A strong brand helps to sell your message and benefits for you. As long as any new products and services you introduce are up to the standard of your existing offerings, it becomes a great deal easier to launch new branded lines. The brand is your ambassador and advocate, attracting customers and reassuring them. At the same time, it will help to bring in a flow of new customers.

You can think of your brand strategy as a 360-degree business blueprint. Ideally, your brand strategy outlines the key elements that make your brand unique, your mission and goals, and how you’ll deliver on them.

A strong brand strategy is meticulously crafted, taking into account all aspects of your market, niche, product or service offerings, customers, and competitors.

This should all be rooted in as much data as you can get your paws on.

In the beginning, you’ll need to take some leaps of faith – this is unavoidable when you’re starting from scratch. But with each new visitor, follower, and customer you get, there will be more glorious data to create meaningful strategies that actually translate into results.

While developing a brand strategy following are the key elements that must be kept in mind:

• Brand Objective (Your vision, mission and purpose)
• Target audience (Who is your target audience? What are their interests. Needs? passion?)
• Brand positioning (What does it take for you to be a big deal in your audience’s life?)
• Brand identity (What people see when they interact with your brand i.e, your visual identity, logos, images as well as your tone and style)
• Marketing strategy (How are you going to build and nurture your customer relationships?)

There are generally three phases for the brand strategy process:

1. Plan: This is the intel phase. Before we start your brand-building strategies, we research to make sure you have a solid handle on the market, your specific niche, your competitors, and the roots for your marketing strategy.
2. Build: Once we have a basic plan in place, we dive into those brand-building steps. We create your brand identity, including your logo, color palette, and other visuals. Then, we create your website, social channels, and other media through which you’ll execute your brand strategy plan.

Execute: Marketing is the fuel for your brand engine. We launch your brand and fully utilize all the messaging strategies we planned and marketing channels we built.

Registration is not essential. But it will help in any future dispute if your trade mark is registered with the Trade Marks Registry. To register, your mark must be “distinctive in relation to the goods for which registration is sought” and “not deceptive or contrary to law or morality”. You will need to check that no-one else has already registered the same mark or something very similar.