Brand Marketing: How To Build a Brand Marketing Strategy

Trying to boost brand awareness among your target audience? Look no further than brand marketing.

Claudia Snoh, cofounder of coffee concentrate company Kloo, thinks entrepreneurs can learn a lot about brand marketing from Liquid Death’s Instagram. “Most of the time, they actually don’t talk about the products that they sell,” Claudia says on an episode of Shopify Masters. “They don’t talk about water, they don’t talk about tea. They’ll just have a lot of random content on, like, heavy metal tattoos. And it kind of dawned on me that I think too many brands right now focus their content on selling the product versus selling the brand.”

Businesses like Liquid Death and Kloo use brand marketing to help consumers form lasting, positive impressions of their brands—and you can do the same for yours.

Here’s how brand marketing works, why it is important for a successful business, and how to build an effective brand marketing strategy to make your brand more memorable.

What is brand marketing?

Brand marketing is the process of promoting your company’s brand to drive awareness and loyalty. Unlike product marketing, which informs the public about how specific products or services meet consumer needs, brand marketing communicates your brand’s values, unique value proposition, and vision to drive consumer engagement.

What’s the difference between branding and marketing?

Branding and marketing are separate and distinct activities that work in conjunction with each other to form a cohesive image of your business. Understanding the difference between these two concepts will support your branding and marketing efforts—and help you build a strong marketing strategy.

Here’s an overview of each concept:

• Branding: Branding is the process of establishing a distinct identity for your company and its products or services. It involves defining essential brand elements, including your brand voice, values, promise, personality traits, and visual identity.
• Marketing: Marketing is focused on communication with your target audience. It includes activities like social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO).

Branding helps you define who you are as a business. A well-defined brand strategy acts as the foundation for building your marketing strategy. When you convey strategic information to your target audience, you’re engaging in marketing activities, while the way you communicate draws from your branding principles.

Brand marketing is a specific type of marketing that uses a variety of tactics to engage your target audience and communicate who you are as a brand.

Why is brand marketing important?

An effective brand marketing strategy can help you increase the value of your brand name, also known as your brand equity. Having strong brand equity means consumers hold your brand in high regard. They may choose your products more often, or be willing to pay more for your product over competitors.

Elements of brand equity

Here’s an overview of three elements of brand equity—and how good brand marketing can support each:

Brand awareness

Brand awareness measures consumer familiarity with your company. Marketing can boost awareness by improving brand recall and brand recognition. It can also encourage word-of-mouth marketing.

Here are a few ideas for building brand awareness:

• Organize a pop-up shop: Heyday Canning Co. launched a bean-themed pop-up shop that helped the brand go viral on social media.
• Use influencer marketing: Tap into influencers’ audiences to help you spread the word about your brand. Companies typically pay influencers but sometimes send free products as well.
• Host a giveaway: Giveaways can help you go viral. You can ask participants to follow you, leave comments on your post, and share your giveaway, which can further your reach.
• Jump on relevant trends: When you find a trend that aligns with your brand, you can create content in hopes of it reaching a wider audience.

Brand loyalty

Brand loyalty measures your customers’ likelihood of doing repeat business with your company. It’s strongly correlated with customer loyalty because more loyal customers tend to make more frequent purchases. Brand marketing boosts loyalty through messaging around your brand story and brand vision, which can strengthen emotional connections with your audience.

Here are a few ways to increase brand loyalty:

• Create a positive customer experience (personalization, proactive customer service, and an easy checkout process)
• Launch a loyalty program
• Offer high-quality products
• Build personal connections with your customers

Brand preference

Brand preference is your brand’s strength relative to your competitors. Brand marketing helps by improving your brand reputation and highlighting what makes your company unique. It can also influence your customers to recommend your brand to others, increasing your reach.

To measure brand preference, you can:

• Survey customers
• Track social media engagement
• Monitor sales data

To improve brand preference, you can:

• Communicate your company’s values 
• Interact regularly with your customers, particularly through social media
• Follow up with customers after a purchase to learn how to improve their experience

How to build a successful brand marketing strategy

1. Conduct target audience research
2. Research your competitors
3. Revisit your brand identity
4. Develop brand marketing messages
5. Plan your brand marketing campaign

Brand marketing is a long-term strategy. Whereas product marketing strategies like special offers and discounts seek immediate conversions, brand marketing aims to improve your brand’s position in your target market, setting you up for ongoing success.

These five steps can help you design and launch a solid brand marketing strategy:

1. Conduct target audience research

The first step in building a brand marketing strategy is researching your target audience (or updating existing target audience research). You can look at industry reports to learn more about the audience in your niche, such as: demographics, decision drivers, beliefs, and media consumption preferences. Sales data, interviews, and focus groups can give you more specific information on what draws customers to your brand and what they have in common.

This research can help you form buyer personas—fictionalized representations of a business’s ideal customers—that can help you deliver more relevant marketing campaigns.

2. Research your competitors

Identify key competitors and take note of their brand positioning—or how they market themselves. Pay special attention to brand promise, which is an implicit or explicit statement of the value a company offers. You can also take notes on design elements, brand voice, and key personality traits.

Focusing this research on a company’s consumer-facing identity makes it relatively straightforward. You can browse competitor websites, peruse social media accounts, and review marketing materials to get a sense of your competitors’ brand strategy.

3. Revisit your brand identity

Once you have a sense of the market, revisit your brand guidelines and ask yourself the following questions:

Do my brand guidelines accurately reflect reality?

A good brand book can keep you focused. However, even with guidelines, brand identity drift—shifting away from your original brand values and image—is possible.

Your brand guidelines might say that your brand uses a compassionate and straightforward tone—but your web, email marketing, and social media content might convey irony. If you find discrepancies, update your guidelines to match. Contradictory messaging can confuse customers and make it harder for them to identify with your brand.

Is my brand identity appropriate to my target audiences?

Determine whether your brand identity is appropriate based on your updated target audience information. If not, revise it to align with consumer needs.

A snarky tone, for example, is a poor choice for an audience that values security and tradition. You might embrace a frank and reassuring tone instead.

How does my brand identity compare to my competitors’?

Is your brand identity meaningfully different from your competitors’? If not, what differentiates your company? Update your brand identity to reflect what sets you apart.

4. Develop brand marketing messages

Brand marketing messages are key points you repeat across brand marketing campaigns. For example, Glossier uses slogans like “Skin first. Makeup second” and “You look good” on its social media pages and ads to illustrate that beauty doesn’t come from wearing makeup.

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A post shared by Glossier (@glossier)

Think of brand marketing messages as the bridge between brand values and consumer needs. Start brainstorming by asking yourself: Why should your target audiences choose your company? Then record your answers, group them by theme, and distill your findings into three to six succinct statements of your company’s unique value.

5. Plan your brand marketing campaign

Finally, plan your brand marketing campaign to get your messages in front of audiences. As with any type of campaign, brand marketing campaign planning involves establishing timelines, and selecting marketing channels and tactics to show audiences what your brand stands for.

Setting goals can help you keep on track. Try the SMART goal framework to come up with specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound goals.

Tips for brand marketing

• Lead with values
• Diversify channels and tactics
• Develop a brand story
• Think of your brand as a character
• Highlight your products

Popular brand marketing tactics include content marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing. You can also support your brand marketing efforts through paid tactics like running an ad campaign or hiring a brand ambassador.

Here are tips (and things to avoid) in your brand marketing campaign:

Lead with values

Customers prefer to shop at companies that share their values, and brands are responding by incorporating values-based messaging into their marketing strategies.

“Values can be a really interesting way of keeping people engaged with your brand,” says Rembrant Van der Mijnsbrugge, co-founder of branding agency Mote. “If people can build an emotional connection with your brand, that is far more powerful and long-lasting than if people are simply purchasing a product to meet a quick need that they have.”

For example, apparel company Everlane uses the messaging, “Fashioning a better future.” This highlights the brand’s commitment to equity and sustainability and appeals to consumers who share these values.

Adopt this strategy by identifying authentic values reflected in your business and incorporating them into your brand messaging.

Diversify channels and tactics

Diversifying tactics and channels can help you maximize reach and optimize results. Consider both organic marketing and paid advertising efforts.

For example, you might create a series of organic social media posts that tell a story about how your products are made and use paid social media ads to increase reach and boost brand engagement.

As you expand your reach, it’s also important to learn what strategies work best on which channel. This will help you create brand marketing campaigns that resonate with the right audiences.

Learn more: 5 Organic Marketing Ideas for Entrepreneurs

Develop a brand story

Brand marketing communicates who you are, why you exist, what you care about, and how you help your target audience. The most persuasive and memorable answers cohere into a brand story. Your brand story is essentially a retelling of specific events in a company’s history that connects abstract concepts (like brand purpose) to concrete events (like the backstory of the founders).

Often brand storytelling details how and when the company set up shop or identified a problem and devised a solution. Kloo is a coffee concentrate brand founded by Claudia Snoh and her master coffee grader mother, Mariella Cho. Claudia learned that people who knew Kloo’s brand story felt more connected.

“Anyone who had heard the brand story directly from me knew exactly what made us unique, knew what we stood for, how we differentiated from other competitors,” Claudia says. “But people who discovered us randomly online mostly thought that we were just another coffee concentrate brand with a cool bottle.”

To rectify this, Kloo created videos that highlighted Mariella’s journey and expertise and updated its website to better highlight its products, quality, and knowledge.

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A post shared by Kloo (@drinkkloo)

Identify critical events in your company’s history to create your brand story. Then write them down and explain how each informed your company’s trajectory and core values. Consider creating videos or blog posts that outline your brand story so that your audience can easily find it.

Think of your brand as a character

Andy Pearson, VP of creative at Liquid Death, takes a unique approach to brand marketing. “Rather than being a brand, Liquid Death is kind of almost more of a character,” Andy says on an episode of Shopify Masters. “I think that’s why Liquid Death feels so compelling to people.”

“It’s not this sterile thing that was conceived as like a hole in the market that we’re gonna fill with this one very engineered brand, right? It’s sort of this amalgamation of stuff that [founder] Mike [Cessario] likes, and stuff that I like, and stuff that other people in the marketing team and our sales team like.”

When creating content for the brand, Andy thinks of Liquid Death as a character in a TV show. This allows him to show off different sides of the Liquid Death brand without coming across as confusing or inauthentic. “The fun of watching a show is when a character shows you something that makes total sense but you didn’t see coming,” Andy says.

Highlight your products

Brand marketing works best when it aligns with product marketing. For Bombas, a sock and underwear company, branding revolves around comfort. It achieved that with its first product, socks, sharing images of models and customers in cozy moments while they show off their socks.

As it’s expanded to underwear and slippers, Bombas has continued to place comfort at the forefront. In one Instagram post that features a bralette and pair of underwear, the brand proclaims: “Underwire is out. Bralette is in.”

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A post shared by bombas (@bombas)

An understanding of its brand identity has allowed Bombas to continue to expand without veering away from its core messaging.

Think of your products as evidence for the claims made by your brand marketing strategy, and choose claims that your products actually support. Before you launch new products, define how they complement your brand marketing strategy. If you can draw a clear connection between the two, you’ll be able to present a cohesive vision of your brand—and keep that brand image in the minds of your target audience.