Looking and sounding the same as your competitors is expensive in the long run.
If you blend in with everyone else, you need more time and budget to break through the noise in your sector. You run the risk of price-driven commoditisation if you can’t demonstrate why you’re different.
But if you can find, refine and amplify the differences that make you stand out, your sales and marketing engine will run more efficiently and effectively. That’s the power of brand strategy.
Getting it right can be very profitable. Learn more about the return on investment (ROI) of brand strategy.
So how do you develop your brand strategy and what should it include? The process and output can vary depending on the framework you use or the agency you work with.
In this article, we’re throwing open the doors to our process and brand strategy packages so you know what to expect when working with us.
Our approach to brand strategy: The Difference Engine®
We use a proprietary framework for marketing and brand differentiation best practices called The Difference Engine®. It’s our blueprint for a better business that helps you power growth, optimise your marketing and sales funnel and move forward.
In brand strategy, our philosophy is to help clients avoid the smooth pebble problem.
A smooth pebble is safe and inoffensive, but it’s also not remarkable or memorable. It’s easily lost on a stony beach of other smooth pebbles. If your brand loses its edge, your sales and marketing have to work much, much harder and spend much more money to achieve results. You don’t want to be a smooth pebble.
Our brand strategy packages
When you pay an agency to write a blog post, you know what to expect when they share the final draft. When you work with an agency on a brand strategy, there can be much more variation in the output—what you get for your money.
At Articulate, we have three brand strategy packages to help bypass the initial ambiguity and cut straight to your business needs: Starter, Pro and Enterprise.
- Starter brand strategy is for startups and SMEs operating on a lean budget or companies that don’t require a full-service brand strategy project. It’s also the bare minimum we need to do other kinds of work such as signature websites or thought leadership content.
- Pro brand strategy is the entry point for ambitious smaller companies and mid-market organisations seeking to realise their potential with brand differentiation. It’s also helpful for startups and spinouts who have not yet pinned down their brand. For these reasons, it’s our most popular package.
- Enterprise brand strategy is for larger or more complex organisations with equally complex needs, multiple stakeholders and global ambitions.
Once you’ve signed up for one of these packages, we get to work.
Our brand strategy process
Each strategy package has different steps and output but they follow similar paths. In this article we’ll focus on the process and output for a Pro brand strategy—your mileage will vary for Starter and Enterprise packages.
Stage one: immersion, research and playback
This stage is all about getting to know you, your business, your customers and your market. It’s like running diagnostics on your brand marketing engine, identifying where parts need replacing and where they need a boost.
- Discovery workshop(s): This is where we ‘go wide’, asking questions to help us understand everything from your business model to your competitors to your content strategy, at a high level. We’ll also ask for any existing documentation that will help us immerse ourselves—think market research and current brand guidelines. If you don’t have those things because you’re starting from scratch, we can work with that too.
- Desk research: Once we’ve completed your discovery workshop, we have our paper trail for research to understand how your world works and what’s happening in it right now. We’ll look up industry press, competitor activity and consultant perspectives to supplement the knowledge you’ve shared with us and find out what others are saying.
- Branding questionnaire: We take a qualitative, baseline measurement of your current branding using a simple Typeform questionnaire which you share with your teams and your customers. This helps us get a more holistic view of your current brand perceptions from inside and outside your organisation. As it’s anonymous, it can also reveal brand perceptions (positive and constructive) you weren’t aware of—this helps put our focus in the right place.
- ICP and personas workshop: When you’re developing or refreshing your brand strategy, you need your target customers in sharp focus. That’s why we do a separate workshop dedicated to discovering and defining your ideal client profile (ICP) and personas—the fictionalised profiles of the people you need to buy from you to grow your business.
- Brand archetype workshop: Every brand is unique, but an archetype helps us quickly categorise the essence of your brand identity, its strengths and weaknesses and other, similar brands for context. We run through a questionnaire that we created in-house based on the 12 Jungian archetypal figures and leave time at the end to discuss how it fits with your current perceptions and aspirations.
- Stakeholder and customer interviews: Multiple points of view from inside and outside your business help to validate and challenge your perceptions of your brand, competitors and customers. ‘Front-line’ teams such as sales and social media have particularly valuable insights. And by interviewing some of your existing or past customers, we can discover their pain points and the value they’re looking for (or have already found) in your products or services.
- Visual and verbal brand and SEO benchmarking: This is where we don our goggles and lift the hood on your and your competitors’ brands and digital channels. We evaluate the individual elements of visual and verbal branding (from colour palette and typography to messaging and tone of voice) and complete benchmarking and SWOT analysis. We also use SEO tools, including Ahrefs and Google PageSpeed Insights, to benchmark the performance of your website against competitors and identify keyword ranking opportunities.
- Summary of findings: With all that work complete, we create your summary of findings and present it to you on a call. It’s the culmination of our work together to date as well as our independent desk research and analysis. The intention is to ensure we’ve clearly understood your goals, your brand marketing foundations and the landscape in which you operate. It helps us run the next stage at pace and with a shared language (and expectations) for the output. Clients often find this illuminating and thought-provoking on its own but for us it’s the launchpad for the next stage.
Stage two: strategic brand definition
This is where the rubber meets the road. We run more workshops on specific areas of your brand and your customers, aiming to brainstorm and explore new ideas and directions, then develop the blueprint for your brand with the strategic brand definition.
- Positioning workshop: In this session, we go deep into what makes you different from your competitors and how you believe customers currently perceive you in your market. We also explore your ambitions for market positioning and what we can dial up in your strategic brand definition to help support your goals.
- Messaging workshop: Are you prioritising the right messages for your target customers? That’s what we aim to answer in this workshop, comparing the key messages you currently platform with your business’s key strengths and your personas’ core needs.
- Content and tone of voice workshop: Brand strategy goes beyond high-level messaging. It also defines and informs the way you communicate and the content you produce. In the content and tone of voice workshop, we discuss your current approach to content and ask you quick-fire questions about your communication style and preferences.
- Buyer journey mapping workshop: Understanding how your customers get from A (not knowing you) to B (signing up for your products or services) is a critical input for your brand strategy. It also helps inform your sitemap if we’re designing and building your website, as well as your content strategy (which we can also help with!
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Keyword research: To supplement our understanding of what your customers are searching for, we’ll do more in-depth SEO keyword research. We evaluate the keywords that you and your competitors currently rank for and expand our search to relevant themes, topics and content types.
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Strategic brand definition: Finally, we take away the sum total of our collaborative efforts from stage one and stage two and put pen to paper (in the digital sense.) We craft the words for your strategic brand definition—your brand marketing blueprint—and walk you through it on a call. In the Pro brand strategy package, your strategic brand definition includes:
- Mission and vision statements
- Positioning statements
- Value proposition
- Core message
- Service or persona-based messaging
- Tone of voice
If we’re working with you on an Enterprise brand strategy, this list will also include your values and a custom writer’s style guide to help your team and our team write consistently and authentically for your brand.
Add-ons: Creative development and implementation
Our brand strategy packages focus on creating your strategic brand definition—the foundation of your brand identity. But we also offer add-on design services to bring your brand identity to life and implement it across key sales and marketing assets.
- Creative development: Once you have the words that define your brand, we can also realise it visually with you. This can include logo development, a design language and visual style elements that you can use to express your brand across different channels.
- Activation: A new visual brand is exciting. The thought of updating all your sales and marketing assets is less so, especially if you operate with a lean core team. We can take care of this for you too, implementing your visual brand in assets such as capabilities decks, sales collateral and ebook templates. We can also help you embed the new brand across the business with training, coaching and change management.
- Creative implementation. Once you have created (or refreshed) your brand strategy, we can help you bring it to life in the form of a signature website, with thought leadership copywriting and design and with HubSpot-powered marketing automation.
We see the brand strategy phase as foundational to ongoing marketing activity, as you can see from our ‘marketing lifestyle’ journey. We recommend integrating it into a growth plan with regular updates and annual refreshes.
Brand strategy for purpose-driven B2B businesses
Want to avoid being a smooth pebble and supercharge your sales and marketing engine? You’re in the right place. We’re a B Corp-certified brand marketing consultancy that helps other progressive B2B businesses drive growth through differentiation. Get in touch with our team and we’ll discuss how we can boost your brand together.