Key Elements of a Successful Brand Strategy
Developing a results-driven brand strategy to guide your marketing efforts is no easy feat. You need to incorporate solid public relations, digital marketing, search and social media strategies to serve as the foundation of your brand’s entire strategy.
Brand Strategy Fundamentals
Before you create your strategy, it’s important to understand the key elements of each brand strategy pillar and how to use all of the components together for maximum impact.
- Public Relations: A strong public relations program incorporates reputation management, thought leadership promotion, corporate news and a variety of types of content. Establishing business goals, key performance metrics and clearly defined target audiences is the first step in building your public relations strategy. Once you understand your key audiences, you can identify the reporters, analysts and social influencers that your audiences follow. Create a comprehensive list of your key targets and segment them based on position, outlet and coverage area. You will not pitch all of the influencers on your list for every thought leadership topic or news announcement, but it’s useful to have all of your contacts in one place. Stay up to date on breaking news and emerging trends in your industry. When the topic is relevant and aligned with your business goals and core expertise, reach out to media contacts to offer your key executives as a source.
- Digital Marketing: You can leverage digital marketing tactics to elevate your brand strategy and PR results. A large component of this is content marketing. It’s critical to create ongoing content and resources like white papers, blog posts and thought leadership content that you can use to position your organization as an expert in your field. For example, if you develop a data-driven white paper, make it downloadable on your website and capture visitor contact information to build out your email marketing and prospect lists. You can promote the white paper through digital marketing techniques such as pay-per-click campaigns and remarketing ads.
- Search Engine Optimization: In addition to digital marketing initiatives, search engine optimization (SEO) is also an important part of your brand strategy. Strong SEO strategies depend on frequent and high quality content, positioning you as an authority to leading search engines like Google. PR placements can also improve your SEO results by including back links to your website that helps raise search visibility. When you rank higher on search results, it makes it easier for qualified visitors to find your website.
- Social Media: Social media is a valuable tool for content promotion, allowing you to share your corporate perspective and engage with influencers and prospects on a more personal level. If you are just getting started with social media, don’t try to be everywhere at once. Focus on two or three of your most important channels and build a robust presence with useful, relevant content and followers. Once you have mastered those, you can expand to additional outlets.
Throughout all of the components of your brand strategy, it’s important to maintain cohesive messaging and a unified brand voice. By developing a holistic approach to strategy development that guides all of your brand efforts, you can engage audiences and drive sales. Learn more about our comprehensive strategy services by calling us at (312) 235-6171.