How Do I Develop a Brand Marketing Strategy for My Business (On a Budget)?

To create a Brand Marketing Strategy for your business is one of the most crucial aspects of its development and, ultimately, your success. An effective brand strategy provides your business with a unique identity that allows it to stand out from the rest of the field. It also serves as your business’s voice, making it easier to connect with your customers by increasing awareness about who you are, what you do, and what you value.

When people talk about building a brand, many automatically assume that you need significant resources to create an effective brand marketing strategy. While that statement holds true for several big companies, it doesn’t mean that you can’t roll out a successful strategy to brand your business without spending too much. 

With the number of free platforms and resources available on the Internet today, you can apply a brand marketing strategy to build a strong brand. As long as you make sure that you always keep your customers in mind, you can create a budget-friendly brand awareness strategy to grow your business.

If you’re looking to build a compelling brand for your business without breaking the bank, here are some essential steps you can take:

1. Learn to Understand Your Audience Better

If you want to develop a successful brand marketing strategy, you need to make sure that it caters to your target audience. To do that, you must understand your audience to align your marketing tactics with what appeals to them.

How can you better understand your audience? The answer lies in creating a buyer persona.

So, what is a buyer persona? A buyer persona refers to a semi-fictionalized representation of your ideal customer, including his characteristics and values. By creating a buyer persona, you will know more about your customers by putting yourself in their shoes, allowing you to understand their desires and challenges better, therefore equipping you with more knowledge to help them with your business.

There are several things to consider when creating a buyer persona. You will need to think about your customers’ demographics, so that you can paint an accurate picture of their needs, pain points and behaviors. Then, once you’ve set up a detailed and carefully-designed buyer persona, you can adjust how you convey your products so that it follows your customers’ priorities and goals.

For more about buyer personas and why they are important for your own marketing efforts, read “Buyer Personas: Why They are Important and Why You Should Have Them”.

2. Create a Unique Identity for your Brand

While defining your branding strategy, identifying your buyer personas is only the first step in effective brand-building. The next step is just as important – creating a unique identity for your brand.

When you created buyer personas earlier, you zeroed in on your customers’ values and priorities. This time, you will need to delve into your headspace and identify your business’ core values so that you can market your company the right way. Ask yourself questions about your short and long-term goals, how you want people to view your brand, and what you want to accomplish.

Once you can answer these questions, you will have a clearer focus on building your brand marketing strategy. Next, you need to start building content that supports your newly-discovered identity. You want your customers to understand who you are through your website, blogs, emails, and social media posts. As such, all of your content should reflect your company’s values and objectives so that you can start an honest relationship with your customers from the get-go.

3. Build a Strong Presence on Social Media

Now that you know who your target audience is and have a clear idea of how you want your business to be recognized, it’s time to reach out to your customers. In today’s digital age, most people are active on social media, so it only makes sense to build a strong and consistent social media presence if you want to get your audience’s attention.

There are several social media platforms, and it’s essential to maximize your effectiveness by focusing on one platform first. An excellent way to find out which platform your audience is most active in is by checking out your competitors – the platform they use most often will be the one where your customers are. There are ways to connect with your audience depending on the platform, so do your research and make sure that your strategy matches the right platform.

Always remember that maintaining your presence on social media is just as crucial as building one. People can easily forget about your brand if you don’t roll out new and valuable content regularly. You must plan your posts well and try to maintain a regular posting schedule.

4. Write a Blog for Your Business

Blogging is one of the cheapest yet most effective digital marketing strategies. A blog with helpful and updated content can significantly increase your reach by attracting potential customers and keeping them glued to your website, turning them from random browsers to regular visitors and, ultimately, loyal customers.

Effective blogging means making full use of your buyer personas to publish content that matches what your target audience is searching for. If you can publish blogs that are relevant to your customers’ searches, there’s a pretty good chance that search engines will recommend your content to bring them to your website.

You can also recycle your blog entries as content for your social media posts. It’s an easy way to replicate your relevance in your target audience’s search results, especially if you can utilize keyword research to improve SEO and increase your ranking on internet searches.

A fair warning, however – blogging might not cost you a single cent, but it will take up a lot of your time. You will have to find relevant topics for your customers and make sure your content is always up-to-date and useful. This means you’ll continuously roll out new content while updating your previous posts. It can be a little overwhelming at the beginning, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll be able to reap the rewards without any monetary investment.

5. Rank Customer Service as Your Top Priority​

It shouldn’t be a mystery as to why excellent customer service should be the cornerstone of every business that wants to succeed. Besides fostering customer loyalty by ensuring their needs are always taken care of, high-quality customer service is also a significant marketing boost in itself. 

When customers are happy because of the product or service you provided, they will want to share that happiness with other consumers. This is called word-of-mouth marketing, and it can save your business thousands of dollars in advertising while being just as effective, if not more trusted since the reviews are coming personally from people they know. 

The more customers you can satisfy with your services, the bigger the potential network will recognize your brand’s competence. To make sure that your customers are always pleased with your company and that they find doing business with you quite memorable, always incorporate your brand’s culture into their experience. People will always come for quality products, but they will only remember experiences that made them feel valued and appreciated. 

A Final Word on Your Brand Marketing Strategy (On a Budget)

For more about branding and why it’s important for your business, have a look at our resource section, “A Helpful Guide to Brand Development for Beginners​”.

Remember, having a brand marketing strategy for your business is going to take constant attention and effort on your part. So keep updating yourself on the latest best practices when it comes to how successful businesses approach branding. Especially when times are changing, you’ll have to adapt to the evolving needs of your customers and industry as well. 

Need Help With Your Business Branding Strategy? Talk to LOJO!

You can create an effective brand for your business even while working on a fixed budget. You need to make sure that you can maximize the resources you have and find the most creative ways to build a unique and memorable brand for your customers. To do that, you must always keep your target audience in mind.

It can be challenging to develop the most interesting brand ideas, but you can also have fun with the process. Don’t hesitate to experiment and try new ideas out. If it doesn’t work, you can count it as experience, and you’ll only have discovered room for improvement. Building a brand can’t be done overnight, so stay patient and always try to improve. 

The sooner you can discover your signature brand awareness strategy; the quicker growth will come for your business.