Story:
4 Steps to Successful Brand Management

Knowledge

To successfully manage your brand, you must familiarize yourself with the following:

Brand Values

You cannot have a successful brand management strategy without a clear brand vision. And, if you want to discover your brand vision, you need to ask the right questions.

Ask yourself: What is my company all about? What are our goals? How will we achieve them? How do we help people?

Simply put, your brand vision is the story of your business. It tells us where you want to take your company, but it also outlines where you come from.

Niche Market

In order to identify, analyze, and follow the competition, you need to gain a detailed understanding of your niche market. This will help you discover what differentiates your brand from your competitors.

Touchpoints

Your brand’s key points of customer contact are your customer touchpoints. You need to define a detailed list of points they make before, during, and after a purchase. To manage each interaction, you need to understand each touchpoint.

Products and Services

It is best to define products by brand because your business may have products that span across multiple markets. The same goes for the services you offer. For some brands, this is pretty straightforward, but for others, it can be a difficult task that requires complex analysis.

Company Culture

One of the reasons why branding is important for your business is the fact that your brand is a point of pride and satisfaction for your employees. Your company needs to have a set of values that expresses its beliefs and practices.

These elements also define your company culture. They are also an essential element of your brand’s voice, so it is very important to understand them.

Insight

Your brand strategy needs to work hand in hand with your business strategy. For your brand management processes to be a success, you need to gain an insight and understanding of your business plan.

It’s vital to ensure clear alignment between your business strategy and your brand strategy. If you want to create a roadmap for your brand’s long-term and short-term growth, this will help you bring greater differentiation and clarity.

It is also key to understand the difference between branding and marketing. Marketing and branding activities need to be well-coordinated. Branding establishes the strategic foundation for marketing. Because of this, it needs to precede and underlie marketing and sales activities.

A clear understanding of your customers’ needs is also important for successful brand management. These needs are constantly evolving, so you need to stay current and relevant.

You also need to ensure that your brand strategy is inextricably linked to your go-to-market-strategy. In order to achieve your business goals, your brand strategy needs to permeate the entire product lifecycle.

Analyze

For brand management purposes, you need to analyze past and present brand performance, including repositioning and new brand development. To follow this, you can utilize online metrics.

Over time, you may roll out some tactical marketing initiatives as a part of your campaign strategies. The way you manage your brand will have an influence on them and vise versa.

To measure brand perception, there are many KPIs and metrics you can use. The most important are brand awareness metrics, familiarity metrics, and consideration metrics.

To track name recognition of your brand in real-time, you need a brand awareness metric. You can use a familiarity metric to measure the understanding and knowledge prospects have about your brand.

To understand why prospects want to buy your products and interact with your brand, you need a consideration metric. This metric is an important part of the customer journey and is based on intent.

There are plenty of tools that can help you manage your brand in-house. The best and most popular include:

• Brandfolder;

• Canva;

• Wedia;

• TrustPilot;

• Lucidpress;

• Bynder;

• BrandVerity.

Assets

You will also need to manage the tangible components of your brand. These include the parts of your brand that consumers can experience, see, and remember.

They include every piece of marketing and branding that your employees, customers, as well as the general public can see. You will need to organize these assets both physically and digitally. You will need to manage your:

• Brand name: Your brand name won’t change even as the other assets of your brand evolve, but you’ll still need to manage it. For instance, you need to ensure you have leverage over unauthorized use.

• Logo and color palette: These elements are the embodiment of the creative representation of your business.

• Typography: You need to pay close attention to how you use text-based assets and fonts in your branding.

• Graphics: Your content writers, social media marketers, designers, and other members of your team use your brand images and graphics. You need to have clear instructions on how they can use them. Your graphics need to be well-organized as well as appealing

• Digital marketing channels: Naturally, how you run your social media pages is a big part of branding. However, you must know that this includes executives’ and employees’ social media pages.