What is Brand Marketing?
Discover how brand marketing helps businesses build brand equity and promote their product lines, while learning the steps to create a brand marketing strategy for your business.
Brand marketing involves a business promoting brand awareness through various marketing efforts. While well-known brands like Nike, McDonald's, and Apple have been deeply ingrained in the cultural landscape, many other brands work hard behind the scenes to reach similar levels of recognition among consumers. Brand marketing helps a business expand its following within its target market and build brand loyalty.
Understand what brand marketing is and how to develop your own brand marketing strategy.
What is Brand Marketing? Brand Marketing Definition
Brand marketing focuses on promoting a company's overall brand rather than emphasizing individual products or services. This approach includes creating marketing collateral that represents the brand's visual identity, communicates its values, and tells a captivating brand story.
Brand marketing serves several purposes, such as enhancing your brand’s reputation, building brand equity, and earning consumer trust and loyalty. A well-executed brand marketing strategy can also boost consumer engagement with your brand, increase revenue, turn loyal customers into brand ambassadors, and positively impact people's lives.
Branding vs. Marketing
Although brand marketing combines elements of both branding and marketing, these two practices are not the same. Branding is the process of creating a unique identity for a company and shaping the experience consumers have with it. On the other hand, marketing refers to the strategies a company uses to promote its products and services to a specific target audience, guided by insights from market research.
How to Market a Brand: Build Your Brand Marketing Strategy in 5 Steps
A brand marketing strategy is a long-term plan designed to strengthen your brand’s position in the marketplace. It helps organize efforts to educate consumers about your brand. Start by gathering any existing brand assets and marketing collateral, such as design elements, social media content, buyer personas, and ad campaign creatives. Then, follow the steps below to create your brand marketing strategy.
1. Identify Your Brand Marketing Goals
Clearly define what you aim to achieve with your brand marketing efforts. This will guide your tactics and approaches, providing a foundation for measuring progress over time. Make your goals specific, while remaining flexible to adjust them as you refine other aspects of your brand marketing strategy.
Here are some examples of brand marketing goals:
Create marketing content that highlights your brand’s vision and philosophy, driving increased customer engagement with your messaging.
Gain a deeper understanding of your brand’s overall appeal.
Recruit brand ambassadors from your existing customer base who are eager to participate in promotional activities.
▶️ View Course: Learning Personal Branding
2. Define Your Brand Story
A brand story is a clear narrative that explains a brand’s origin, mission, purpose, and its role in the lives of customers. A compelling brand story should resonate with customers, allowing them to relate to the brand or aspire to what it represents. Since people connect emotionally with well-crafted stories, having a coherent brand story can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your brand marketing.
To define your brand story, start by reviewing every element that forms your brand’s identity, from the visual and linguistic aspects customers first encounter to the values and philosophy that support these elements. Then, answer the following questions to bring your brand story to life:
How did this brand start?
What events led to its creation?
What inspired you to create it?
What problems do customers face that your brand solves?
What desires do customers have that your brand fulfills?
What ideas and principles influenced the brand’s design?
How is each product and service developed?
After gathering this information, craft a concise and coherent brand story. Consider creating multiple versions of your brand story: a short one that can be shared quickly, such as in a few seconds or as a social media profile intro, and a longer version for your website or other marketing channels.
Your brand story can become the foundation for creating brand marketing collateral.
▶️ View Course: Accelerating Your Career with Personal Branding
3. Determine Your Brand Marketing Tactics
Review your market research, brand marketing goals, and brand story to identify the specific tactics you’ll use to market your brand. Answer the following questions to define your approach, and be prepared to explain why you’ve chosen each tactic and how it will help you achieve your brand marketing goals:
Which marketing channels will you use to establish and strengthen your brand presence?
How can you integrate paid ad campaigns and organic content to effectively tell your brand’s story and expand its reach?
How will you work with social media influencers and leverage their relationships with their audiences to reach new niche markets?
What affiliate marketing or referral programs can you implement to turn loyal customers into brand ambassadors?
▶️ View Course: Brand and Marketing Integration
4. Develop Brand Marketing Collateral
In this step, your goal is to create brand marketing collateral that effectively communicates your brand’s values, mission, visual identity, and story across all marketing channels. Brand collateral can include:
Email campaigns and sequences
Website copy, blog articles, or other types of content
Social media posts
Videos
Digital or print ad creatives
Business cards and other print materials
▶️ View Course: Advanced Branding
5. Measure Your Success
To evaluate the effectiveness of your brand marketing efforts, review your goals and tactics and choose the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll use to measure success. This helps identify what works well and where adjustments are needed. KPIs could include metrics like website visitor numbers over a specific period or the performance of individual pieces of branded content.
Once you’ve identified the KPIs, set up analytics tools on each marketing channel to track them. Create calendar reminders to regularly review the data and refine your strategy as needed.
Brand Marketing Key Takeaways and Best Practices
Marketing your brand as a whole can enhance its reputation, drive revenue growth, and foster customer loyalty. Achieving long-term results requires setting clear goals and maintaining consistency in your efforts. Here are some best practices to guide you:
Monitor Competitors: Continuously observe your competition's brand marketing tactics to identify opportunities for differentiation and to help your brand stand out.
Stay Trend-Aware: Keep an eye on emerging trends in brand marketing, such as using videos to share your brand story, employing omnichannel marketing approaches, enhancing content marketing, and collaborating with influencers to tap into new markets.
Maintain Brand Consistency: Ensure that your brand assets (such as your name, logo, fonts, and tone of voice) are consistently applied across paid ad campaigns and organic content to reinforce your identity.
Regularly Update Your Strategy: Periodically revisit your brand marketing strategy to incorporate new products or services and refine your tactics for improved outcomes.
🎧 Listen to the audio summary of Building a StoryBrand
