A well-defined brand strategy roadmap is essential for navigating today’s dynamic business landscape. It outlines a clear path to establish, communicate, and strengthen brand identity, ensuring alignment with business goals and market expectations.
A strategic roadmap provides a structured approach to building brand value, fostering customer loyalty, and enhancing competitive advantage.
In this blog, we’ll walk through the essential steps in creating a brand strategy roadmap, from defining key elements to understanding the step-wise process. By following these guidelines, your brand can achieve sustainable success and resonate effectively with its target audience.
If you’re looking for professional guidance on creating a strategy roadmap for your brand, I’ve worked on thousands of campaigns and can help you build a successful strategy. Schedule a discovery call with me today.
TL;DR – How to Create a Brand Strategy Roadmap
In this guide, I will help you map out a cohesive and unified brand strategy.
Too long to read right now?
Here’s a sneak peek:
- Set up your brand foundations
- Define your audience
- Clarify your market position
- Identify your brand strategy
- Shape your messaging
- Design a brand awareness campaign
For a complete discussion on each step of this process, keep reading.
What is Brand Strategy?
Brand strategy is the master plan that companies use to create and establish their brand identity.
Think of it as a road map that guides every team member, employee, and stakeholder on their role in making your brand memorable to your customers.
Developing a brand strategy ensures that all branding elements (from design to brand messaging) are consistent and reinforce a narrative you want your audience to receive.
Also, you need the expertise of a branding strategist to bring your vision to life.
Types of Branding Strategies
There are four main types of branding strategies.
You may use more than one, depending on the range of your services or the nature of your business.
These are:
1. Corporate Branding
This involves marketing a company in a way that establishes its market position and uses corporate messaging to communicate the unique attributes that make it favorable to its customers.
Companies that have mastered corporate branding are easily recognizable and memorable. Their audience knows precisely what they’re about and understands their core values.
For instance, Coca-Cola has successfully marketed itself as synonymous with happiness and enjoying life. Its marketing campaigns, such as “Open Happiness,” were specifically crafted to achieve this.
2. Personal Branding
Common among celebrities and icons, this strategy involves building a brand around a person by highlighting what makes them unique, such as their opinions, skills, talents, or accomplishments.
Think about some of the most famous people today, like Lionel Messi, Elon Musk, and even the Kardashians.
They all portray unique narratives about who they are. Because of this, people have expectations about their behavior, attitudes, and associations.
3. Product Branding
This strategy uses product messaging to communicate the benefits, features, and use cases of certain products.
Companies that leverage compelling product branding have products whose popularity propels the company forward.
A good example of this is the iPhone. When launched in 2007, it was marketed as the product that reinvented the phone. Today, it remains a standard bearer for Apple.
4. Service Branding
Service branding highlights a company’s services and their value to customers.
Service-oriented companies, like travel agencies and construction firms, rely on this strategy to communicate what sets them apart from their competition and why they deserve their customers’ trust.
What is a Brand Strategy Roadmap?
A brand strategy roadmap is a master plan for how to build, nurture, and strengthen a brand.
It lays out key elements that define who you are and how you communicate your value to your customers in a way that ensures consistency and coherence.
This is especially important when marketing across various platforms and involving many moving parts, like your customer service teams and brand ambassadors.
By providing brand direction, a roadmap eliminates unnecessary costs from trial-and-error or decisions that don’t contribute to your brand vision.
Need help with your brand strategy? Let’s connect to discuss how we can work together to develop a results-focused brand direction.
Key Elements of a Brand Strategy Roadmap
These key elements should be present in your brand roadmap:
Vision
What do you want your brand to mean to your customers? That’s your vision. Everything else in your brand strategy is geared toward achieving this.
If you’re planning a significant branding pivot, the aim of your rebranding should be clear in your vision.
For example, when Dunkin’ Donuts shifted to simply being Dunkin’ in 2018, it aimed to transform the brand from being a donuts-first to a beverage-led company that constantly reinvented its menu while remaining the brand people loved.
Purpose
Why do you exist?
Many brands make the mistake of citing their business goals as their purpose.
So, if you’re one of those companies that answer the question by saying something like, “To gain a 50% increase in market share by 2050”, it’s time for a change.
Draw from your brand pillars and history to tell a story about how you began and, more importantly, why consumers should care that you’re in business.
This way, your key messages resonate with your audience.
Brand Idea
Also called a brand’s big idea, this encapsulates the reason/s why customers should support your brand.
You can formulate a brand idea by tying the following areas together:
- The products or services you provide
- Pain points you address
- How your audience views your brand/how you want to change brand perception
- Brand identity
For example, if you’re a company that sells self-care products like shampoo and bath soap to an environmentally aware audience, you’ll want to highlight your company’s efforts toward sustainability and responsible manufacturing.
Core Values
Your brand values keep your strategy aligned with your brand identity.
They dictate how you deliver your brand promise to your customers, guide interactions with your stakeholders, and outline the behaviors that you want your team to display.
What’s more, 64% of consumers say they trust brands that share their values.
Objectives
These are the business goals that you want to achieve with your branding. After all, your message should contribute to your bottom line.
Look at historical data and make projections based on what you can realistically achieve to ensure that your objectives are practical and attainable.
Also, results are easier to gauge when your objectives are measurable. So, include numbers that make your goals clear.
For example: Increase brand engagement by 15% in 6 months.
How to Create a Brand Strategy Roadmap
Ready to build a successful brand?
Follow this guide on how to develop a brand roadmap:
1. Set Up Your Brand Foundations
Solid branding begins with the proper groundwork of strong brand foundations.
These include your mission, vision, core values, and purpose.
Whether you have an in-house marketing team or work with a brand consultant, you need to be deeply involved in this step of the process, as it forms your brand’s DNA.
Everything else that comes after, from planning to marketing execution, is influenced by these pillars.
2. Define Your Audience
Understanding your audience is half the battle won when it comes to branding and messaging.
Their motivations, preferences, and struggles give insights into what will move them to take action, how they feel about your brand, what you need to do to improve that perception, and which solutions they need the most.
Once you have established all that, you can craft a brand story that speaks directly to your customers and encourages them to engage.
3. Clarify Your Market Position
Study the market and competitive landscape to understand where you fit in.
A clear positioning statement that articulates your unique value proposition, market fit, and competitive advantage will tell consumers why they should choose you for the solutions or products they need.
It’s also easier to formulate attainable objectives once you’ve established your market position because it shows you the strategies you need to take and areas in your branding that need work.
4. Identify Your Brand Strategy
Refer to the four types of brand strategy that I mentioned earlier (corporate, personal, product, and service), and choose the one/s that suits your vision and objectives.
Also, you need to derive strategies from your branding objectives.
Make it easier to gauge the effectiveness of your campaign by making each goal specific and enumerating the action plans needed to achieve each goal.
In other words, it should look like this:
Objective → Brand strategy → Action plan or tactics
5. Shape Your Messaging
Strategic messaging is how you communicate your brand story to your target audience. This involves content, customer interactions, and visual language (such as typography and design).
Glean from customer research to create a messaging architecture that ensures consistency across all customer touchpoints and keeps execution aligned regardless of who’s telling your story.
6. Design a Brand Awareness Campaign
Once all your brand elements are in order, it’s time to take your campaign public. Devise a plan to make your audience aware of your brand.
If you’re building a brand from scratch, it could take long before people catch on. On the flip side, if you’re marketing an existing brand, you need only build on or change what people already understand about you.
But don’t assume that marketing an existing brand is any easier!
In fact, it can feel like swimming against the current, especially if the perception you want to change has been cemented for many years.
But stay patient.
All good things take time. Using the following tactics, you can get the word out about your brand:
- Social media campaigns: Nearly every person on the planet is on social media, making it a great platform to target a broad audience.
- Content marketing: Distribute relevant and helpful content that answers your audience’s top questions in a way that demonstrates you as the solution they’re looking for.
And voila! You’ve just built a brand strategy roadmap for your business.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Explore the top questions about brand direction and strategy here:
How Can a Brand Strategy Roadmap Align with Business Goals?
Your branding and messaging should ultimately impact your bottom line.
That’s why developing a brand roadmap that integrates your business goals with your branding strategy is crucial. It ensures that your branding contributes to your corporate objectives.
How Do You Measure the Success of a Brand Strategy Roadmap?
Measure performance indicators aligned with your objectives to gauge whether your roadmap has accomplished your branding goals.
How Often Should a Brand Strategy Roadmap Be Updated?
There are no rules that dictate how often your branding roadmap should be updated.
It’s best to update your roadmap when there’s a need to rebrand or if campaign results show that your strategy needs reworking.
Conclusion
You’re most likely competing with hundreds–maybe even thousands–of other brands in the market. But you can build a name your audience doesn’t just scroll past.
A clear and cohesive brand strategy roadmap can do that for you.
Lay out your brand direction by laying the proper brand foundations, choosing the right brand strategy, and articulating a brand promise with persuasive messaging.
If this sounds more than you can handle, you can hire a pro to get the job done.
I’ve worked with brands that sold over $500M worth of products and services and have more than 20 years of business experience. Join me for a discovery call today!
