5 Simple Steps to a Winning Brand Strategy

Published on: 08 September 2021 Last Updated on: 13 January 2025

Perhaps people’s greatest delusion is that a winning brand strategy is all about a stunning logo and a catchline. The truth is that creating a winning strategy is nothing less entailing than growing a child. Just as you would nurture, take care of, and enrich your child, similarly, you have to develop and build every step of your brand strategy.

It requires utmost care, consideration, effort, and planning. Keep reading to learn five simple steps that can help you create a winning strategy. With these, you will soon get your brand on its feet and ready to conquer the world.

A Brand- What it is

One of the essential assets your company will ever own is your brand name. A brand is a name that becomes the identity of your organization. How you market your brand could stand for loyalty, quality, faith, and trust. Your brand is in short, your reputation!

Developing Your Brand Strategy- Make it Simple but Impactful

Branding is a very extensive process and demands careful planning and time. However, many often underestimate the power of a simple approach in building a strategy that is winning and effective. It all depends on strategic approaches and elements. Here is how:

1. Find Your Market Niche

A winning brand strategy is one you develop with a clear idea of your market niche. But finding your niche is not an instantaneous process. You must take time to serve a specific class of audiences with your specialized services. Then you must shortlist where you have performed excellently.

Similarly, with products too, you should first focus on those that best cater to your customers’ needs. This way, you get the best idea of which products have performed optimally, and therein lay your expertise.

The problem with niche-ing down is that many falsely believe that they are under-suing their potentials. But the truth is that when you downsize your niche, you make a strategic and beneficial move in several ways. Here’s how:

You are able to stand apart from the competitors who appeal to the same or general audiences
You get the golden chance of charging premiums upon offering specialized expertise
You minimize wastage of essential resources, including finances
You free up more time, energy, and capacity to create the finest experiences, services, and products for your loyal customers

In the end, the biggest advantage in specifying your niche is that you do not have to scatter and stretch to be the best for everyone. Instead, you only have to use your resources where they’ll yield and achieve the most.

2. Research Extensively

By now, you have surely realized our emphasis on spending time and taking time to build your brand strategy. It is not an instantaneous process: it is a research-based and time-consuming one. The more you spend time researching your brand, the more effective a strategy you will design.

Rather than build your strategy in a bubble, take the time to study your competitors and the other ruling businesses. Take time to observe how your audiences are engaging with them and what professional services branding techniques they’re using.

Next, DO NOT COPY them. Rather, take your learning of the industry and competitor brands to market position your brand. Design compelling ways to engage with your audiences and draw responses actively from them. Draw inspiration and strategic insights and then unleash your own creativity to set yourself a class apart from the crowd.

Come up with products, services, and experiences that you know for sure no other business is offering. And this, you can only deduce and conclude after you have researched thoroughly!

3. Vision and Mission

Remember how we said simplicity can be a vital component in helping you build a winning strategy? We stand by this truth.

Despite your extensive research, there is no certainty that you will manage to come up with something truly one of its kind or unique. If that was possible, there would be endless unique brands around the world today. The fact is that while uniqueness may not come naturally, playing your cards right in the industry can and should.

So even if you have nothing new to offer to the audiences, they’re still several ways in which you can stand out and at the top. Do you know how? With your brand messaging!

By playing this card right, you can make your brand strategy soar to heights of success. You can take the world’s most popular commercial coffee chains for example. Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks have an unbeatable global reputation, despite the fact that they both sell the same products. But why do they stand out so distinctly in the whole world?

Brand messaging my friend, brand messaging. You can make your business stand out by customizing your brand strategy with a winning message. Here’s how to do that:

Include personal vision and mission statements
Reflect your core values in the message
Give a crystal clear description of your unique approach to solving their problem
Attract them by promising exquisite experiences

4. Blogging

Make blogging a firm part of your brand strategy. In an all-digital age, there’s no understating the power and influence of blogs. It has done many established businesses immeasurable good, starting with increased sales and increased online visibility.

Give your business easy identification by producing qualitative, highly informative, and communicative blogs. Let the blogs reflect your company’s unique personality, expertise, and intent in detail. Choose relevant topics and information and make them interesting with images and stats.

5. Be Cohesive

Your social media accounts along with your website are the most accessible representatives of your company. To be a distinguished brand, it is important that you maintain a cohesive voice and visuals. Therefore, for a successful brand strategy, it is important that you unify all your existing media platforms into one.

From Instagram, Facebook, to Twitter, unite all your social media handles into one voice and identity to ensure customers of your reliability and consistency.

Final Thoughts

The success of your company largely depends on the success of your brand strategy. A brand starts with an individual, but it ends with the perception that audiences have of that business. By shaping and putting considerable effort into every aspect of your brand strategy, you will positively impact the response and perception of your audience.

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4 Simple And Cheap Methods To Attract More Customers

Every business’s lifeline is its customer base, which is why big companies allocate a large budget to create strategies to reel in more customers. For a small business like yours, you don’t have to go to such extensive lengths to grow your number of customers. You can start with simple methods and build from there. 4 Strategies To Attract More Customers To Your Business Big giant companies are spending thousands to attract more customers but your budget is small. How you can organize your branding and promotions and going to attract more customers? Every time you do not have to spend thousands if you are going to follow some easy tips you can accomplish your work within a small budget. Here are a few ways you can attract more customers to your small business without breaking the bank. 1. Treat Your Customers Well: Customer satisfaction is vital in every business, which is why you should make sure to treat the few customers you already have with care. Word of mouth is always an excellent method to gain more customers. Let’s say you’re a company like Capstone, and you provide a service that requires you to interact and communicate with your clients. The way you treat them, the tone of your voice, your body language, etc. affect how satisfied they will be by the end of your meeting. If you treat them well, they will be satisfied with your service and are more likely to recommend you to their friends or relatives. If you treat them poorly, they might badmouth you which might cause you to lose potential clients. 2. Create Social Media Accounts: People, when looking for something, usually search for it online first. If you have a social media account, there’s a high chance they will find you. The best thing about it is that the potential customers can quickly send you a message to ask for details about your products or services. They won’t even have to get up from their bed to ask a query, which makes things easier for them. However, not every business with a social media account can always succeed. It takes more than just setting up your page to create a successful social media strategy. As a small business, you probably don’t have the human resources yet to manage all of your accounts. Here are a few tips to make sure your social media accounts benefit you: Start with one platform first. It’s better to have one platform which you regularly manage than to have multiple ones but don’t get to handle actively. Create useful, informational, and quality content. Be a little witty or funny sometimes, but make sure that what you say is appropriate for your business. Respond to comments and messages as soon as possible and always be respectful. 3. Start A Contest: Contests are always a fun way to create a buzz. People can get competitive especially if there’s a prize waiting for them. There’s something about emerging as the winner or being the lucky one that makes them feel special in probably some egotistical way. Word of mouth and social media are both excellent ways to spread awareness of the contest. If you offer a prize that benefits the winner and a family or friend of their choosing, they will immediately talk about it and might even share the news with other people they know. For a social media contest, you can require the contestants to like and share your page, tag a few friends, or even invite as many as they can to like and share their page too. If you do plan to run a contest, make sure to set an appropriate budget. The prizes you will give out should not cost you too much. Stick to your budget so that the costs during the entire duration of the contest do not make you lose more money than the sales you gained. 4. Get Involved In The Community: You don’t have to conquer the entire country to achieve success in your business. Everybody starts small. You can begin with your local community. Being involved in the place closest to your business’ location is an excellent way to attract more customers. It’s a good strategy to attract first the persons nearest to you since it’s more convenient to have business transactions with them. Usually, the target market of a business involves most of the people within their community. You can attend or sponsor some local events like charities or sports leagues. People are supportive of the people who also support their community. Your brand name can get associated with those activities, and you’ll build a good reputation, which will attract more customers. Conclusion: Try these simple steps, and you might grow your customer base. Small businesses don’t have to risk time, money, and effort for campaigns that will cost them more than what they gain. It’s all about good strategy and excellent customer service. Once you earn a substantial amount of customers, make sure to maintain good relations, so you don’t lose them. Read Also: Building A Brand For Your Small Business How To Attract The Best Talents For Your Startup The Best Methods To Build Strong Customer Relationships

How can I use an RSS feed reader for business? 5 great ideas

You’re here because you’re searching for that hidden weapon. The one secret that will give you a definitive edge over other companies in your line of work. Behold the RSS feed reader. It’s not flashy. It can, in fact, be a little bit confusing, if you only have memories of them in the early 00s. But it’s true. An RSS feed reader can make all the difference for your business. What is an RSS feed reader? Or maybe you’re not familiar with RSS. Here’s a crash course. RSS is a protocol, which was developed early in the Internet’s youth as a way for users to have an easy way to access numerous sites simultaneously. Basically, every website and blog would have an RSS feed embedded in their code, which can then be accessed by an RSS feed reader. Add any feed to your reader and then receive its content as soon as it’s posted. It’s that simple and was the chief way to stay connected and on top of development during the blogging craze. Is it going to help my business grow? Yes. RSS readers have grown by leaps and bounds from where they started. For one, they now support all types of media files and formats, ranging from YouTube to podcasts. You’re able to cast your net wide – excellent for performing monitoring and research. Not to mention how RSS feed readers have added tools, filters, and integrations that now place them firmly in the category of productivity tools. Depending on which RSS feed reader you have, you are in the perfect position to streamline your company’s journey to success. How to use it for business? a. Monitor your brand To many, monitoring public opinion regarding their brand begins by opening their social media for a quick scroll down mentions and DMs. Maybe retweet something funny. That’s it. Smaller companies are particularly guilty of thinking ‘we’re small, so nobody’s really talking about us.’ It’s a fact many customers share their impressions of a business without tagging the businesses in their discussions unless it’s a direct complaint. Follow the breadcrumbs no matter how infrequent or small they are through RSS. Here’s what you can achieve with Inoreader as your RSS reader: Create Google Alerts for important branded keywords and migrate them to Inoreader. This way you get the benefit of Alerts without the ineffective mail delivery. Create keyword searches on social media, Twitter for instance, and subscribe to them via Inoreader, so you’re instantly updated when posts mention you. Subscribe to important trade sites and set triggers to receive alerts whenever an article pops up that mentions your brand. b. See what competitors do The same principles as above apply here. Users can shift their attention easily to direct competitors in a heartbeat with minimal effort. You don’t have to change much in your monitoring approach, but it can also be wise to subscribe to your competitors’ newsletter, website, and social media. The goal here is to monitor not just what’s said about your competitors, but also keep a close eye on every possible move they make. If you’re a considerably smaller fish in the pond, it’s smart to know when the market leaders are going to make an announcement, release a product or start a new campaign. That way you can time important marketing pushes on your part during the empty slots in their calendar. Besides, your competitors are live case studies on the viability of campaigns and marketing ideas. c. Follow influencers and bloggers I mentioned trade publications above and the importance of checking for coverage of your brand, but there’s also another important category of sources you shouldn’t neglect. I’m talking about influencers and bloggers. These are the people that are somewhere between your target audience and industry systems. They’re vehicles for promotion with varying degrees of influence. Some showcase what resonates with your ideal customers and others have economic power thanks to the size of their audience. Influencer marketing is still here for the time being and it’s a truly interesting phenomenon as it allows you to see firsthand what connects with your audience. Influencers and bloggers thrive on their relatability to their followers. RSS feed readers are made for this exact purpose – follow blogs, newsletters, forums, and now a variety of media formats. d. Discover new topics RSS readers have made a sharp turn towards assisting their user base in finding relevant material, not just consuming it. After all, will you ever leave your RSS reader, when you keep on finding new and new feeds to explore? However, this functionality is not just created for leisure. It’s perfect for research purposes. Inoreader has invested a lot into their discovery features. The very thing you encounter when you make your account is the discovery zone. You have several main branches of topics that further divide depending on how narrow your interests run. Each topic and subtopic is populated by the most subscribed-to RSS feeds in the reader’s database. Furthermore, you have a lot more flexibility in how you explore suggestions thanks to the Sort by Magic feature, while the browser extension simplifies subscriptions to new RSS feeds and grants easy access to recent updates. e. Learn more about your customers Really, through the right blend of branded and non-branded keyword monitoring (we touched on both above), you arrive at a fuller, more fleshed-out profile of your ideal customer. You experience your customers in relation to your brand, which is essential in improving the ever-fragile brand-customer relationship. But more importantly, you get to experience them in their own environment. If you follow the current crop of successful influencers, then you know quite a lot. Where do they hang out online? What’s important to them? How do they talk? What inspires them in their day-to-day life? What needs does your product meet? What motivates them to buy specifically from you? All these are questions you can answer. All from Inoreader’s dashboard. Read Also: 4 Reasons Your Home Business Needs A Virtual Receptionist Influencer Marketing Tool to Move from Local to Global Market 5 Content Ideas to Use with Instagram Influencers

Why Automation of The Procure-to-Pay Cycle Is Critical?

Organizations across the world are facing the brunt of rising commodity prices and increasing procurement costs. Executives are hard-pressed to make a tangible difference to supply chain profits. But cost-cutting is adversely affecting investment decisions and chances of expansion across the board. Read further to know the top Reasons Why the Automation of the Procure-to-Pay Cycle Is Critical. Technology enables companies to look offshore for cheaper resources and raw materials. Procurement has become a more important process than it had been before and geographical boundaries to availability are diminishing. The procure-to-pay cycle is considered a crucial strategic operation, in which expenses need to be closely monitored. 10 Reasons Why Automation of Procure-to-Pay Cycle Is Critical Organizations need a comprehensive approach by which operations are aligned to lower procurement costs. Every department needs to be made accountable for its costs and effective use of assets. This is only possible through automation, which includes monitoring of requirements and expense optimization. It helps to procure the assets at competitive prices. Automation of your procure-to-pay cycle can bring immense benefits to minimal investments. Here are 10 of them. 1. Save time Automation means faster cycle times. An Aberdeen Group report found that organizations that have implemented e-procurement initiatives have halved their transaction cycle time. This means faster order processing, instant approvals, and better decision-making. The future belongs to organizations that have automated systems, as speed, efficiency, and effectiveness of procurement solutions provide a competitive edge in the market. 2. Save money Big savings are now possible with manual procurement fading into the future. Shortened procurement and fulfillment cycles reduce administrative costs and improve staff productivity. Employees can use their time more strategically instead of pen-pushing. Consolidation of orders from different departments results in manifold advantages like decreased cost per transaction, reduced maverick spend, increased negotiation power, and volume discounts. 3. Reduce errors Automation ensures better accuracy. Multiple receipts, documents, and bills are no longer in the picture as vendors log in their quotes and departments key in their requirements. Endless matching and re-submission of documents are no more the order of the day. Clerical errors are minimized and you can identify the best and worst-performing assets and other variables to plan for the future. 5. Be compliant Automated procure-to-pay solutions ensured standardized procurement practices, pre-negotiated pricing and real-time data that ensures compliance. Maverick spending comes down to zero as procurement managers look out to established vendors who provide better prices than the rest. Standardized equipment and products are bought only from vendors that ensure compliance across the board. 5. Improve negotiations Large volumes are open invitations for vendors who can provide discounts and still get better profit margins. When there is the consolidation of requirements from different departments, procurement managers and executives are better placed to negotiate stronger terms that deliver profits. 6. Get vendor visibility Automated procure-to-pay solutions provide better visibility to the procurement process and ensure single-window clearance. Vendors do not need to meet multiple stakeholders and fill up diverse forms just to quote the price. All they have to do is log in to the cloud-based system and fill up the electronic forms. 7. Be better informed Procurement policies can easily be accessed and any deviations can be instantly red-flagged. Executives, vendors, and agencies just need to access the procure-to-pay system for clarification about the process and polices to ensure compliance. 8. Communicate completely Procurement communication is never blocked as every transaction leaves an audit trail. The information that can be accessed immediately upon authorization and the entire pipeline is better managed. 9. Enhance control Executives and managers have access to real-time business data that can instantly refer to the financial health of their organizations. With automated procure-to-pay solutions, you can access all spending with the click of a mouse. Minute information that can change purchase decisions for the betterment of the company is available. Detailed control of the process helps limit spending and stick to the budget. 10. Gain the competitive edge Reduced costs, increased accuracy, better control, and transparency give you a smart, streamlined, resourceful supply chain. The smarter purchasing decisions boil down to better financial health that can give you a competitive edge in the market. Automation helps you to build a smarter procure-to-pay system. It is imperative that organizations move on from cumbersome manual operations to cloud-based automation systems to streamline their supply chain and procurement processes. Expensing platforms are easy to use and adaptable automated systems which facilitate procurement, invoicing, and expense management. With Expensing procure-to-pay systems, the procurement process becomes better streamlined, with faster cycle times and better control and visibility. Image Credit: stampli.com Read Also: Reasons to Support Nonprofit Organizations That Help Save the Environment How To Choose A Practice Management Software For Your Law Firm

5 Simple Steps to a Winning Brand Strategy

A Brand- What it is