Imagine you could increase your company’s revenue by 120% and sustain that change over 6+ months: That’s what some of our clients have achieved using the strategy we laid out for their brand.
In this article you will learn how Brand Strategy can and will impact you:
- Market Share
- Revenue
- Culture
You will also learn how Strategy impacts Sales, Marketing and Recruiting.
Let’s get started.
Revenue
This is every business owner’s mail goal.
Whether investors are involved or not, all of us care about cashflow. As you know there are several ways of doing that:
- Launching a new product
- Improving retention
- Finding new clients
- Increasing prices
Now, to understand how Brand Strategy can help here you will need to re-program yourself:
Brand is not a Marketing function.
S. Hidalgo
Most business owners think that Brand = Logo, Website, Marketing.
They’re wrong, and here’s a breakdown of why:
- Brand is the MEANING people attach to your company.
- Brand-ing is the discipline of managing that meaning.
- Brand Strategy? The art of creating that meaning.
Brand is basically a spell you put on your audience, powered not by magic but by what my clients call the High Science of Strategy.
And now you will be asking yourself: “How do I create ‘brand’, then?”
A successful Brand Strategy hinges on a few ingredients:
- Market Research
- Differentiation
- Positioning
- Personality
And here is where we finally circle back to revenue.
You see, Market Research is the very foundation of Brand Strategy.
Without knowledge of your market there is no Strategy – and, to be honest, there shouldn’t be any business either.
Market Research allows you to know what your competitors are doing wrong, which thing your audience wants, needs, and may not be getting, as well as what is missing in the market and, going deeper into psychographic data, how your audience thinks and speaks.
Once you gather all this information you’ll be able to introduce any product to the audience that needs it using their language & appealing to their desires.
This is a paradigm shift, because it means you can finally stop marketing to people who may need something similar to what you offer: You’ll market to people who need precisely what you offer. And the outcome of doing this?
More clients, who stay longer.
In layman’s words, more revenue coming in.
Now let’s dive into our second matter.
Market Share
Everyone has the same problem:
There’s always selling the same thing you offer.
More specifically, there are competitors who have been doing it longer and have the social proof you need.
Brand Strategy is here to help you: What you need to take clients away from them is a Differentiator.
I started this article by Market Research because, and I’ll repeat it because it’s vital, it is what lets you discover if there are market gaps and where. And those market gaps are things your competitors can’t or won’t do – in a nutshell, your differentiators.
It’s starting to make sense, right?
If you offer something unique to a market that needs it, what’s going to happen?
You start taking up more market share. Your competitors’ clients come to you because you put the differentiator at the beating heart of your marketing and sales communications… and what makes this even better is that, by definition, a differentiator is something nobody else has. So you can command higher prices.
Now, let’s talk culture.
Culture
That’s me in the picture above, dressed in blue taking a selfie at a company event.
They gathered 700 people from all over Europe and flew them to Barcelona for 3-day party.
This happened because that was the culture of the management leading that company at the time.
They believed in a people-first company where having fun and feeling at home was at the center of life in the company.
And they had just acquired some other companies, so they threw a massive party to welcome the newbies into the culture.
Now, why am I telling you this?
Because Brand Strategy shapes company Culture around you.
In a company, culture starts from the values and the values must come from leadership.
We make this happen thanks to:
- Workshops
- Interviews
- Surveys
And just like Strategy gives you a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) to communicate your company’s difference, so that customers choose you over all other competitors, you will get an Employee Value Proposition (EVP) – in a nutshell, the reason why top talent should dedicate most of their day to your business.
Here’s where it all comes together.
Strategy affects Culture because it allows you to align everyone under a shared Vision.
It gives your workforce the feeling that they matter, that their work is impactful beyond just screens.
And it affects Recruiting because now HR can qualify & disqualify: If you start hiring employees whose values align, they’ll get along better, and if your hires are excited because they share the Vision they read about on your recruitment material, they will work with more passion. And you’ll weed out rotten apples easier.
But there’s more.
Marketing, Sales, HR
Strategy affects Marketing because now there’s no guesswork.
Your marketing team will know who you’re talking to, how to talk to them and why they need you.
This means that:
- Your copy becomes audience-centered
- Your organic content gets shared
- Your ads convert more
- Hiring gets easier
Strategy affects sales because it gives you clear Positioning. Your sales people will know:
- What to say
- How to say it
- Which buttons to push
If you want investors, you’ll have a Positioning Statement that captivates them because it tells them exactly why your company is the right one to invest in and for people to believe it. Here’s the Positioning formula I use with my clients, by the way:
As a bonus, working with agencies and freelancers will become easy because they will get:
- Brand Vocabulary guidelines
- Your Positioning Statement
- Your USP
They will know what and how to communicate just as well as your full-time employees do.
What you just read is an overview.
The final results, if you will.
Brand Strategy is much more, but if you had to summarize it in one sentence, let it be: One of the highest ROI assets you can have in your business.
