5 Winning Ways to Utilize Branding and Outsmart Your Competition in 2023

Brand consistency is one of the top techniques that tends to be overlooked in marketing plans. Yet it's key in setting your business apart and targeting your desired audience. It's crucial retail companies are maintaining and developing good customer relationships. To achieve this, the focus has to be on delivering brand consistency and building brand identity.

Here are five steps to follow to build your brand through brand consistency:

1. Start with a brand audit.

Auditing your brand is the first and most basic step to undertake to have an accurate understanding of where you are as a company.

Analyzing the company’s brand architecture will allow for an accurate assessment of its products and performance in the marketplace. The audit should  focus on internal and external branding and determine how it aligns with how the brand wishes to be perceived. The end of the audit should show clearly which marketing channels and materials help most with achieving the desired image and generating sales.

2. Create a solid brand strategy.

Branding is a holistic concept. It requires that all aspects of a company’s marketing, promotion and value system be aligned. It's more than a name and logo; it's the correlation between the company’s public image and customer experience.

Developing a brand strategy requires an understanding of the results of the brand audit. For branding style, for example, it's essential that all brand elements, such as the brand story, logo and imagery, project the intended brand values and messaging.

Next, the focus should be placed on customers. When developing a brand strategy, buyer personas should be drafted so the marketing team can have a clear description of who their ideal customer is, and how to target them.

3. Design an efficient content creation strategy.

For successful branding, a company must share content that's current and carries the intended messaging and tone. Emphasis must be placed on quality and quantity. Having a planned and constant flow of content is important, but equally important is ensuring that that content is of high quality and is relevant to the target audience.

Studies have shown that 72 percent of consumers are more likely to engage with a brand if the marketing message is personalized. Up to 93 percent of businesses experience increased sales from targeting customers with customized messages. To maximize the value of content creation, therefore, targeting with customization is important.

Finding the best methods and channels for distributing content is also key. Whether content is distributed through email, social, SMS or other digital marketing channels, finding the channel that's most impactful for delivering content will help to set your brand apart.

4. Build an active brand presence through marketing outsourcing.

Brand consistency requires skills and talent. Given recent events such as the great resignation and the pandemic, marketing outsourcing is the solution for retail businesses struggling with retaining good in-house marketing talent.

Finding a reputable marketing outsourcing agency will allow for the marketing activities of retail companies to be done more efficiently while observing the latest marketing trends — and at a controlled cost. Hiring an agency will also provide much-needed on-call guidance and support in a marketing world that's constantly evolving.

5. Evaluate your brand performance.

Very often, brand strategies aren't maximized due to a lack of performance monitoring. Even well-researched strategies can be short-lived when companies fail to track performance and monitor results.

Brand performance is measured through metrics such as clickthrough rates for ads and email marketing, blog performance, traffic to the website, and shares and likes on social media platforms. It's also measured through top-of-mind brand awareness, sales volume, and customer brand loyalty.

The data obtained from the implementation of the brand strategy and analysis of brand performance will help the brand to determine how well it has connected with its target audience and if any adjustments need to be made to any aspect of the strategy to produce better results. At this point of the process, the goals of the strategy as it relates to building brand consistency will be stacked up against brand performance.

Anna Stella is a two-time national award-winning marketing expert, academic researcher, and CEO of the global marketing outsourcing agency BBSA.