Who your brand is and how your brand is perceived are two entirely different things. Some brands struggle with their core identity, unable to keep up with fast-paced markets. Other brands struggle to effectively communicate who they are in the market, so they get lost in the sea of competitors. The majority of brands struggle with both. It’s no surprise that recent Gartner data found that 84% of surveyed business leaders believe their identity needs an overhaul if they want to achieve their five-year goals. Clearly, this problem is pervasive. But how do you build a strong brand to become more competitive? You need to master two key elements.
The Keys to Build a Strong Brand
It doesn’t matter how funny your brand’s social accounts are. It doesn’t matter how pretty your website is. A winning brand is really built on two key elements:
- Clarity about who you are and what you believe.
- Consistency in how you talk about who you are and what you believe.
Although you brand can and will evolve over time, and everything from positioning to messaging to brand colors may change, every channel and touchpoint should be aligned to communicate your brand—and reinforce that brand story at every touchpoint.
Businesses that can effectively communicate how their brand is evolving are 39% more likely to exceed their revenue goals. —Gartner Research
However, gaining clarity and maintaining consistency can be sabotaged in many ways. Let’s talk about some of the biggest challenges you might fact, as well as our fixes to help you strengthen your brand.
How to Get Clarity
It’s surprising how many brands think they have clarity, but if you ask 10 different employees about who the brand is, they’ll give you 10 different answers. There are many reasons this happens.
- Rapid growth or scaling means brands lose sight of their original mission or values.
- Brands don’t have a properly documented Brand Heart to act as a North Star and guide decision-making.
- Brands may make quick and hasty changes to messaging (in an attempt to keep up with a quick-moving market) that takes them away from their defined values.
- Internal misalignment on brand values or directions can create siloes or breaks in the communication chain.
We find that when a client is struggling with brand clarity, they are almost always dealing with at least two of these issues.
58% of brand leaders admit they’re facing internal gaps in alignment. —Gartner Research
The fix: Realign your brand by completing a Brand Heart exercise to identify your purpose, vision, mission, and values. Use the free template from our Brand Strategy Toolkit to get yours on paper, then share with all stakeholder to ensure everyone is aligned to your vision.
How to Get Consistency
Although it requires consensus from many stakeholders, clarity is the easiest aspect of branding. Consistency is incredibly difficult to maintain at every level—for small and big reasons.
- Brands have incomplete brand identities that don’t support all types of content creation (e.g., motion graphics or interactive content).
- Brands have outdated or inaccessible guidelines that make it difficult for different content creators to understand the brand.
- Brands don’t have the workflow or infrastructure for a proper review chain.
- Creators are given too much creative liberty, which results in off-brand content.
The Fix: To achieve consistency, you need both the tools and infrastructure to apply the brand well.
First, ensure you have a complete and cohesive brand identity that reflects your current brand in voice, visuals, and personality.
Next, build easy-to-follow guidelines that include real-world applications and examples across channels.
Finally, create a checklist to ensure all content is on brand. If you don’t have the team or bandwidth to assign someone to sign off on all content, a simple checklist will empower creators to stay on brand without oversight.
Remember: Your job is to ensure everyone is telling the same story about the same brand.
How to Win Through Brand-Building
It’s easy to talk about clarity and consistency, but effectively communicating these elements through your content journey requires attention in every aspect of your marketing.
- Make your differentiators clear. Brainstorm ideas around your selling points, make that messaging pervasive throughout your site, and equip your sales team with the right sales enablement content to highlight those differentiators.
- Build a seamless brand experience. One of the biggest mistakes in marketing is telling an inconsistent story between marketing and sales. Optimize your journey to blend emotion and logic, and find out how to bridge the gap between marketing and sales.
- Streamline, streamline, streamline. If you want to create quality content at scale—and ensure clarity and consistency—you need a strong production infrastructure and workflow to facilitate it. Can you create a better content review system? Can your team use AI and templates to reduce manual tasks? Can content writing and design happen concurrently? See our guide to optimize your production process for more tips on working smarter.
Most importantly, stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices to build a strong brand. (Start by subscribing to our Best Story Wins podcast to find out how industry leaders are winning hearts, minds, and market share.)
That said, we know that brand-building is an ever-evolving practice, and it requires a lot of moving parts. If you need strategy or production support, find out more about how we can help.
