Corporate Branding: Develop A Strong Branding Strategy

Corporate branding is mostly about creating a story that resonates with the people you aim to target. Transform abstract and intangible concepts into something relatable that aligns with the spirit of your company.

This is not just about the visual representation of the company. You must touch every aspect of the business. The way you handle the customers, the way you shape your company culture, the quality of the products, and how you craft your marketing efforts.

With the help of this guide, we will go through the landscapes of corporate branding. Let’s understand the power corporate branding holds and explore the strategies that ensure that the brand gets attention and has brand loyalty.

What Is Corporate Branding?

Corporate branding is a form of strategy that promotes and contextualizes the brand. It is not just a service or product that you are promoting. Corporate branding includes brand logo, tone, purpose, values, target audience, and market differentiation.

A strong brand knows how to shape public perception and helps you set the difference from your competitors. If you have corporate branding, it can help you grow your company and get you repeat business and brand loyalty.

Corporate Branding Is Important: Why?

Corporate branding conveys and crystallizes your business values and personality When done properly. It extends to almost all aspects of the business, from sales to customer service and marketing. If you have a strong brand identity, it can help you in these areas.

Differentiate Your Brand

In this era where e-commerce has taken a big part of the market, it is natural for consumers to get overwhelmed. A compelling market branding will help you stand out from the lot and poke the audience’s memory when they see something relatable.

Guide Your Decision-Making

A brand’s mission statement should stay at the core whenever you are making any decision to create the company’s framework. This will guide the approach to everything, like company culture, customer service, and communications.

Helps You Connect Better With The Target Audience

Steady brands have a set of values along with a clear purpose. If these are communicated effectively to the audience, they can connect with the audience’s values and needs.

Develop A Strong Corporate Brand

It takes a lot of time to build and execute a brand strategy. However, having one can help you make decisions more efficiently. Here is a process mentioned that can help you build strong business branding.

Identify And Understand Your Audience

Your target audience has different customer personas. They have different characteristics and types yet share the same values as your brand. Identify the customer based on demographics, educational level, profession, income, location, aspirations, personal values, and shopping habits.

Your brand does not have to be for everyone. It should speak only to your target audience and your specific brand values.

For instance, luxury brands should connect with an audience that focuses on lifestyle and not on those who are price-conscious. Trendy brands focus on those who like living in the moment and not those who are practical.

Know Your Competitors

Knowing your competitors is important. It is an important step in understanding how to make your brand different from your competitors. Review the competitor’s position with respect to all the touchpoints, evaluate their tone and voice, and look for real customer opinions.

Look for the following answers when you are conducting the research.

• Who are your main competitors?
• What are they promising their customers?
• Are they successful in delivering this promise?
• How do they communicate with their customers?
• How are the customers receiving them?
• What opportunities do you have to beat them?

Identify Your USP And Value Proposition

According to the CMO of Yami, Joey Ng,

“Find your niche and define in very few words what makes your brand distinctive.”

Finding a niche means knowing what benefits you want to give your customers. And how you can provide it better than your competitors!

Look for the answers to these three questions when you want to find out the brand’s value proposition:

• What benefits will you give your target audience?
• What pain points are you going to address, and how are you going to solve it? How will your product branding improve their situation?
• Why is your product the only solution to their pain point? How are you different than your competitor brands?

Have A Brand Voice

Brand voice is your brand’s personality and how your customers speak of it. Your tone could be anything; it could be motivational, silly, or mysterious, but it should reflect the value and mission of the brand and communicate directly to the customers.

To develop a tone and brand voice, ask yourself the following questions:

• What adjectives describe the personality of the brand?
• You know certain points that you know about your target audience, so which is the best way to communicate with them?
• Which personality will your brand want to copy, whether real or fictional?

Conduct A Brand Audit

A brand audit mainly involves looking closely at your brand’s identity, image, and messaging. Various elements make a brand and an image, including the website, sales materials, and marketing collateral.

Review all those materials that your audience will see, as they will represent your brand persona, purpose, vision, goal, and mission. Then, you can identify the areas for improvement and strengthen them to represent the brand better and present an accurate image.

Develop A Brand Marketing Strategy And Style Guide

Before you get on with the brand marketing strategy, talk with the staff who work at the grassroots level, which would accurately represent the brand’s identity. Review the present material and highlight those areas that need to be changed.

Build a strategy that is going to fix these changes. You must create a style guide that would explain the brand’s purpose, image, and message. You must instruct your employees to represent your brand as well.

When creating marketing and sales details, employees can review the style guide and understand the strategy so they can communicate it to the audience.

Have A Visual Identity

Just like the brand voice influences copywriting, the visual identity influences how the touchpoints and assets look for the brand.

Here are a few tips that you can use to create a visual identity:

• Your visuals should complement your brand values. Think about how you want to represent it. You can choose minimalism or maximalism and form the whole thing around it. If you plan co-branding, ensure the visuals represent both your values.
• Ensure that everything makes sense to your audience. You can also cross-reference the ideas and make them in a way that people from every culture can relate to.
• Various free design tools can help you build a brand identity at a low cost. You can prepare marketing materials and advertising elements even if you are not very good at designing, and that too at a very low cost.

Work With A Corporate Branding Agency

If you are not very comfortable doing it in-house, then you can work with a corporate branding agency. There are multiple benefits that a company can get from a corporate branding agency can provide.

One of the primary advantages of working with an agency is their precision in creating guidelines that keep in mind the uniqueness and goals of the company. They understand that the brand persona is very important and influences the company’s communication process with the audience.

They provide strategic insight and innovative ideas, which is not possible in-house. Branding agencies are ruling the market and changing the marketing and branding landscape.

Read Also:

• Connecting With Your Audience: Psychic Insights In Brand Development
• Mastering Brand Promotion: Strategies, Innovations, and Legal Considerations for Branded Merchandise