Without a brand strategy, your message may as well be stuck in a bottle and lost at sea.

If you don’t understand what you're saying, how will someone else?

Unless you've spent the time honing your own brand strategy, it's likely your messaging isn't making an impact on your audience.

Without a brand strategy to guide you, your messaging, given enough time, will become vague and confusing. This is dangerous, because disjointed messaging makes your brand look sloppy, and sends mixed signals to your audience regarding who you are, and what you're trying to do.

Not to mention, if the way you portray your own brand doesn’t land right, you won’t connect with the kind of customers you’re trying to reach. Eventually, the disinterest will cause stress, making you lose sight of your goals, creating a negatively compounding effect on your marketing efforts that your audience will notice—Even if you don’t.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t really matter how good you are at your craft if you can’t sell it to people. You can only sell your product to people if they can find you—and even if they can—they need to click with your messaging, and understand what you're trying to say before they take any action.

Building a brand without considering its strategy first basically ensures your marketing efforts will fall flat. What’s the point in spending money on ads, or investing time in marketing your business on social media if the things your saying aren't getting any traction?

So, before you spend any more time crafting messages and materials for an audience that doesn't exist, ask yourself...

• What does your brand believe in?
• What is it trying to do?
• Where does it want to be?

Questions like these are essential steps in determining your brand strategy, and by extension, the way you communicate with your audience.

When you understand who you are, and what you're trying to accomplish, you'll develop a better understanding of your customers' desires. It's only through this act of self-discovery that you can begin to tailor messages that resonate with your audience.

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If your brand's positioning is unclear, your messaging will never stick.

Do you know who your audience is?

Ok, so I’m not going to name names or anything here, but let me just talk for a minute about a brand my wife and I came across a few days ago that’s totally on point with what I’m talking about here.

The restaurant was labeling itself as a fancy French dining establishment, and on first appearances, it totally fit the bill: An intimate interior, dimly lit with nicely set tables… It was clear they invested heavily in interior design. But something was off.

To start things off, the logo was bland and uninspired. That was the first clue. Then there was the typography, which was ALL over the place. The website had no clear form or focus, other than a bunch of sporadically aligned buttons that were trying their darndest to make me do something, anything. Huh.

Upon closer inspection, the menu was littered with… ‘erotic’ drink names, and that’s putting it mildly. Printed on desktop printer paper with a large QR code, this wasn’t presenting the kind of experience that they were going for.

But the icing on the cake was the restaurant’s offering itself. Though it labeled itself as a fancy French restaurant with a French name, there wasn’t a single french item on the menu. This was… interesting. We had to explore deeper.

Our search took us into the Google reviews, where we found how people truly felt about the way the brand positioned itself, and what their customers ended up getting. And they weren’t happy.

You see this kind of situation a lot. And it’s not that the brand was doing everything wrong, it’s just that they had no clear focus. No brand strategy.

They were attracting customers expecting a ‘fine dining experience’ and giving them something more akin to a nightclub vibe, and it just wasn’t resonating with their audience.

If they had invested in a foundational brand strategy from the beginning, they could focus their efforts on pleasing ONE kind of customer, instead of alienating both audiences.

They didn't understand WHO they were, so their customers had no idea what they were getting when they chose to eat at their establishment. Ultimately, this created a sense of distrust and disappointment in their audience that could've been rectified with an appropriate brand strategy.

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Magical things happen when you actually invest in your brand’s strategy.

Before you get too far ahead of yourself, think about what your brand is saying.

Creating a custom brand strategy that identifies the goals of your brand and tailors its approach to connect with the kind of customers you want to reach is key to the success of your business, long-term.

You need to position yourself as the ‘go-to’ for your ideal customer—And before you do that, you need to pinpoint WHO that customer is.

When you’ve nailed down the right brand strategy for your business, you’re going to see some crazy compounding effects:

• You’ll feel more confident, which will allow you to speak with more authority,
• Which means people will actually engage with your messaging,
• Which means, people will be curious about you, and want to try what you have to offer,
• Which means, you won’t waste limited time and money thinking of new marketing strategies that don’t work, because you already have an interested audience,
• Which means, your brand will be more cohesive, which will make your customers trust you more, and keep them coming back long-term

So, if you like customers, feeling good about your brand, and NOT wasting your time marketing messages that no one cares about, creating a custom brand strategy might be worth your consideration.

Schedule a strategy session with us here, and we can talk about crafting a brand strategy that will amplify the way you communicate with your audience.