We love a brand strategy document. It’s your go-to guide and reliable roadmap for your brand, a.k.a. the Holy Grail of documents. We’re massive advocates for how it can help you build an aligned brand that can grow, scale and achieve your wildest creative business dreams.
Your brand strategy is more than just a static document. It’s a living, breathing, collaborative guide that changes over time as your business does.
But creating your brand strategy document is just step one. From there, it’s time to put all that magic into action. To do that, we’re here to tell you 20 tried and tested ways that creatives can make damn good use of their brand strategy.
Your brand strategy includes all the things that make up your brand - your vision, mission, values, people, personality and more. You can use these elements to ensure that you’re making the best decisions in your business that align with your brand.
There is so much information in your brand strategy that will help you write targeted, intentional, powerful copy that communicates your key brand messages. For example, you can use the information about your clients to write copy that’s going to speak directly to them, and you can use your voice guidelines to say it in the perfect tone for your brand.
There are heaps of different ways to market your business, from social media, email and influencer marketing to in-person print marketing. Your brand strategy can guide you to the most aligned and impactful option for you based on what your brand is all about, the people you want to reach and the message you want to get across.
If you know the key messages you want to communicate and everything about the people you want to communicate them to, then it’s going to be a heck of a lot easier to create content. No more coming up blank as you try to come up with something to post - instead, you’ll know exactly what to say, the pillars you want on your profiles, and the best way to share your message with the people you want to attract.
Brand strategy is most commonly associated with visual identity, which includes things like your logo design, colours and fonts. Through your strategy, you’ll understand the personality and vibe of your brand, and will be able to choose the best visual elements to communicate all of that to your ideal people. Your visual identity will also last that much longer, because all those elements have been created intentionally and align with your overall brand strategy.
When you know your mission, the people you’re trying to help, the problems they have, the things they’re looking for and the things they want, then you’ll know the best products and services to create for them. You can make informed decisions about how to price and position those products and services so that they appeal to your dream people.
The information in your brand strategy can be used to create freebies, opt-ins or downloads that will help solve a problem for your people, communicate more about your brand, and lead them to your other products or services.
Your customer experience is a super important part of your brand - after all, it’s the journey they go on with you on the way to becoming paying customers! A brand strategy will guide the decisions you make about what your process looks like, how you’ll take people along that journey, and how to make sure they feel exactly the way you want them to at each point along the way.
Say goodbye to shiny object syndrome, because your brand strategy is your roadmap from where you are now to where you want to be in the future, whether that’s 6 months, a year, or more. When you know where you’re trying to get to and by when, you can prioritise and focus on the projects that are going to get you there.
Of course, you can only prioritise your projects once you’ve set those goals you’re working towards. For example, your goal might be to get into certain magazines that appeal to your ideal audience or to position your brand in a particular way for people to see who you are. Use your brand strategy to choose goals that will take you in exactly the direction you want to go.
There are all kinds of reasons why you might need somebody to know what your brand is all about, such as pitching for projects, applying for funding, or getting into markets and exhibitions. Your brand strategy can be an amazingly helpful and ready-to-go tool for showing someone how awesome your brand is and telling them all about it.
There’ll be times in your business when you want to promote something, like a new product, service, course or resource. Having a solid brand strategy in place means that creating advertising campaigns, videos, graphics or other promotional material will be that much easier because the messaging and audience information is all right there ready to guide you.
This relates mostly to service-based businesses, but running your potential clients through your strategy to see if they fit the attributes of your ideal client allows you to choose more aligned clients. It’s up to you to decide whether you’ll still take them on even if they’re not an ideal client, but you’ll have a better understanding of the choices you’re making about who your clients are.
Similarly to your customer experience, your brand strategy can guide the processes, systems and operations in your business. For example, to structure the experience of booking into your services, you can use your strategy to understand who those people are, where they’re coming from, and why they’re booking in with you. That way, you can create a booking experience that aligns with them, speaks exactly to their needs, and makes them feel just the way you want them to.
When outsourcing work, you want to make sure that the end result is aligned and on-brand. If you need to hire contractors or consultants, you can give them your brand strategy as a guide to make sure that anything they create fits perfectly with the rest of your brand.
Just like with contractors, you can use your brand strategy to hire people. There are two ways you can go about this - either showing potential hires your strategy so that they understand what your business is all about or running these people through a checklist of your strategy, similarly to what we mentioned about choosing clients. If you look at your brand’s values, vision and personality, you can see whether someone is going to be a great fit or not.
There’ll always be things that you’re interested in investing in for your business - courses, equipment, software, support and more. Rather than splashing your cash on everything, you can make informed decisions about which investments to prioritise based on your goals, the projects you’re working on, the people you’re trying to attract, and the messages you want to communicate.
It’s not just about money - your time is precious too! If you’re deciding on events or opportunities to take up, then you can use your strategy to decide what’s going to be the best fit and have the most benefit for your brand. Make sure that you spend your time on opportunities that are aligned with your values, attract the right people, show your brand in the best way possible, and help you work towards your vision and goals.
Ultimately, your brand is nurturing people towards buying and engaging with your services or products. This process is called a marketing funnel and your brand strategy can help you understand the best way to design this.
For example, people might find you on Instagram, be sent to your email newsletter where they can download a freebie, and on the back of that freebie is a call to action to download your product. From there, you can nurture them in a product sequence and encourage them to enrol in your 1:1 services, and the end result is an amazing new client or customer!
Instead of comparing yourself to what anybody else is doing to decide whether you’re successful or not, you can set out your own goals and milestones in your brand strategy. Then when you look back at your strategy, you can measure your success based on your own progress and development towards the goals you want to achieve.
As a creative, there are so many practical, tangible and actionable things that your brand strategy can do to make a difference in your business. We can’t wait to see you putting those powerful documents to use to move your business forward, achieve your goals, and build the business and life you’ve always dreamed of!
Ready to have this super handy document to make all the strategic decisions we’ve talked about and more? Then we’ve got a little something with your name on it - Map Your Brand Magic. We’ll workshop the whole process of creating a brand strategy together so that you can set yourself up for success and share your wonderful, unique brand magic with the world. If that sounds pretty darn amazing to you, then click here to enrol and we’ll see you soon!
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