What comes to mind when someone mentions Chanel? Is it the willowy models adorned in silks and perfumes? Is it the sense of luxury and beauty? Is it the unobtainability of it all? Or is it some combination of the above?
Chanel is an example of wildly successful brand building; the name alone conjures up feelings of longing for a lifestyle that is both out of reach, yet instantly accessible with the swipe of a card. This wouldn’t be possible without clear brand objectives and excellently executed marketing campaigns.
So, what are brand objectives? Simply put, brand objectives describe what a company hopes to accomplish through branding. In order to create a successful brand, it’s crucial to identify clear brand objectives and map out the strategies necessary to achieve them. What efforts can we make to achieve success with our own brand? In this article we’ll explain exactly how to set up and achieve milestone brand objectives in five steps.
Step 1: Define Your Brand Vision
The foundation of brand building is identifying a clear brand vision. Before any aimless social media ads or website revamps, we first need to understand what our product is, who our customer is, and what kind of company we strive to be.
Clarify Your Vision
The North Face is a great example of a company with a strong brand vision. They are an environmentally conscious sportswear brand, dedicated to shifting consumer fashion towards sustainability and durability. This is of course reflected in every aspect of the brand’s marketing and product design. As a result, customers instinctively trust that the North Face is an ethical company, where every purchase is contributing towards a worthwhile cause.
A brand vision is a focus on the future. This is not just for the sake of strengthening employee engagement and providing internal brand building directions. It’s also a way to differentiate yourself from competitors, build up trust with potential customers, and ultimately drive brand activity.
Alignment with Business Objectives
Make sure to establish a brand vision that’s driven by a tangible product or service that you believe in. Start by asking, what problem am I trying to solve? As you take steps to implement your solution, where does your company want to go? What does it hope to achieve?
For an eyewear brand, it’s ensuring everyone has the right to clear vision. For a game developer, it’s spreading happiness in everyday life. For a social media company, it’s connecting the world through the internet.
Be careful not to make lofty statements that are completely disjointed from your company’s objectives. Ground your brand vision in what makes your product indispensable. Only then can it persuade customers to trust in and engage with your brand.
Step 2: Identify Key Brand Objectives
After identifying a brand vision, what are the concrete steps towards accomplishing it? The first would be setting up brand objectives, or specific goals your company will achieve in a certain time frame.
While a brand vision is the guiding principle for company development, brand objectives guide employees towards creating tangible strategies for improving sales, expanding the customer base, and raising brand awareness.
Set SMART Goals
Try to set up SMART goals. A SMART goal is defined by five criteria: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. These criteria serve as guiding principles when defining objectives for your brand.
Specifically, we want to set up clearly defined and quantifiable objectives that are not only achievable, but also align with the company’s brand vision. A timeline for the completion of the goal is also necessary. Take into account what is realistic, but also be careful to balance long-term development with short-term gains.
Primary Objective
What is your brand’s primary objective? It could be simple, like increase sales by 1 million within a year. Or it could also be less straightforward, such as raise brand awareness and strengthen customer loyalty within the next five years. For a company as global and established as McDonald’s for example, their primary objectives are measured in five, ten-year intervals.
Whether a local brand or a global conglomerate, a company must identify their primary objectives before implementing any kind of brand strategy. They are the basis of every decision that is made towards marketing and business development.
Step 3: Conduct a Brand Audit
Up until now we’ve talked about big picture things. Let’s scale back and consider how to actually reach those brand objectives. In order to do so, you should know the details of your brand inside and out, usually through the form of a brand audit.
What is a Brand Audit?
Simply put, a brand audit is a regular check-up of your brand to see what is doing well, and what needs additional care. Brand audits consist of mainly two components: internal and external. Know what aspect your brand audit will cover before gathering and analyzing data.
The internal part includes taking a close look at your brand values, your culture, and the communication within your company. Is your brand value defined? Is your company’s culture inviting and attractive to potential employees? Are there established avenues of communication between departments in your company?
The external part involves analysis of brand elements outside of your immediate company. Things such as your website, SEO social media, and PR activities. What is your website’s conversion rate? How high is your social media monthly traffic? These are all metrics we can visualize through a brand audit.
Tools and Techniques
There are various tools that are used in performing brand audits, here we’ll separate them into two categories, quantitative and qualitative.
For gathering quantitative data, the importance of Google Analytics cannot be stressed enough. With Google Analytics, conversion rates, bounce rate, and website traffic will tell you clearly how effective your current marketing strategies are. Additionally, if the numbers don’t meet expectations, they provide a clear guide for what to improve in the future.
Surveys, emails, and online polls are methods of gathering qualitative data on customer satisfaction. Customer sentiment is the guiding force of brand building. With it in mind, it’s easier to ensure consistency between all channels of marketing and align products with the target customer needs.
Assess Current Position
Why exactly is a brand audit necessary? It’s a simple principle: before we start solving problems, we need to know what they are.
A brand audit can help us assess your brand’s current position relative to competitors, and identify strengths and weaknesses. If website performance is low, then the solution might be improving SEO. If customers have a hard time understanding your brand, then more targeted social media marketing would be necessary.
With brand objectives looming on the horizon, companies might start throwing solutions at the wall hoping for a positive outcome. This is almost never effective. Understand what metrics are underperforming, then based on brand objectives and company capabilities, formulate marketing strategies accordingly.
Step 4: Develop and Execute a Brand Strategy
With the information we obtain from a brand audit, it’s time to develop a detailed brand strategy. There are a few major components to creating a well thought out marketing strategy.
Identify Brand Objectives
As mentioned earlier, lay out the broad strokes of what you hope to accomplish and the timeline for it. It can be as simple as increase annual sales by 5%. This will inform the details of implementation later on, including budget, marketing channels, and KPIs.
Create a Buyer Persona
Before anything else, identify who your potential customer is. This is the basis to an actionable marketing strategy. This includes knowing their demographics (age, education), psychographics (personality, priorities), lifestyle traits (hobbies, entertainment preferences), and behavior (channel preferences, shopping habits).
Using this information, create a buyer persona, or the image of an ideal customer. For a brand like Dior, their buyer persona might be an affluent woman in her 40s, with ample free time during the day, looking to purchase quality items that indicate luxury.
With a clear buyer persona in mind, make it a priority to tailor your message to their unique demands. This ensures that your marketing campaigns can target potential customers effectively without needlessly wasting time or budget.
Conduct Competitive Analysis
Analyze your competitors using SWOT Analysis in order to better gauge where your company stands in the industry. While you might already know the names of your competitors, that doesn’t mean you know their market share, growth potential, or advantages over your own brand.
Based on a deeper understanding of your competitors, angle your own messaging to stand out from the rest of the bunch. Amplify what makes your brand unique, while also trying to tap into untouched market share.
Develop a Compelling Message
You know who your target customer is, so now the question is, what message should you communicate to them? This message is also your brand story, and it should encapsulate your brand’s vision: What is your brand identity? What problems are you here to solve? What aspects of the customer’s life will you improve?
If your message resonates with the target audience, then you will stand out from the crowd to make a lasting impression. This is how you establish a genuine connection with consumers and build up loyalty in the long run.
In additional to a brand story, an engaging visual identity is oftentimes equally as important when it comes to crafting a convincing message. The shape of your logo, the type of font, and the specific color palette should come together in ways that are not just stimulating to the eye, but also convey a cohesive brand vision. To ensure consistency, this cohesive visual design should extend to all channels of marketing, including websites, social media profiles, and marketing materials.
Choose Marketing Channels
Now that you have identified the objectives, buyer persona, and key messaging for your brand, it’s time to implement your marketing strategy. Do this by selectively utilizing marketing channels in the form of paid, owned, and earned media.
Paid media is any form of advertising you can purchase, including billboards, SEM (search engine marketing), and social media ads. Owned media refers to online channels, such as blogs and websites, and content owned by your brand. Earned media is user-generated content, like shares on social media or posts about your company’s products.
To decide what kind of social media strategy to utilize, consider the product you are selling, as well as your target customer and their media consumption habits. If you’re selling a design related product then visual focused avenues, such as YouTube or Instagram, would be most effective. If you’re targeting younger audiences then TikTok and Reddit might be desirable.
Evaluate Performance
With your marketing strategy in place, it’s time to evaluate its effectiveness. How do you even decide what is an effective strategy and what is a waste of time?
The solution is to set measurable key performance indicators (KPIs) that track the performance of your chosen marketing strategies. Clear indication of your marketing strategy’s metrics such as return on investment (ROI), cost per sale, and customer lifetime value (CLV) is invaluable to diagnosing what you’re doing right and what needs to be improved in terms of marketing strategy. This leads to more optimized and targeted resource allocation.
Step 5: Monitor Progress and Make Adjustments
The market is constantly changing and consumer demand with it. In order to ensure your current marketing strategy is suitable to perform well in industry conditions, it’s important to keep an eye on changing metrics and evolve your strategies accordingly.
Regular Evaluation
After a marketing campaign is put into motion, regular analysis and re-evaluation of the marketing strategy is crucial. Refine your strategy based on quantitative feedback, or devote additional resources to well-performing areas to make sure that your marketing strategy will yield maximum results and achieve brand objectives in time.
Adapt and Refine
While consolidating data is one thing, formulating strategic feedback based on the data is another. Oftentimes brands are confronted with the problem of low return on investment, with no idea how to improve it. If you require similar assistance, contact us at BrandCloud for cohesive support, from data tracking to long term strategy proposals tailored to your brand objectives.
Conclusion
Brand objectives are foundational to developing any type of business strategy, therefore a structured approach towards setting brand objectives will yield the most success.
When it comes to media campaigns or any kind of business strategy, the details hinge on your brand objectives. Understand what your potential customer looks like, what you wish to communicate to them, what channels of communication to utilize. These are all crucial steps towards lifting brand image, improving sales, and solidifying consumer loyalty.
We’re here to help you implement these steps effectively, elevating your brand to new heights.