The speed at which the market recognizes and understands your capabilities primarily drives your early-stage growth. Most founding teams consider brand development a luxury item and defer critical positioning decisions until the product's features can stand on their own.
This guide describes the framework by which your organization can define its brand strategy for startups. We will show you how to deploy and organize the sequencing of your market positioning, message mapping, and visual identity in a manner that takes into consideration real-world resource limitation, thus, you will develop early market authority.
Understanding Early Stage Brand Strategy for Startups
The visual design of your brand is nothing more than ornamentation unless it has an underlying strategic framework. True brand strategy for startups works as an integral component of the total operation of your company.
True brand strategy will help define the following:
What products or services to build.
The manner in which to target customers.
The mode of communication from your sales team to prospective customers.
How Founders Confuse Brand Strategy with Logo Design
Founders often utilize the phrase "brand strategy" to refer only to the design of the logo for their brand, which results in costly cycles of branding and no effect on improving the rate of sales conversion. Brand strategy is only built upon a clearly defined positioning statement.
You must be able to define your market category in order to win the market category you are striving for and articulate the value of your product in a single, concise sentence. If you cannot describe the value of your product in a single, concise sentence, the amount of time and money you invest in building a visually appealing launch will not be enough to improve your launch success rate. To be successful you must provide the buyer with clarity of thought.
Dealing with Early Stage Limits
The typical startup has the following constraints: limited budgets, limited timelines, and extreme uncertainty regarding its product. Therefore, your brand's strategy must be constructed with the expectation that your brand will continue to change. Your ideal customer profile will change.
Your product roadmap will change based on user feedback. Once you develop a strong foundational brand strategy, you will be able to change your messaging but not your underlying brand identity, as you will develop the necessary agility needed for your brand to achieve success in the first year.
The Basics of Positioning
Positioning is the process of strategically locating your product within a specific framework. The framework communicates to your buyer how to benchmark you against other products that are similar to yours. If you do not define the framework, then the marketplace will choose one for you.
Defining Your Category and Ideal Customer
You cannot market to everybody. Instead, you need to identify a very narrow niche target market. The ideal target market should be a specific market segment or company, or a user that experiences the pain point that your product addresses.
After identifying your target market, you need to create a description of the category. Do you consider yourself a better alternative to an existing product or do you believe you are creating an entirely new category of product?
If you are creating a new category of product, it will take a considerable amount of education to inform users about your category. If you are competing in an existing category, you will need to differentiate yourself clearly.
Using the April Dunford Method
Industry experts like April Dunford assert that positioning should be based on your true competitive alternatives. When determining what customers are currently using without the benefit of your startup, you may find that the answer is often a spreadsheet and not a competitor's software.
Once you have identified your alternative, you need to identify the specific features that distinguish your product from your alternative. Next, convert those features into a quantifiable value proposition that your ideal target market values. This conversion is the foundation for your entire brand strategy for startups.
Creating a Positioning Statement
A positioning statement serves as an internal tool only and will not be found on your website. Positioning statements help your founders, sales people, and product managers remain aligned.
Building Your Messaging Plan
The messaging architecture provides an understanding of your brand that will guide you when developing your messaging materials.
The message architecture consists of the following four components:
Target audience
Market category
Main benefit
Proof points
When a company is unable to come to an agreement on its target audience, market category, main benefit, and proof points, the company will not be able to convey an effective marketing message.
The messaging architecture provides structure for how your brand communicates its position and, therefore, provides structure for how your marketers should communicate with their target audiences. Having structured messages that are clear and concise is critical to building buyer trust and maintaining it over time.
Most startups that are successful use a message house to create their messaging architecture. Each message house consists of three foundational messages, known as pillars. These pillars represent your company's three main value propositions.
For example, if your value propositions are speed, accuracy, and cost savings, then those are your three pillars. Every piece of content that your marketing team creates must relate back to one of these three pillars. This helps the marketing team to remain focused on the message, and reduces the potential for confusion.
A pillar alone does not provide value without a proof point. Each claim made does have a proof point associated with it. For instance, if your company makes a claim about the speed of your software, then you need to describe in detail (the number of hours saved) how that is true.
Your proof points need to be written so that your sales representatives can easily use them when talking with prospects. Sales representatives are not trained to use and/or understand marketing terms, so write proof points in plain language, using the words of the best customers who have already bought from your company.
As the messaging architecture provides a foundation for creating your message house and therefore, your messaging architecture, the same applies to the creation of your website layout. Your website layout should reflect your messaging architecture, which is how you develop your homepage headline.
Your three primary messaging pillars will become your three primary feature segments. Underneath those features, the proof points will be used to create the bulleted lists and case study segments. This will create a clear connection between the high-level strategic plan and the tactical execution. By maintaining consistency among these elements, you will improve conversion rates.
Creating a Visual Identity
After you create an overall strategic plan and a tactical execution plan, you will be able to move onto the visual execution of your brand. Ideally, as a startup, you need to create at least a minimum viable identity so that you will have enough visual identity to appear credible to investors and early adopters.
A minimum viable identity does not require you to create a large and complex design system within your first year. You should focus on developing a clean and simple logo, a unique color palette, and two readable fonts. By doing so, you will be able to develop a level of trust among users and investors.
Putting too much effort into a complex visual identity system in your first year is risky. Your product and your target audience may change throughout the development of your business, so you should limit your visual identity to what you will need as you continue to work towards finding your true product/market fit.
To increase the appearance of your startup and to reduce the perception of smallness and unprofessionalism, you should begin documenting your visual and messaging assets immediately after finalizing them. You should develop a basic, but accessible guideline document outlining the use of your visual and messaging assets so that every contractor, agency, and new employee has access to this document.
If your sales team is using an old logo and/or outdated messaging in their presentation slides, then it will signal that your tactical execution failed to execute properly. Because speed is important in this phase of your company's growth, you cannot afford to spend the next six months debating your brand's identity. Your runway will likely run out before you are able to solidify your brand's identity if you do not act quickly.
The 30-Day Plan for Brand Strategy
You will have a structured way to create this foundation by going through all of the activities you must complete during your 30-day outline. Each week in your sprint will consist of a specific goal with specific actions to complete during the week in addition to laying out the 30-day outline.
Week One: Research and Alignment
The first week is focused on research and alignment where the founders should reach a consensus on the core business objectives they want to achieve over the next 12 months. To validate the objectives, the founders should interview a minimum of five recently acquired customers or prospects they lost to other companies or products.
During this phase, founders should listen to customers/prospects about how they describe their problems. Tools such as SparkToro can be used to evaluate the types of content customers/prospects read and what content they are discussing online about your product or category. Create a basic Value Proposition Canvas mapping this data.
Week Two: Positioning and Messaging
The second week will be dedicated to developing the positioning statement for your company/product based on your research and developing the messaging for your company/product. This will require all founders to meet together in one location to discuss and finalize the wording of the positioning statement.
Once the category and target audience have been agreed upon, the company's messaging house will be created. Each of the three pillars will be drafted with the supporting proof points. The language used for the messaging house should be very simple and straightforward. These core pillars and their supporting proof points can be taken to a few trusted advisors or friendly clients as a way of validating that there is logical consistency to the messaging.
Week Three: Visual Application
The third week will consist of creating visual representations of the messaging. Once the messaging has been approved, founders can provide direction to either an outsourced designer or an internal design team. If internal, you can provide the positioning statement to the internal design team. If outsourced, you can provide the positioning statement to the outside designers.
For the design phase, focus on creating the items you will need to use immediately. The first item will be creating a homepage mockup for your product or service. Next, creating a standard template for presentations, including emails for your company, and creating a standard template for social media content. At this point in the design process, any designs that do not communicate the message tone of the approved messaging pillars should be dismissed from consideration.
Week Four: Documentation
During the last week, the founders will focus on the documentation of their work and their completed product. All logos, color codes, and font licenses will be finalized and placed into a centralized location so they can be sent to the designers.
Create a brief, one-page overview of your strategic design in order to send out this document, which includes your strategic positioning statement, message pillar statements, and a link for accessing your visual assets, to your entire team with the directive that they must adopt and utilize the new system immediately.
Tools to Help Build Your Brand
In order to execute your strategy properly, you must have the right support systems in place. Software stacks of specific use types are utilized by most of today's startups for conducting research, design, and maintaining an internally consistent quality of branding. By using the right software you will minimize costs and maximize speed in your business.
Research and Brainstorming Tools
Prior to writing, you will want to gather all of your thoughts and data related to your marketplace in order to put them into a format to reference. Miro is an excellent resource for visualizing competition in regard to the positioning of a brand within a marketplace and for conducting internal workshops to develop and refine your brand strategy.
To assemble and catalogue notes from conversations with potential customers (interviews), and also to create your Value Proposition Canvas, Notion is a convenient way to gather your tidbits of information and assemble them into a text format. Using Notion or similar tools allows people working remotely from different locations to work on strategy together on a collaborative basis.
Design Platforms
The design side of your strategy will be executed in the most commonly used platform (Figma). Figma is the leading software for creating web and interactive design and complex assets. However, it is important to note that not all people on your team have the same design skill set.
For the creation of daily postings to various social media platforms, the creation of simple sales sheets, and most importantly for those who may not have any resources allocated to design at this time, Canva is a very accessible solution. For those starting out who have no budget for design, AI-based logo creators such as Looka are a great tool and will allow you to create and/or maintain a temporary visual identity when your budget allows.
Tools to Keep Your Brand Consistent
Developing and executing a strategy are great tools to enhance the effectiveness of a business. However, it must be understood that for a strategy to work, the people on the team must adhere to it. Companies use dedicated software applications to maintain consistency of both visual and textual content for their brands.
In this regard and in the creation of brand guidelines, Frontify is a wonderful solution for maintaining reliable brand guidelines. For smaller teams, Notion is a great solution for creating a centralized wiki to contain an archive of brand assets. By using tools such as BrandBird or Grammarly for Business, founders can keep messaging consistent across daily communications while adhering to branding and communications policies.
Budgets for Start-Up Brand Strategies
The primary consideration is how much to allocate to brand strategy development. Founders should also understand the current market rates for brand strategy work. The cost of brand strategy work can vary greatly depending on the depth of the work.
In-House Versus Agency Pricing
Hiring an external branding company is a major financial commitment; basic visual identity projects, most frequently just logos and color schemes, cost between $2,000 to $10,000.
Full strategy work includes positioning, messaging structure, and a complete visual system and costs between $50,000 and $150,000 or more. For a start-up without significant venture capital, the most viable option is to do the strategy work in-house and outsource the visual design work.
The Importance of Writing Down Your Strategy Early
By doing quality documentation early on, hundreds if not thousands of dollars will be saved later. When you provide your freelance copywriter with a complete and accurate message map, they will write better forms of content for you faster.
When a web designer has an accurate positioning statement, they will create a more effective website for you. In addition, quality documentation will diminish the total amount of time charged at hourly rates for fixing errors generated by out-of-focus vendor work; savings are directly correlated with your operational costs.
How Positioning Grows Your Revenue
Market leadership is not determined by a well-designed logo; it is created through absolute clarity of position. Startups with a defined category at the launch experience shorter sales cycles and reduced customer acquisition costs. By aligning the mapping of their brand strategy from the founder's vision to the exact copy used in the sales emails, the entire organization has achieved extreme capital efficiency.
Companies like Mailchimp achieved their massive valuation, not through the constant redesign of their website and logos, but by being extremely consistent in their identity and positioning throughout their growth stages. Ultimately, documenting your brand strategy for startups is a means of creating operational discipline and ensures that as your company grows, the message you are sending to the market remains focused, consistent, and hits your revenue targets.
Answering Common Questions on Early-Stage Branding
What Should We Do When Our Product-Market Fit Changes?
You need to look at your Value Proposition Canvas immediately. By changing your product-market fit, that means the ideal customer profile that you originally defined is no longer applicable. Your visual identity needs to remain consistent to protect your basic brand recognition in the marketplace. However, the three core messaging pillars need to be rewritten for the new, specific target audience. Start with updating your website headline and measuring any changes in conversion, and then roll out the new messaging to your sales team.
When Should We Hire an Agency for a Full Rebrand?
The best time to create a full-agency rebranding is when the way your target market perceives your brand is currently blocking your revenue growth. This typically happens during a major funding event, when you enter an enterprise market that requires a greater level of trust, or when you are expanding beyond your original category or niche. If your sales team is constantly losing sales because your company appears too small or too inexperienced, then you need to invest in a comprehensive, strategic overhaul from an agency-level firm.
How Should Founders Fix Fights Over Their Category?
The best method of settling internal debates regarding what category to take is to look externally at data. If there is a disagreement between the co-founders regarding which category they will represent, run a fast testing cycle. Create two different landing pages to represent two distinct categories of positioning statements and drive a small amount of targeted advertising traffic to each of the two pages. The one that generates the most engagement and the clearest lead capture will determine the direction of the company.