Brand strategy and marketing strategy are often intertwined, and while they do work hand-in-hand there are important differences. In this post, we will cover brand strategy vs marketing strategy, what makes them different, how they work together, and how to strategize for your business.
Brand Strategy
Your brand is how the company is perceived, similar to your brand perception. This includes everything from your logo, colors, fonts, imaging, and even online reviews. A brand strategy is a game plan on how to best utilize branding to product market fit and is derived from your brand development. In other words, how to best use a brand to sell more to customers and appeal more to your consumer.
A company with an excellent brand strategy understands what its consumer needs and exhibits their need through its brand. To explain this, Mcdonald’s understands consumers want well-priced food, fast. Therefore, their branding appeals to consumers who are hungry, on the go, and price sensitive. In one example, the red and yellow colors are colors that have been proven to exhibit hungriness.
Marketing Strategy
Marketing is the activity you do to achieve your branding strategy. So, your marketing strategy can include your content strategy, public relations, digital marketing, and advertising campaign strategies.
To add to our previous discussion on Mcdonald’s, the fast-food chain uses television advertisements to talk about how efficient, and cost-effective their food is. Moreover, Mcdonald’s lists their cheaper menu options quite frequently in advertisements and on the menu. This directly matches their brand strategy.
Brand Strategy vs Marketing Strategy
How your marketing strategies perform and what they do is a part of your branding strategy. To illustrate this, a brand strategy could be to appear as a family company, in other words, a company a family should trust. Therefore, a marketing strategy to execute your brand strategy could be to televise advertisements with families trusting your business. Or, developing content around these ideas.
How To Get Your Branding & Marketing Strategies Right
To get your strategies right, they need to be able to appeal to a particular consumer group and work together to sell to that group. Some larger companies, conduct consumer research to find out what consumers are interested in. If you are a smaller company, no sweat! Oftentimes, you can infer what a consumer needs by asking your previous customers and reading online reviews.
As a local home service company, you might brand your company around quick turnaround times and reasonable prices. Therefore, your branding should reflect the idea that your company is efficient and reasonably priced from your logo to colors, imaging, and design.
Check out our home service marketing guidebook for more information.
Next, your marketing strategy should consider your brand strategy and execute it accordingly. Using the same example from above, your home service company could run advertisements with messaging around fast turnarounds and reasonable prices. Moreover, your content development should focus on the same messaging. Finally, releasing a public relations article on how you are able to save time and money for families can additionally execute your branding strategy through marketing efforts.
Execute Your Marketing Strategies
Your marketing material is developed through your brand. At WolfPack Advising, we help companies execute their branding strategies through web design, search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, and more. Just check out the industries we work with our awesome reviews to see how we can help your company achieve your goals.
