How Brand Strategy Sessions Help Your Business – Crafting a Battleplan
A strong brand strategy is one of the most important (yet undervalued) tools in your arsenal. While action is important, without effective planning any outcomes are entirely left to chance. If you want to come out on top, that isn’t good enough. Brand strategy sessions focus your efforts and ensure you have a detailed plan for your brand development.
Brand strategy sessions are focused workshops that help you and your team develop a concrete plan to grow your business. This article explores the importance of these sessions, how to get the most out of them and how a battle plan is crucial for success.
Defining Your Brand with Brand Strategy Sessions
The first purpose of brand strategy sessions is definition – and the earlier you have these, the better. Ideally, the very first should be before going to market!
To begin with, brand strategy sessions should focus on defining what the brand is and how it is different. A focus should be on the ideal customer and what your unique value proposition, or selling points, are. Identifying what makes you different at an early stage helps to build a more unique, targeted brand identity. The better the plan, the less time and money you’ll spend on building a matching visual identity.
With an understanding of what makes your product or service different, you should move on to establishing the brand identity and personality. This process is vital if you want to stand out but can be a lot of fun – if you let it!
Your brand identity is what helps you stand out and appear unique. It covers the brand vision, mission, values and character as well as the visual identity like logos, colour scheme and typography. Discovering what makes you unique at an early stage gives you a massive head start when it comes to creating this.
Understanding Your Audience
The next objective of good brand strategy sessions should be to understand – specifically your audience. The better you understand your target audience, the more likely your message will land.
First, build personas or ‘avatars’ for your ideal clients. These should focus on what your ideal client needs, fears and desires. What are their goals and motivations? What challenges do they have and what behaviours do they exhibit? Again, workshops and strategy sessions are ideal places to discuss these ideas creatively.
Established businesses can also use sessions to analyse ongoing patterns of behaviour and preferences. Ignoring the mood of your audience is dangerous and can lead to real problems for a business. Using strategy sessions to analyse current trends and feedback gives valuable insight into what your customers need and how to position your brand.
Crafting Compelling Messaging in Brand Strategy Sessions
Your brand has a story – sharing this effectively has many benefits for your business. From building trust to increasing loyalty, the brand story is a powerful tool. It’s a vehicle to convey your brand’s values, vision, and mission, as well as how you got where you are and where you intend to go.
A compelling narrative engages customers in your brand. Brand strategy sessions help you focus on the important stories to tell and how to show them to your audience.
Key messaging is also developed in strategy sessions. They are great places to test what sounds good and what is failing to land. Develop key messages and taglines in an environment where it’s easy to throw ideas around and get quick feedback.
Remember, effective messaging is what conveys your unique value to your market. If you’re struggling to craft messages that engagingly tell your story, it’s worth the time to workshop ideas to find a voice that tells your story well.
Implementing the Battle Plan – What to do after your Brand Strategy Sessions
It’s all well and good to spend time planning – but if you don’t take action that’s time wasted. When you finish your workshops and strategy sessions, aim for clear objectives, actions and next steps. Think about how you will integrate your brand strategy across your marketing channels. Do they all need to be dealt with at once or can you tackle them one by one?
Consistency is what makes your branding work. Strategy sessions are a great way to spot where the brand is inconsistent and fix the issues before they become major problems. Consistent messaging, visuals, tone and customer interactions help strengthen your brand. Use your strategy sessions to ask how consistent any proposed elements are and ensure they align with the rest of the brand experience.
Strategy sessions should also focus on measuring and evaluating success. Create targets and measurable indicators so you can gauge how successful your efforts are in future sessions. Make targets tangible and use real data to compare your efforts against them.
Remember, if you aren’t measuring the success of your brand strategies, you can’t be sure they are working. Regular strategy sessions can be used to make sure you are on track and make micro-adjustments where necessary. Just remember to give your plans time to work. Constant changes can derail a good plan before it can show results.
Implementation is just as important as strategy. You can’t expect all your plans to work if you never actually do them. Factor this into your planning and work out what implementation looks like. Taking measured, focused action will do more for your brand than winging it.
Conclusion
Brand strategy sessions are an important investment for a growing business. Aiming for sustained growth requires an ongoing strategy to both build the plan and measure your success against. Without these, it’s hard to make the right choices that will result in consistent growth.
Running workshops and strategy sessions also hugely benefits building a unique brand identity. Firstly, ideas flow more easily in a creative environment than sitting behind separate desks with blank notepads. A workshop uncovers more interesting results as your team bounces ideas off one another.
Beyond creativity, brand strategy sessions also aid consistency. A cohesive brand strategy has many benefits; from brand recognition and market share to customer loyalty and referrals. This all starts with thoughtfully implemented planning sessions.
By taking the time to craft your battle plans and build effective strategies, you set yourself up for success. A strong, unique brand is attractive to new customers and works to retain existing ones. It thrives in the face of competition and grows even in challenging times. No general goes into battle without a plan – and you shouldn’t build your brand without one either.
To sum up – brand strategy sessions are your best tool for purposefully growing your brand. Invest in them early and the rewards are great.
Need to start strategising? Book a meeting below to discuss how brand strategy sessions can accelerate your growth.
