Brand Planning – Five Essential Elements

When planning the stages of your marketing plan and structure for your strategic brand management, there are important elements of planning that will shape how your business is perceived by consumers and determine what drives your traffic and revenue. The beginning stages focuses on creating goals and brand personality then shifting toward definitive planning.

Here are the five effective elements of brand planning:

1. Envision your brand’s goals

Before implementing a new marketing plan, evaluate your brand’s situation now in terms of brand awareness and image. How do consumers view your brand? What do they think of your brand’s quality or performance? These are only a few questions to ask during the first stages of planning.  After evaluating, develop goals and values that will determine how your brand will be perceived by consumers and brainstorm ideas on how to achieve your goals. Keep in mind long term goals, such as developing an excellent overall brand image, and short term goals, such as improving brand awareness. By having a balance of these in your strategic brand management, you’ll create an effective plan that will expand and grow your business and revenue.

2. Create a brand personality and persona for target audience

Once you have established your brand’s goals, you must create a personality for your brand that will connect with an audience. To help in shaping a brand personality, choose adjectives you’d like your brand to be described: fun, authoritative, family friendly, etc. Your brand’s personality must be something that is identifiable or relates to a target population or demographic by creating a persona. Creating a persona for your target consumer through data analysis should aid in determining how you will reach your audience. This persona will determine which marketing channels you go through in order to reach your target audience.

3. Position your business marketing plan for action

After envisioning your goals to complement your brand’s personality and help determine your strategic brand management, prepare your business to execute your marketing plan. Position your marketing team in place and train them in implementing your plan. For online marketing especially, your marketing plan includes designing a website and site map, creating graphics, developing content, placing ads and signing up for social networks site to promote. It also helps to write and have access to guides, like style guides, that will aid in training as well as in keeping your brand’s goals, personas and content style consistent.

4. Convey your main message

While having the right tools for marketing put into place is a good start, the next crucial step is in conveying your main message. When developing a main message that will act as a way to communicate what your brand is all about, create a list of how you think your brand can benefit consumers and the ways how they can value your brand. This list of benefits and values can then help you in writing calls to action, or messages that will convince consumers to take action towards knowing about your brand, purchasing your products or services and other actions considered valuable toward your business.

5. Choose marketing channels

After doing much of the preparations for your marketing plan, you must choose the appropriate marketing channels that will help you reach your target audience. If your target demographic is the 18-29 age bracket, they are most likely to be social media users who use Facebook, Twitter, etc. Sign up and build up a following on those social networks. These marketing channels determine your strategic brand management when interacting with your target demographic in converting them from leads into consumers.