The Big Picture: Brand Strategy and Where Social Media Features In it
There's never the perfect timing or circumstance to start anything, be it exercise or a business. You just need to start somewhere. Given how accessible and indispensable social media has become to our lives, it seems instinctive to have your business's social media up, running and pulling in leads or customers as a baby step.
Ummm no.
Building a social presence for a budding business seems like the easiest stepping stone to take but there is something you can't start without—a solid brand strategy.
Social media platforms are the sales counter over which you can talk to your target audience directly, and I know this is so very appealing. Why make brand marketing plans when you can talk directly to potential leads and find out exactly what they need?
The danger of allotting your marketing dollars into social media channels before a branding strategy is you associate your brand with every other trend that's doing the rounds. When you get your brand in front of people by hopping on and hashtagging every trend, your brand voice and perception gets distorted. It's not about getting your brand seen and felt by everyone, it's about getting it noticed by the right audience. For instance, if your brand is meant to be perceived as dignified, you don't want to be raking in views for dancing and jumping to TikTok jingles and doing ask me anything’s on your Instagram Stories. That may be your own off-screen personality, but it's not the same one for your business brand. One off-brand social media post is sufficient to change the perception from an entire audience.
An established brand identity is built when you follow a set of well-researched guidelines and principles in your marketing and business strategy. By following these principles consistently in your content marketing, you can craft the way you want your brand to be received. In this big canvas of brand messaging, your content marketing strategy is just one colour of paint, and social media marketing is just a brushstroke of that paint. Starting off your own brand with just social media messaging and trying to build off that is like trying to run the business with one brushstroke.
Social media marketing comes later on in your marketing efforts. I get that it's the seemingly fun and 'easy to do' part of marketing, especially in the democratized world of the internet where anyone can be a creator with an audience at your fingertips. Building a brand strategy sounds less fun and flashy but it's crucial.
So why does the seed of your business need brand strategy? An effective brand strategy framework helps you separate the secrets from the sauce. Chipping away at the brand strategy first and foremost narrows in on your brand's unique selling proposition. From that point on, you can construct your brand personality, and brand voice. Once you have those components nailed down, you come up with social posts that reflect that. So now do you get why social media marketing comes later on in the scheme of brand strategy?
Here are the key components of your brand strategy.
Purpose
Your 'why' drives everything you do about your business. To you, your brand purpose is obvious, you are immersed in it almost every waking moment. But to your audience, they probably have only one or a few touchpoints with your brand. It's important to communicate your 'why' in ways that fit in with your audience's needs. After all, why should they care about your business if it doesn't help them in any way?
Vision
Knowing where your business needs to be a year or ten from the present helps map out the decisions that get it there. A brand vision is a workable dream that you can turn into reality, with each business decision. Your vision shouldn't be limited to lofty words on a page, but provide strategic direction to what your business hopes to change or improve for its audience.
Values
Your brand values showcase your brand's contribution to society beyond a service or a product. Publishing and living your values guides certain business decisions and builds an emotional connection with potential customers who share the same values. For instance, you may choose not to collaborate with certain businesses due to what your brand stands for. Audiences can easily spot when your actions don't live up to your values, here's a video about the recent announcements from Patagonia and Boohoo.
Although the brand core of brand purpose, vision, and values are intangible assets, they set the tone and establish how your brand positioning works in the broader scope of marketing. Now, we move into the other components of brand strategy that set you up with the right target audiences.
Target Audience
Impressing your target customer starts with knowing them well, and this isn't limited to a one-pager customer profile of demographics, and stats about different buyer personas. Build an ideal client avatar that helps you pinpoint their hopes and dreams, so you can position your brand's real value in the lives of the right audience.
Competitive Analysis
There may be many businesses that do what yours does, so what sets your brand apart? Studying other brands helps your clean up and amplify your unique selling proposition, and in turn strengthens your brand perception. You may be doing what others are doing, but you can control the narrative of how your brand is perceived or why it stands apart from the rest of the competitors in the industry.
Brand Personality
Your brand doesn't need to have a 'larger than life' persona to get attention, instead it needs to feel human and stir up emotions that make people feel like your brand is just another person with an engaging story. To arrive at these emotions, you need to style your font a certain way, pick certain colours for the logo or use certain words in your brand message and copy.
Brand Voice
Once you have pegged down what the brand personality makes your potential customers feel, you can construct the brand voice that will relay your brand message.
Now, you're ready to create social media posts that accurately reflect your brand.
Connecting the dots
There is a whole pathway from brand strategy to when you can finally piece together your social media content strategy. That's why starting with a social media presence causes you to skip out on essential building blocks of a great brand strategy. It's not just your social media strategy that falls into place, but other business goals as well. For instance, your brand mission can influence your company culture as well, when you do expand your team.
Creating your brand strategy is an important branding exercise that sets the tone and mood of every marketing effort that is to follow in making your brand memorable.
