It’s critical for every business to spend some time between developing a business strategy and executing a marketing plan. Many people, myself included, call this “Brand Strategy”, but there’s other names for it. The important issue is to find out what makes you truly unique and irreplaceable to your customers, and the only way to really find this out is by having conversations and asking tough questions, both of yourself and your customers.
Here’s why it’s important to have a brand strategy before kicking off your marketing strategy:
1. Without a brand strategy you will have no aligned single “deeper truth” driving your marketing efforts beyond profitability or increasing shareholder value. This encourages short term thinking that diminishes the individuality of your business and makes you generic. The marketing strategy will be based more on the “now” and therefore the brand strategy should be rooted in the “always”.
2. You need a sounding board to validate constantly changing marketing efforts. When developing creative ideas and concepts, how do you validate these? By having a solid brand strategy you can weigh everything you do against that. Is this idea really us? See if it speaks to your brand. It will help you know whether your agency “gets you” and whether your sales teams are all saying the same thing. Put a stake in the ground and live by it.
2. Without a stake in the ground on your brand you are at constant risk of saying the wrong thing and therefore being the wrong thing to your customers, then you’ll need to triage, which is expensive. Do this enough no one will believe you. Choose your story and stick with it for the long run.
3. You need to find your “True North” for your business/brand. Once you understand how to articulate this, it will inspire fantastic creative execution, because everyone on your team will be working towards the same clear goal or destination. It will also make it easier and less costly to engage new team members/agencies, etc. By being able to articulate your unique value and position over and over, it becomes easier and easier to onboard team members and takes less time to get them onboard. Many companies stay with bad agencies simply because the time to onboard a new team is too costly and there never seems to be a good time for it.
What’s your true north?