Without a brand strategy, your marketing is just beating a dead horse.

If you don’t even understand your own brand, how will someone else?

Without a brand strategy, you’ll notice that your marketing efforts are sporadic, lack cohesion, and don’t follow any set pattern. This is dangerous, because it makes your brand look sloppy, and sends mixed signals to your audience. If you don’t have a solid identity that people understand, they’re going to create one for you—And you probably won’t like it!

If your messaging doesn’t land right, you won’t resonate with the kind of customers you’re trying to reach. So it doesn’t really matter how much money you dump into ads, or how much time you waste on social media putting content out. If it doesn’t have a solid foundation, it just won’t have the same effect, and it becomes really costly to frankenstein a brand over time.

To top it off, you’ll start to lose sight of your goals over time, 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 if people can find you—and even if they can—they need to click with your messaging before they take any action.

Building a brand without considering its strategy is like building a house on sand. What’s the point in spending money on ads, or investing time in marketing your business on social media if it’s not getting any traction?

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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.

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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 resonate 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 interest 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 some ways we can hone in on a brand strategy that works for you.