The Complete Guide to Creating a Brand Marketing Strategy in 2024

Election night is chaos. Tensions are high, emotions run wild, and news anchors fill every second with speculation and analysis. Then suddenly—silence. No breaking news. No commentary. Just the quiet, steady sound of rain falling on leaves.

That was Calm’s move—30 seconds of pure, uninterrupted calm during one of the most intense nights on television. While everyone else fought for attention, the meditation app simply offered a breath. And in doing so, it became the brand everyone remembered.

This is what brand marketing is all about: creating moments that stick. Selling your products is one thing. But making people feel connected to your brand? That’s the real game-changer. In this guide, we’ll explore how to craft a brand marketing strategy that keeps your brand top of mind and leaves a lasting impression when it matters most. Ready to make your mark? Let’s get started.

Brand Strategy vs. Marketing Strategy for a Brand: Know the Difference

A brand strategy is a well-defined plan outlining how to present your brand to the world. It involves defining what your brand stands for, how to position it, and how it should be visually represented. Ultimately, a brand strategy helps to differentiate yourself from the competition and establish your name in the industry. 

As such, a brand strategy is a long-term, ongoing plan that will consistently be a part of all your brand communications and actions. It plays a vital role in every other initiative taken on behalf of your brand — from your marketing campaigns to your partnerships. LEGO’s brand strategy is focused on creativity and play, which are visible in their social media efforts. They regularly create playful and fun content that resonates with the target audience and helps to establish the brand’s distinct character.

POV: waiting for the humans to tell you how amazing you are on International Cat Day.
Comment section now open for catpliments. 🐈‍⬛

Vacuum cleaner not included.
Hat not included. pic.twitter.com/3SMMHO4VSm

— LEGO (@LEGO_Group) August 8, 2024

Meanwhile, a marketing strategy is a plan that defines how to promote specific products or services. It’s mostly a short-term undertaking that goes on for a pre-determined time period, often for a specific campaign. Your marketing strategy should align with your overall brand strategy, consistently following guidelines for communications, design, and brand persona. 

In the LEGO example above, the marketing strategy is the process of using social media content to promote specific products for International Cat Day. However, they also closely incorporate their brand strategy into these marketing efforts, using a fun and playful voice to write an engaging caption that stays true to their brand identity.

Benefits of Having a Brand Marketing Strategy

So what’s the big deal about creating a brand marketing strategy? Here are a few ways that your brand can benefit from having an established brand marketing strategy.

1. Improve Brand Recognition

One of the most direct benefits of a brand marketing strategy is the ability to improve brand recognition. Your strategy would involve crafting a brand identity through colors, themes, and logos that people would instantly associate with your brand. This makes it easier to set your brand apart from the competition and remain top of mind during buying decisions. 

For example, McDonald’s is instantly recognizable through its iconic golden arches. You don’t have to spell out the brand name to know that the following French fries are from McDonald’s.

Source: mcdonalds.com

2. Differentiate Yourself from the Competition

One key benefit of a strong brand marketing strategy is the ability to set yourself apart from the competition. It allows you to showcase how your brand is different from others in the market so you can give customers a reason to choose you. 

Ford Motors uses brand marketing to create a distinct identity that resonates with consumers who value freedom. This differentiates the brand from key competitors like General Motors, whose brand strategy focuses on dependability. You can see Ford’s unique brand identity through various channels where the brand has a presence. The brand’s Instagram bio, for one, explains what they stand for.

Source: instagram.com

In addition, the various types of branded content they share further reaffirm this identity.

3. Establish Credibility

A strong brand marketing strategy helps to establish your brand credibility in the market. It allows you to position your brand as one that customers can trust to provide high-quality products and services. This gives consumers the confidence to choose your products or services over those of your competition.

For example, Microsoft is one of the most trusted brands in the world with a trust score of 1,135,357. In addition to consistently producing reliable tech products that people can count on, the brand has a strong promotion strategy in place to support its brand marketing efforts. Microsoft has been able to establish credibility through positive media coverage in the form of press releases and product reviews.

4. Earn Customer Loyalty

Brand marketing involves building a community around your brand. Combined with high-quality, dependable products, this community will keep customers coming back to you. As such, you can nurture customer loyalty when you strategically market your brand in a way that will form a strong connection with your audience.  

Think of Apple’s loyal community of users who flock to the brand’s stores whenever a new product is launched. Each year as a new iPhone model gets released, Apple stores see hundreds of people lining up to get the latest model.

5. Attract High-Quality Talent

A strong brand attracts strong candidates for job openings. In fact, 84% of organizations believe that having a well-maintained employer brand allows them to hire quality talent. So your brand marketing efforts eventually help you make quality hires, which eventually contribute to your bottom line. 

For example, the brand marketing strategy for Electronic Arts (EA) extends to LinkedIn, where they regularly share content featuring employees and interns. Besides celebrating career milestones for their employees, they have interns providing testimonials about the company’s internship program. This strengthens the company’s employer brand and enables them to attract high-quality talent for their internship program and job openings.

6. Drive Long-Term Business Success

Brand marketing strategies are continuous and long-term, unlike typical marketing campaigns. As a result of this, they can yield greater success in the long run. 

By ensuring better brand recognition and trust, it allows your brand to stay top-of-mind. So when customers are ready to buy, the first brand they’ll think of is you. Consider how people instantly think of Starbucks when it comes to coffee or McDonald’s when it comes to burgers. 

Similarly, your brand marketing strategy enables you to build a loyal community, which contributes to your long-term success. When you have a loyal group of customers, you can entrust this community to advocate for your brand and keep buying from you.

The Impact of Social Media on Brand Marketing

With social media now being a vital part of our everyday lives, there’s no doubt that it will impact brand marketing efforts. Everything from the content you share to the way you interact with audiences will help to reaffirm your brand positioning on social media. 

For starters, many consumers have switched from search engines to social media to search for information. The trend is particularly common among Gen Z and Millennial consumers, with 46% and 35% respectively, preferring social media over traditional search engines. 

When your brand has a strong social media presence coupled with effective brand marketing efforts, you can enhance visibility among relevant social media users. Moreover, 44% of Gen Z discover new brands on social media every day. So focusing your brand marketing strategy on social media is an important part of Gen Z marketing.

The latest social media stats also reveal that consumers want to interact with brands on social media. About 90% of people follow at least one brand on Instagram, with 80% using the platform to research services and products.

With social media giving you the opportunity to accurately represent your brand and interact with your customers, you can create positive experiences that enhance your reputation. Similarly, social media serves as a channel to effectively position your brand to reflect your values and what you stand for. This helps you appeal to consumers whose values align with yours, giving them an even bigger reason to support you.

Key Components of a Successful Brand Marketing Strategy

Successful brand marketing relies on having an established strategy that lays out all the details of your efforts. This starts with the basics, such as who you want to target and how to present your brand. Let’s take a look at the key components of a successful brand marketing strategy. 

1. Understanding Your Target Audience

Regardless of the specific approaches you take, your brand marketing strategy should ultimately resonate with your target audience. You want to make sure that the brand values and identity that you promote in your brand marketing are aligned with the people you want to reach.

Say you want to reach an audience that values sustainability and minimalist lifestyles. You’ll need to position your brand as a leader in sustainable practices with aesthetics that focus on minimalist design. 

This makes it crucial to gain a deeper understanding of your target audience. What do they like and dislike? What are they interested in, and what values do they uphold? These are important questions that will inform the rest of your brand marketing efforts.

You can find your target audience on social media and use various audience insights tools to understand them better. Go beyond basic demographics data and explore key behavioral and personality data to see what makes them tick. This will then help you understand how to best position your brand in a way that resonates with your target audience.

There are various audience research software tools in the market to perform this analysis. Tools like Audiense, for instance, can uncover details about your audience such as their personality, interests, buying mindsets, online habits, and media affinity. It can even analyze the brands and influencers they follow so you can get a better understanding of what appeals to them.

You can use these audience insights to create customer personas and segment your customers based on their shared characteristics. The Audiense platform supports customer segmentation, allowing you to develop unique personas based on factors such as demographics, content consumption, interests, and more.

2. Defining Your Brand Identity (Branding)

Once you have a clear understanding of your target audience, you can get started with your branding efforts. This involves establishing a solid brand identity that will be consistently presented through all your brand communications and marketing efforts. It’s essentially determining who you are as a brand, which will be the foundation for your entire brand marketing efforts.

The following key elements are necessary to define your brand identity:

• Core values, mission, and vision – What does your brand stand for and what beliefs drive your business? What goals do you wish to accomplish as a brand?
• Unique value proposition (UVP) – What sets your brand apart from the competition? What do you offer that no one else offers? How does your product or service solve a unique problem?
• Brand messaging – How will you communicate as a brand to your audience? What language, tone, and phrasing will you use? It’s important to make sure that your brand messaging resonates with the audience you want to reach. 

To learn more about how to define your brand identity, check out our complete branding guide. 

Branding in Marketing

Branding is the process of developing a unique identity to accurately represent your business so that it’s immediately recognizable and distinct from the competition. This identity may include your brand personality, visual identity, values, and messaging that will be associated with your brand.

As such, branding inspires every aspect of your marketing efforts — from your approaches and channels to your messaging and creative. Your brand identity should be seamlessly integrated into your marketing efforts to resonate with the audience and accurately represent your brand. Without branding to direct your marketing efforts, your messaging will fall flat and fail to engage your audience.

Known for her bold and innovative looks, Rihanna has a distinct identity that accurately reflects in the brand identity of her eponymous beauty brand. The artist created Fenty Beauty, with collections that boast “loaded pigments and freestyle formulas,” perfectly representing her unique style. 

This can be seen in the way products and collections are named — “Holidaze Hustle Collection,” “Lil Butta Dropz,” “Match Stix” — reflecting how the singer normally speaks. Similarly, you can see the unique branding in every marketing effort, such as the following Instagram Reel to promote the “Fenty Fresh Market.” 

The Reel features a bodega with various Fenty Beauty products displayed in a colorful setting to accurately represent the brand’s visual identity. It includes a caption that’s written in a language aligned with the brand voice, using words and phrases that the singer is likely to use. 

3. Developing a Comprehensive Marketing Plan

Now that you have your target audience and brand identity in place, it’s time to come up with a comprehensive plan to market your brand. This is the stage where you hash out all the details of your approach and will include the following key steps:

Step 1: Set SMART Goals

Start with a clear idea of the purpose behind your brand marketing strategy. This is necessary to give your strategy more direction and shape different aspects of your branding efforts. What do you wish to accomplish through your brand marketing efforts? Some examples of brand marketing goals include raising brand awareness, improving brand reputation, and boosting customer loyalty.

It’s important to ensure that your goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This will help you identify approaches and metrics that are relevant to meeting those goals. For example, if you’re looking to boost brand reputation, your goal may look something like this:

• 30% growth in brand mentions within six months
• Increased positive sentiment from 50% to 70% within six months

Step 2: Integrate Your Marketing Mix

Your marketing mix includes four main components: product, price, place, and promotion. These four components should be closely integrated into your brand marketing strategy. Here are the basics to consider when integrating your marketing mix into your brand marketing efforts:

• The product you offer should effectively meet the needs of your target audience. It should either solve a unique problem or address a shortage in the market.
• It should be priced at a level that’s accessible and reasonable to your target audience without a negative impact on your bottom line.
• It should be distributed strategically through channels that allow optimum access. Consider omnichannel strategies to make the product accessible to more people.
• It should be promoted through messages that resonate with the audience and channels where your audience is present. 

Step 3: Allocate Budget and Resources Effectively

How much are you willing to spend on your brand marketing strategy? Make sure to have a clear idea of how to allocate your budget so you’re not spending excessively on it. Set a realistic limit on how much you can spend on various aspects of brand marketing, such as branding development and content creation. 

Similarly, decide on how to allocate other resources such as tools and workforce specifically for brand marketing. Will you have your regular marketing team handle it along with their usual responsibilities? This might be too much to handle if you have a small team that’s already working on multiple marketing projects. Consider partnering with agencies offering brand strategy services if needed.

Step 4: Research Your Competition

Competitive research is another vital step in developing your marketing plan. This is when you get a clear understanding of the competitive landscape so you can see how to set your brand apart. What are your competitors doing, and how are they positioning themselves? How can you position your brand in a way that stands out?

It’s important to be strategic with this so you’re focusing your research efforts on key competitors. That way, you won’t get distracted by information about brands that aren’t necessarily a major competition.

“Market research can be helpful to see the trends and what successful competitors are doing. However, you can get bogged down by all the different campaigns and data,”

says Baruch Labunski, CEO at Rank Secure.

“I research my demographic group, the trends they are using, and my top three competitors and end there. That gives me all the info I need without getting mired in an overwhelming amount of information,”

he advises.

You can make use of competitive intelligence tools like SimilarWeb and SpyFu to conduct this research. These will give you a breakdown of your competitors’ marketing mix and understand how they’re promoting their brand online.

4. Building an Online Presence

With consumers using digital sources to discover brands and products, it’s crucial to build an online presence for your brand. This will ensure greater visibility and help to strengthen brand recognition in the long run.

According to GWI research, the most popular way to discover new brands and products is through social media (38%) — mostly through ads, recommendations/comments, and brand pages. It has now surpassed search engines (37%), which once held the top position for brand discovery channels. But they still point to the importance of having a strong brand presence online.

This makes it crucial to focus on boosting your online presence, starting with a professional website. Your website serves as a digital storefront for your brand. It’s where people come to learn more about your brand and services. So it should accurately reflect who you are as a brand — from the colors and design to the copy and fonts.

CLEARSTEM has a clean, soft, and welcoming website that represents the brand’s “clean” identity. It makes use of high-quality visuals and reviews to instantly build trust with visitors. Adding the logos of top publications where they’ve been mentioned further boosts credibility.

Source: clearstem.com

While having a professional website is vital, it’s equally important to focus on search engine optimization (SEO) to boost brand visibility. Otherwise, your beautiful website will see little to no visitors. SEO will help you put your brand in front of people who’ve never even heard of you before. So you can strengthen your brand’s online presence and effectively raise brand awareness.

The optimization process can be time-consuming and complex, requiring thorough research and strategic approaches. It goes beyond conducting keyword research and using the right keywords in your content. Consider working with organic SEO agencies to effectively boost your brand’s online visibility.

Finally, you’ll also want to allocate some of your brand marketing efforts toward social media. Being the top source of brand discovery, social media platforms help you get your brand in front of millions of social media users. You can use it to effectively showcase your brand personality and strengthen your brand’s online presence.

Think of Duolingo’s viral online presence thanks to its creative and hilarious TikTok content reflecting the brand’s personality. With over 13 million TikTok followers, the brand’s strong online presence is the strongest contributor to its brand marketing strategy.

@duolingo

One vital benefit of using social media is that it allows brands and consumers to seamlessly interact with each other. This fosters a stronger bond between you and your audience, helping you build a community around your brand. So you can build a loyal brand following to further strengthen your brand reputation.

5. Content Marketing Strategies

Content is the backbone of an effective brand marketing strategy. In fact, 84% of marketers have been able to generate brand awareness thanks to content marketing. With the right content, you can share information that provides value to your audience. This helps build positive brand association and establishes your brand as an authority in the field.

So it’s crucial to build an effective content marketing strategy with the aim to boost brand awareness and credibility. Check out our detailed content marketing guide to get started. Additionally, get inspiration from some of these branded content examples.

Start with audience research, which is the top factor influencing the success of a content marketing campaign, according to Forbes. When you get a better understanding of your audience, you can figure out how to deliver content that addresses their pain points and through channels and formats that appeal to them.

Your audience research will reveal valuable insights to inform your content marketing strategy. In addition to this, it’s important to keep the following key considerations in mind for content marketing success:

Valuable, Engaging Content

First of all, your content needs to provide value and engage your audience. Whether it solves a problem, helps them learn something, or even entertains them — it has to give them a reason to engage. Here’s a quick look at the content that consumers want to see from brands based on a HubSpot survey.

• Funny content (52%)
• Content showing a brand’s products or services (39%)
• Relatable content (38%)
• Content reflecting brand values 
• Educational or informational content (25%)

Our Place leverages Instagram to regularly share useful recipes, cooking inspiration, and entertaining Reels to engage their community of cooking enthusiasts. They even partner with influential content creators like Radhi Devlukia to share funny and relatable content that would resonate with the brand’s audience.

Brand Storytelling

For your content to leave a lasting impact on your audience, it needs to tell a story in a way that resonates. Storytelling can help you emotionally connect with your audience, enabling them to remember your brand. 

When we say “emotional,” it doesn’t necessarily have to mean tear-jerking content. Even funny content can trigger emotions like joy, amusement, and happiness. That’s why funny content and relatable content rank so high in the HubSpot survey highlighted above. Additionally, you can use storytelling to trigger feelings like pride, excitement, admiration, nostalgia, and romance to connect with the audience.

Chrysler’s “Thanking Our Parents” promo video series is an excellent example of effective brand storytelling. The series features three videos that each speak to different audience segments. The “Boy Mom” video, for instance, creates a feeling of pride in mothers who juggle a lot of responsibilities. Meanwhile, the “Empty Nesters” video triggers excitement in the freedom that comes with finally seeing your kids go off to college.

6. Ensuring Consistency Across All Channels

Once your brand story and purpose have been developed, it’s time to promote it consistently across every single touchpoint and channel. This would involve developing your brand identity and laying out all the details that will define your brand including everything from its tone of voice and messaging to its overall look and feel. Based on this, you can then come up with marketing messages and assets that truly align with your brand. 

This is important so you can have a cohesive messaging and visual identity to use consistently in your brand marketing efforts. The goal is to ensure that every message and every marketing asset you share adds to your brand and strengthens brand association. In other words, you want to make sure that people can associate your brand with specific messages and branding elements.

You’ll need to use your branding across your brand’s website, landing pages, product pages, social media channels, storefronts, and packaging. If you’re creating fun visuals with a relatable voice on Instagram but suddenly switching up to a formal and monochromatic identity on your website, it’s going to leave your audience confused. 

Are they interacting with a different brand altogether? Which one should they trust? What is your brand’s real identity?

To avoid this type of confusion, make sure to develop guidelines on how to consistently represent your brand across every channel. This will guide your team on how to create content, design visuals, and interact with your customers in a way that accurately reflects your brand.

Specify the tone, verbiage, phrases, and words you want to use to maintain consistency in your brand messaging. You can also include example sentences and phrasing that you want to emulate. This can then be used by both internal teams and third-party vendors in developing content and messaging that fit your brand’s identity. If necessary, you can even create saved replies that your representatives can reuse and customize to maintain verbal consistency in your brand interactions.

7. Developing Brand Guidelines

In line with the above, you need to develop intricate brand guidelines or branding guides to communicate how your brand should be represented. At the bare minimum, this guide should include the following key details:

• Logo usage
• Color schemes
• Typography
• Tone of voice

As leaders in accessible design tools, Canva also boasts some of the best branding guide examples. They have a comprehensive brand hub that includes guidelines on everything from logo and color to photography and typography. It even includes guidelines for brand voice, motion, and product UI to guide various partners and teams.

Source: canvacreative.team

The best part about these guides is that they come with highly visual examples. Instead of simply writing the instructions, they show what they mean to improve understanding.

Source: canvacreative.team

Source: instagram.com

Clean, sleek, minimal, sophisticated — these are the words that describe memobottle’s brand. And it’s instantly visible through every aspect of their brand’s online presence. Their website, for instance, uses clean visuals with plenty of white space. This aesthetic is consistently visible even on their Instagram Feed, which is filled with clean and minimalist visuals.

Their brand marketing is also consistent in product-specific promos. For instance, the following post promotes an upcoming release and features a clean and sophisticated product shot. It includes a text overlay with the release date and the chemical symbol “Cu” to hint at the material, i.e., copper. memobottle continues to keep it simple even in their caption, which creatively incorporates the chemical symbol and invites the audience to “Cu. Soon.”

 

3. Sharkbanz

Sharkbanz is a brand that sells shark deterrent products. Their brand marketing focuses on promoting their proven technology, positioning themselves as innovators solving a key pain point in the ocean community. 

As such, they focus on creating high-quality content to help build brand trust. They create YouTube videos proving the technology’s effectiveness by showcasing the product in action. Press features and user testimonial videos further help to strengthen trust in the brand.

Source: youtube.com

Based on the insights from your analysis, you can make constant adjustments to your strategy and improve your performance. For instance, if you notice that your entertaining Reels are driving high levels of engagement and positive sentiment, you may want to create more of them. Or if a certain approach seems to have backfired based on the number of negative comments, you’ll want to quickly respond and mitigate the issue before it affects your brand reputation.

Collecting and Utilizing Customer Feedback

Besides the quantitative performance data, it’s also crucial to gather more qualitative context through customer feedback. Make use of social listening tools to collect information from comments and conversations across social media. See what customers are saying about your brand and how they’re responding to your marketing efforts. Use these insights to inform and optimize your approach for better resonance.

Additionally, you can ask your customers directly through surveys and feedback forms. Consider adding these options on your website after certain interactions or displaying them to new visitors. You can even share these surveys and feedback forms to existing customers from your mailing list.

Build a Strong Brand Image with Effective Brand Marketing

A successful brand marketing strategy contributes to long-term business success. With greater brand trust and loyalty, it allows you to drive more sales and strengthen your image. Make the most of our detailed guide to start building your brand marketing strategy in 2024.

About the Author

Jacqueline Zote

Writer

Jacqueline Zote is a freelance writer and content producer. She writes for leading blogs in the digital marketing space. Her areas of expertise include influencer marketing, social media marketing, social media management, and content marketing.