browse competitor websites, peruse social media accounts, and review marketing materials to get a sense of your competitors’ brand strategy.
3. Revisit your brand identity
Once you have a sense of the market, revisit your brand guidelines and ask yourself the following questions:
Do my brand guidelines accurately reflect reality?
Brand identity drift—shifting away from your original brand values and image—is possible. Your brand guidelines might say that your brand uses an empathetic, compassionate, and straightforward tone—but your web, email marketing, and social media content might convey irony. If you find discrepancies, update your guidelines to match.
Is my brand identity appropriate to my target audiences?
Determine whether your brand identity is appropriate based on your updated target audience information. If not, revise it to align with consumer needs. A snarky tone, for example, is a poor choice for an audience that values security and tradition. You might embrace a frank and reassuring tone instead.
How does my brand identity compare to my competitors’?
Is your brand identity meaningfully different from your competitors’? If not, what differentiates your company? Update your brand identity to reflect what sets you apart.
4. Develop brand marketing messages
Brand marketing messages are key points that you repeat across brand marketing campaigns. For example, a financial services company might develop a message like “Integrity is at the heart of what we do,” and use it in its advertising, informational brochures, and even company letterhead.
Think of brand marketing messages as the bridge between brand values and consumer needs. Start brainstorming by asking yourself why your target audiences should choose your company. Then record your answers, group them by theme, and distill your findings into three to six succinct statements of your company’s unique value.
5. Plan your brand marketing campaign
Finally, plan your brand marketing campaign to get your messages in front of audiences. Brand marketing campaign planning involves setting goals, establishing timelines, and selecting marketing channelsand tactics. It also involves determining who is responsible for creating and distributing marketing materials, and planning how you’ll track performance.
Tips for brand marketing
Popular brand marketing tactics include content marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing. You can also support your brand marketing efforts through paid tactics like running an ad campaign or hiring a brand ambassador.
Here are tips (and things to avoid) in your brand marketing campaign:
Lead with values
Customers prefer to shop at companies that share their values, and brands are responding by incorporating values-based messaging into their marketing strategies.
For example, apparel company Everlane uses the messaging, “Our way: Exceptional quality. Ethical factories. Radical Transparency.” This highlights its commitment to equity and sustainability and appeals to consumers who share these values.
Adopt this strategy by identifying authentic values reflected in your business and incorporating them into your brand messaging.
Diversify channels and tactics
Diversifying tactics and channels can help you maximize reach and optimize results. Consider both organic marketing and paid advertising efforts.
For example, you might create a series of organic social media posts that tell a story about how your products are made and use paid social media ads to increase reach and boost brand engagement.
Learn more: 5 Organic Marketing Ideas for Entrepreneurs
Develop a brand story
Brand marketing communicates who you are, why you exist, what you care about, and how you help clients. The most persuasive and memorable answers cohere into a brand story, which is a retelling of specific events in a company’s history that connects abstract concepts (like brand purpose) to concrete events (like the backstory of the founders).
For instance, often brand storytelling details how and when the company set up shop or identified a problem and devised a solution.
Identify critical events in your company’s history to create your brand story. Then write them down and explain how each informed your company’s trajectory and core values.
Don’t forget your products
Think of your products as evidence for the claims made by your brand marketing strategy, and choose claims that your products actually support. A company that sells baby blankets and stuffed animals will struggle to support the statement “We can help you dominate the global energy market,” and a worldwide management consulting company isn’t well positioned to claim that it’s there to make bedtime better.
Brand marketing FAQ
What is an example of branding in marketing?
Branding is the process of establishing a unique identity for your company. Choosing a color palette, designing a logo, and deciding on core values are all examples of things that contribute to branding.
What does brand marketing mean?
Brand marketing promotes your company by communicating information about your brand as a whole. It uses messaging about your brand’s values, value proposition, and vision to drive consumer engagement and encourage conversions.
What is the difference between branding and marketing?
Branding establishes a distinct identity for your company, and marketing communicates directly with your target audiences. In other words, branding says who your company is, and marketing conveys that information to consumers.