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Strategic Brand Management explained: importance and Steps to Implement

Feb 13, 2023

Find out how your company can make use of Strategic Brand Management to supercharge marketing initiatives, increase sales, and grow.

B2B businesses often associate branding visibility with "best of" awards or appearing in top trade magazines. However, in these times of the overcrowded market, well-educated and empowered buyers, and long sales cycles, B2B companies are looking for new ways to differentiate themselves. The key to standing apart is differentiation by using strategic brand management to do it.

Strategic brand management can create a unified brand story across all points of your customers' journey--which is critical for complex B2B offerings and services. Even in tough economic times there is a need for strategically managed brand management in order to boost your marketing efforts, drive greater revenue, and expand your business.

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What exactly is Strategic Brand Management

Strategic management of your brand is the intentional overseeing of the external and internal brand activities to grow the equity of your brand. Brand equity is the term used to describe a brand's power in relation to its popularity and its perception with the public.

In the book, the marketing specialist Kevin Keller teaches how to make use of strategic brand management in order to build brand equity. Keller lays out the foundation of brand equity that has been used by marketers over time to establish solid brands through shaping the way their customers think and feel about their brands.

Strategic brand management activities are:

  • Responding to and monitoring customer reviews
  • Affiliating your voice, tone, and appearance across your complete online presence
  • Making guidelines for messaging to ensure that consistency in the branding across the company.

Why Strategic Brand Management is Essential

B2B brands must show up regularly across every channel in order to make lasting impressions on potential customers in today's noisy digital world. Strategic branding management plant seeds in every point of contact throughout the customer's experience about what your brand stands for and why they must remember your brand.

Why you require a Brand Strategy

The messages of your brand should be direct to buyers. For example, many B2B companies are creating materials and content for marketing that acknowledge the recession's recent effects and the reductions in staff. Companies that don't keep an an eye on developments in the marketplace are at risk of looking to be a bit slack.

In order to ensure that your company is aligned about the messages your company will send out, you'll require an effective brand strategy. The brand strategy will outline how you'll communicate with your target buyers. Using the brand strategy as their guide, the brand manager oversees and controls the brand's performance expansion, development, and implementation.

  Use these steps for creating an effective brand strategy:  

Step 1: Get Clear on Your Position

The positioning of your brand is about distinguishing it from the competition. Differentiation demonstrates to potential customers the difference between your products and how it can help customers achieve their goals.

Especially in flooded markets like B2B technology Strategic brand management demands constant monitoring of competitors as well as their abilities to keep an advantage in the market. The process is even given its own role as competitive intelligence.

  Second Step: Determine your target audience and market Segments  

Creating customer avatars once while creating your branding strategy won't be enough. It is essential to revisit your customer personas frequently because customers have a tendency to change and evolve. As an example, the way your target audience is using media could change from listening to radio or podcasts over the past few years.

If you don't have the right information about these changes, you could be wasting money on advertisements that don't reach your audience. Management teams for brands stay at the forefront of their customer peopleas and their customers by conducting studies such as Gartner and Forrester, analytics, and the interactions with customers.

  Step 3: Develop Brand Values, Personality, and Tone of Voice Documents  

Mailchimp's new brand is a great illustration of a brand manager listening to their customer and pivoting. Their brand's evolution began simply by changing their way of describing their service, shifting away from "email software" to "marketing platform" and launching the brand in the manner they intended to be thought of, which is a one-stop-shop for small and medium-sized companies.

  step 4: Start Be a part of the process to monitor your brand's reputation.  

Monitoring and influencing public impressions of your brand is called reputation management. Professionals in communication manage their branding's image by monitoring their conversations and responding in a timely manner. The management of reputation is vital as it takes years to build a image, but it takes only a few seconds to destroy it.

A brand reputation management strategy wasn't always necessary for smaller companies, but growing connectivity in online has changed the way that brands manage their reputation. The word of mouth phenomenon spreads like fire, making small businesses in the local area the subject of the national conversation. As a result, companies of all sizes need brand strategies to manage their reputations in case unplanned events that may harm a brand's image.

  5th Step: Establish a Brand Management System  

In many cases, it is referred to as commonly referred to as Digital Asset Management System, it is a Brand Management System is the home base for your campaign components, assets as well as brand guidelines. As a brand manager, you will require a software to assist with your brand control plan and deal with the major changes and challenges facing your organization.

Your brand management system will automate the distribution of brand-approved, consistent content across all the other systems for marketing, ensuring all of your marketing communications are consistent with the brand.

  6. Track and Measure Your Brand Performance  

It is vital to review your company's reputation regularly to assess your overall status with your target audience and to monitor the progress and success of your campaigns. Some companies conduct this by themselves, and other which hire an agency external to them. It will depend on your budget.

A few brand actions are easy to quantify, such as the reach of digital advertising campaigns. It is also possible to conduct feedback surveys or customer focus groups.

  Areas of evaluation include:  

  • Brand positioning: Culture and values both internally and externally.
  • Assets for branding advertising and marketing materials in print and online
  • Customer experiences: how your customers feel about your services and the sales process

B2B Marketing Basics

Customers who are a part of the values you hold are loyal to your brand. Brand storytelling can be used to communicate your values as a business, and then connect with customers who have those values. Your brand will grab people's attention and communicate consistent messages to your customers with a well-crafted and strategically planned branding storytelling.

The story of your brand will serve as an axis for your content, communication, and marketing efforts. Incorporate your story into the guidelines for your brand so that you can keep everyone in the same boat with your messaging. Use your brand story to come up with ideas to create material. Every piece of content you produce should be in line with your brand story.

  Creating Brand Messaging by using Storytelling Guidelines  

What are the elements that make a truly great tale? The essential elements of good storytelling should be infused into your message. There are several marketing gurus available to help you build strong brands but one of the most well-known is the top Wall Street Journal best-seller Building a StoryBrand that provides a tried-and-true framework for crafting an engaging brand story.

By focusing on the components of what make for a compelling story, the framework shows you how to present your brand's story in a way that immediately connects and captivates your customers. No matter which brand messaging framework you choose, the ultimate goal is to streamline your messaging and create brand equity.

  First Step: Design the brand Materials  

Your branding materials should include logos, images, taglines and other graphics that represent the values of your business. Each of these elements influences how your customers perceive your products or brand. When you create a cohesive set of marketing materials that are cohesive, you create a solid distinct, distinctive, and beneficial connection between your brand and the people who will be using it.

  Step 2. Centralize Your Brand Material  

centralize your branding materials in order that your company's creatives are able to have access to them. A good, quality management tool for brands stores all your digital assets in one place, ensuring everyone understands the goals and objectives of the campaign.

Develop a brand guidelines template like an style guideline, which comprises brand terminology that must be avoided or used, how to communicate with your target public through various channels, templates for emails and automated responses, as well as other standard marketing and communication documents. Make your document available through a cloud-based system for reference and distribute it to the team members by email, Slack or Teams.

  3. Create a Customer Journey Map  

Each company should examine their customer's experience through buyer's eyes to understand the experience of their customers so that you can improve it. With a customer journey map, you'll be able to clearly understand the wants and concerns of your potential customers.

By identifying where customers tend to be stalled or blocked in their journey and pinpointing the areas where you could reduce the friction of the purchasing process. If, for instance, you're having difficulty converting the traffic from your website into leads, it's easy to spot this on the diagram of the customer's journey, and use a chatbot to ease the process and create additional leads.

  step 4: Develop a Brand-Worthy Community  

Strategic branding management provides your customers the feeling of connectedness that will create lasting bonds and the feeling of loyalty. Implementing a flexible learning management system

  Check it out in action Utilizing strategic brand management to generate leads for your business  

As an example, Hootsuite's Academy has played an important role in attracting new customers, driving customer growth, and transforming customers into brand advocates through recognition.

The Basics of B2B Strategic Brand Management

Strategic branding management allows you to appear consistently on every medium to leave lasting impressions on prospective customers. This is more critical than ever before in the current oversaturated digital landscape. It will also help you create a unified brand story which helps the audience on their journey to becoming a customer.

Creating online courses is one of the best ways to provide benefits to your clients when they first interact with your company, allowing you to maintain their loyalty and eventually build brand equity. With the right brand management tools and strategy the brand will be able to reinforce the values you represent and how you want to be remembered.

Do you want to begin generating regular good leads for your business?

Plus allows you to transform leads into brand ambassadors by giving high-quality, customized information at each stage of the journey. It's so simple to utilize, you can focus on generating demand and not worry about technologies.