6 Ingredients Every Brand Strategy Needs to Cook Up Success!

Are you having a difficult time marketing your brand? Have you come up with an excellent product or service but are having trouble sharing your ideas with the world and garnering public interest? If you have answered yes to either of these questions, then you likely need a new brand marketing strategy. 

Whether your original marketing strategy was unsuccessful or you just never made one in the first place, we are going to list six key ingredients that your marketing strategy needs to cook up success in whatever industry you have found yourself in.

Think of your business as a complicated food dish. Several, perhaps dozens of, ingredients are needed to bring the dish to life. Each ingredient serves an important purpose to create a fantastic final presentation. However, most dishes start with some form of base. Take a mirepoix, for instance, a combination of diced onions, carrots, and celery sautéed in some form of fat, like oil or butter, to form the base for a number of different soups, stews, stocks, and sauces. 

You can’t make a mirepoix correctly if you are missing any one of these ingredients. Similarly, if your marketing strategy is missing certain elements, your potential customers will likely turn to your competitors who are cooking up their strategy the correct way. 

A strong brand marketing strategy acts as the base for the dish that is your business. Done correctly, it provides the support for the rest of your business to fall back on. If not, then your business has been tainted from the start and you’re going to have to head back to the drawing board. The following ingredients are the key to creating a successful brand strategy.

1. A Strong Storyline

Stories are what sell your business. People connect to and relate to stories, making them a valuable tool when trying to appeal to an audience. Make sure your business has a backstory and that your audience has a clear understanding of what your overall vision is for your company. If the consumer doesn’t care about you, then why should they care about your product?

Stories are the perfect way to connect with your audience because you aren’t just dumping boring information and data on them that they are likely to forget. An authentic, relatable story will inspire people to take action and bring them along on a personal journey with your brand. Sharing your experiences with potential customers lets people know that you care about them. Remember, businesses don’t sell to people. People sell to people.

2. An Emotional Attachment

It is important to sympathize with your audience’s woes and attempt to address the problems they are having. There are two types of buyers: logical and emotional. The majority of people fall under the latter categorization.

Most consumers evaluate different brands and products based on their emotional reactions to them, as opposed to facts and information. Marketers who focus on their customers’ identities and personal struggles are more likely to succeed than businesses that focus solely on the unique features of their product or service.

Determine who your target audience is and really try to zone in on what makes them tick. Creating a strong bond between business and consumer helps to build trust in your brand and makes it more likely to resonate with your audience. If you are loyal to your consumers, then you will be rewarded with their loyalty as well.

3. A Sole Focus on Consumers

Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club, once said the following.

“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

Every waking second of building your marketing strategy needs to be directed at helping consumers and making sure that they get more in return than what they paid you for. This is how businesses succeed. Taking a business-minded approach, rather than a consumer-centric one, will inevitably lose leads, sales, and then fail. 

Your products and service offerings have to be geared towards solving a customer pain point. Determining what it is that your target audience is craving or lacking will help you create something that addresses that issue. If consumers want something bad enough, then they will come looking for it. Raising your brand awareness will help customers find you, which in turn will help them find exactly what they are looking for.

4. A Variety of Platforms and Channels

It is important to utilize several different methods and channels when it comes to marketing your business. Utilizing both inbound and outbound content marketing efforts will ensure that your brand is made available to the maximum number of consumers.

Examples of outbound marketing efforts include printed advertisements, TV commercials, or sending out emails with information about your brand. These are great for promoting specific products and services and getting your brand out in the open.

Inbound marketing efforts are for people who are actively searching for the product or service that you sell. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website to get it a higher ranking on search engines like Google. This way people searching for your services can find you more easily.

Making use of multiple different social media platforms is an excellent way to widen your reach. When people see your advertisements on platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, or LinkedIn, it builds your credibility. Turn browsers into consumers by making yourself readily available to them.

5. The Ability to Scale

It is important that your marketing strategies are scalable. Lots of businesses make the mistake of spending large amounts of money on, say, an advertisement before they know whether or not that ad will actually pay off. Try starting small and seeing what works before you invest a ton of money into a marketing campaign. Once you know for sure that something works well, the more money you spend on it, the more money you will make from it.

6. The Ability to Adapt

Businesses that do not adapt to an ever-changing market are destined to fail. It is important to analyze market trends and study your industry carefully, so you are prepared to make a change when necessary. Never put all of your eggs in one basket. Just as we mentioned above how vital it is to make use of several different avenues when marketing your brand, the same goes for product innovation. 

In the digital age, market shifts happen much more quickly than they used to. Make sure to take necessary steps to ensure that you can shift along with it. Don’t become so invested or entrenched in an idea that you end up becoming irrelevant and losing market share as the rest of the industry moves on without you.

Creating the Perfect Dish

By utilizing these six essential ingredients, you will effectively create brand consistency and brand relatability for your company. These are crucial to your business succeeding in the long term. As long as you stay true to your brand, while still welcoming change, (consistency) and relate to your consumers on an emotional level (relatability), you’ll do just fine.