The majority of organizations think in terms of brand as simply a collection of colors and values. In fact, these companies are mistaken as a true brand equates to a mathematical equation specifying how much you will have to spend to get someone to acquire a product. If you cannot use definitive data to quantify your current brand strategy, then there is no strategy.

When looking to be successful at a brand strategy, please remember the operational aspect of a brand. The modern marketing landscape is inundated with tactical hints with no executional capabilities. Brand founders and internal marketers will spend an inordinate amount of time on theoretical ideas of brands instead of focusing on the real operational systems that are needed to generate revenue.

The data clearly illustrates that there are too many service pages on agency websites with outrageous performance claims and absolutely no metrics or independent verification. Agencies are selling you thoughts. We need a disciplined and definable approach for you to truly execute your brand as defined.

To practically execute a brand, you must also be able to provide a comprehensive “how to” list that includes mapped workflows for generating a long-term return on investment that leads directly into your search engine optimization strategy. By not connecting your brand decisions to the topical authority results, you will be wasting money.

What Exactly Is a Brand Strategy?

A brand strategy is the exact collection of rules by which a company establishes how a product is positioned and how the audience will show up over time, as well as the metrics that show how rapidly a product will grow in the marketplace.

You cannot create a successful brand strategy without empirical audited historical data to support your operational procedures. Before making any changes to your website, it is essential to establish some benchmarks.

Specifically, you need to know how people perceive your brand (brand awareness), the Net Promoter Score (NPS), and the amount of traffic driven by branded search terms.

Your brand's infrastructure is merely a guess without these records. You cannot measure what you don't monitor. Successful entrepreneurs and business teams use reporting mechanisms to create their strategy.

This is generally achieved through software such as Qualtrics, and Google Analytics is leveraged to see how the brand is positioned and how the business's new position interacts with users' actions on their website. The data generated from reporting is the only source of information used when re-establishing a location.

You will want to have everything supported with measurable data. You must create your strategy and the ability to pay for it simultaneously.

The vast majority of the content that provides guidance on creating strategy fails to align with the stage of development of a business. If you are a 1099 contractor, you cannot afford to spend ninety days creating a focus group. A contractor needs quick, inexpensive templates to help them win contracts.

An enterprise needs solid tiered service options, defined deliverables, and tracking over several months. To set your strategy, you must demand the prices and the make-up of the team required upfront. If an agency doesn't provide time-to-impact estimates, get a different agency.

The 6-Step Brand Strategy Framework

While everyone can benefit from a defined system, simply telling individuals to "find their voice" doesn't provide them with the knowledge to do it independently. You need a detailed plan that allows everyone on your team to keep the accountability for their results in perspective.

1. Market and Audience Research

You should always conduct a well-thought-out amount of research before forming any conclusions that could impact your business. Target audiences cannot be created in boardrooms - they must be discovered through customer feedback.

The majority of companies make this mistake by relying on assumptions rather than asking customers directly for their thoughts through surveys and focus groups. The research phase should involve the use of tools like HackMD or Notion to compile the enormous amount of user feedback into a format that is easily interpretable and actionable.

There needs to be an established system to track impressions of the company in the marketplace, with the aim to collect unbiased data about current impressions of your brand in the marketplace, including its positive and negative associations.

This is done through the two types of recall tests: aided recall and unaided recall. Aided recall tests ask customers whether they recognize your name from a list. In an unaided recall test, you ask customers to think of your brand name by themselves when asked about your industry.

The difference between the two groups of numbers that you collect will show you the exact difference that needs to be adjusted by your strategy. The raw research that you collected, as well as your customer interviews, will become the first deliverable for your agency.

You must develop scripts for your customer interviews and document all the specific pain points each customer describes.

2. Positioning and Market Placement Models

After you have collected your research, you must determine where exactly in the marketplace you will fit into.

Positioning a company is about describing who you are not and making clear decisions about where you want to be within the marketplace, the pricing tiers that you will offer, the service bands that you will offer, and the specific product category that you are going to offer.

Many agencies create proprietary BSR (Brand Strategy Resource) models or similar types of maps to determine where a brand fits in relation to competitive brands. Your goal is to locate an unoccupied space within the marketplace that can be fully exploited.

You need to make sure that your market position aligns with the resources available to you for support.

3. Messaging and Voice Architecture Protocol

Messaging and voice architecture protocol is the structure that governs all your communications in a public space.

You will create templates and briefings for your team members to follow, containing the tonality used in your brand's communications, the vocabulary that must be used, and the terminology that will not be included in your brand's communications.

This means documenting the vocabulary, phrases, and tone of voice of all of your writers and all of your management, so that no matter what the content is, the writers follow the documented structure.

In addition, the documentation must be made available to all writers, managers, and salespeople in the organisation instantly. If a branded document is not made available, there will be divergent voices and messaging across different channels for a single brand.

By creating a built-in structured message, there will be reduced costs for creating content due to there being fewer review processes. The process for verification of a document against the documented voice is simply to compare it against the established guidelines.

4. SEO Content Matrices and Search Visibility Alignment

Content matrices and alignment of search visibility also represent the greatest marketing gap for today's brands. As the brand selections determine the outcomes of search engine optimisation, if the brand's position changes, then the website structure should be modified based on the new position.

To maintain credibility as the premier authority on "enterprise cloud security", the content on the website cannot be primarily targeted to provide small business firewall tips. The new brand pillars should be directly mapped to topical clusters.

Use platforms like Semrush and/or Moz to gather data on keywords and align search volumes with the unique market position your company occupies. This also means creating a permanent answer to each question typed by your potential buyers in Google to establish a sound position for yourself among all of your market's competitors.

For every brand pillar in place, a corresponding content cluster should be developed containing 12 articles of content. The main pillar page or content should be at the top of your pyramid model and all other pages should be placed beneath the main pillar page in increasing order of specificity, until they reach the bottom-most level.

Doing this will ensure that when potential customers search for the products or services that your brand owns, they will find your site as the very first result. SEO (search engine optimisation) and branding are really two sides of the same mechanism that operate on opposite ends of the sales funnel.

Branding generates the demand and SEO captures the buyer's intent.

5. Cross-Channel Workflow Integration

A strategy is only successful when it changes people's day-to-day habits.

Building the operational assets is essential to building a strategy. Create downloadable research scripts, create pre-created brand brief templates and create a way to test messaging. A strategy cannot be followed through unless you provide all of the necessary assets for your team to use.

Ideally, during the implementation phase, you would assign clear roles within the team so that everyone knows what their job is. Who is responsible for updating the content? Who monitors the tone of social media?

What metrics will be tracked to measure the team's success or failure each month? You must also be sure that all of your brand assets are assigned names and deadlines.

6. Measuring and Tracking Your Brand's Health

One metric that should be measured regularly is how your branding choices affect your company's financial performance.

Create a simple system for tracking your key metrics (e.g. a CSV (comma separated value) file) which lists the percentage of share-of-voice that you own compared to three of your direct competitors.

Track the consideration rate of your primary product and track the increase in direct traffic to your site monthly. If your strategy is successful, you will see an increase in search terms associated with your brand as well as a decrease in the cost to acquire customers.

If nothing changes within the first 90 days, then your strategy did not work. In the real world, a theoretical framework of how things work is free, while buyers want to see real results with a defined time frame, base numbers, and a clearly articulated method.

Brand Strategy Case Studies: The 90-Day Authority Test

Take a look at a medium-sized software business that was struggling with finding new leads through traditional means. In contrast to merely changing their logo, this organization implemented a strict, 12-week repositioning of their organization based solely upon data.

Prior to implementing their plan, there was a poor baseline of direct traffic, bad keywords, and a very low ranking for their core software offering keywords.

The company's first step was to send a survey to 500 of their current customers in which it became evident that the company's customers primarily valued fast integration and not advanced technology. The position statement on their homepage was immediately reworded to align 100% with fast integration.

Then, the company created an extremely focused content marketing strategy. They created a connection between their newly identified brand pillars and an aggressive SEO strategy, publishing 20 new technical articles to address the problem of software integration.

They maintained consistency of their established voice throughout the company's website. After 90 days of implementing this strategy, the company achieved significant results.

The number of customers searching using the company's brand name increased by 24% and the conversion rate on the main product page rose from 1.2% to 2.8%. This is how a real brand strategy works.

It is a controlled test that is monitored using raw numbers and verified through outside sources. To create a successful brand, every company must conduct similar internal tests and share the results openly to demonstrate value.

Final Words

Will you continue to waste money on meaningless color schemes or will you demand that your marketing department map all positioning decisions to a quantified search outcome?

You should remove all anecdotal theories from your organization immediately and set up a tracking system that will create a clear financial return on your time and investment. Additionally, you should conduct baseline awareness surveys now and continue to conduct them regularly going forward.