Corporate Branding Strategy – The Ultimate Guide
Your brand identity is essential to your success, whether you’re running a small business or a large corporate entity. People need to know who you are and what you do. The goal is to strengthen your corporate identity to the point where potential customers recognize your logo and even think about your brand when they need certain products or services.
For example, brand names like McDonald’s, Apple, Nike, and Coca-Cola are so strong that they are instantly recognizable by just their logos. However, to build a brand identity that’s as successful as those brands, you’ll need to implement an effective corporate branding strategy.
What is Corporate Branding and Why is it Important?
Corporate branding is creating a unique brand identity for your company that people recognize. This includes developing a logo, tagline, and marketing materials that accurately represent your business.
It also involves creating a consistent message across all of your marketing channels, from your website to your social media pages.
When done correctly, corporate branding can help you stand out from the competition and attract new customers.
For example, recently, Apple announced that they will be 100% carbon neutral by 2030. Now, this is the thing that is not related to the products or services they offer. But they made ads and marketed their move.
This thing helped Apple to show what’s their mission, and if you want to be part of its mission, then keep using Apple products.
To show that they are severe, they removed chargers from the phone’s box, and at the same time, they launched a $1,000+ phone ($1,000 phone without charger). Results? iPhone 12 is the best-selling iPhone worldwide (100 Million units sold till April 2021).
Of course, its features, design, and marketing played an important role here.
This was just an example; developing perfect corporate branding requires time.
How to Develop a Corporate Branding Strategy?
To develop a corporate branding strategy, you can’t just come up with a logo and tagline and call it a day. A corporate branding strategy is a process that involves several different steps. These steps include the following:
1) Identify Your Target Audience
When you first start your business, it’s easy to think you can appeal to everyone. But to create a successful corporate branding strategy, you need to target a specific audience and focus your marketing efforts on them. Trying to appeal to everyone will dilute your message and make it difficult for you to stand out from the competition.
2) Develop Your Brand Mission Statement
Your company’s mission statement lays out what your company’s purpose is, what its objectives are, and how it plans to serve its target audience. Basically, it’s your company’s primary goal — and it’s vital to your brand identity.
3) Identify Your Unique Value Proposition
There are probably hundreds of other companies in your industry, so it’s essential to research what sets you apart from the competition. Do you offer better customer service than your competitors? Do you have a more extensive product line? Identify your unique value proposition and emphasize it as part of your brand message.
4) Making Your Message Consistent
For a corporate branding strategy to be effective, you must ensure your message is consistent across all your marketing channels. This means the tone and aesthetic of your website, social media pages, and other marketing materials should be the same. This will help customers develop a consistent perception of your brand and make connecting with your company easier.
5) Creating a Visual Identity
Your visual identity must reflect your brand’s messaging and be consistent across all channels. Elements of your visual identity include your logo, tagline, free business cards, and even the color palette you use. For instance, if your logo uses a blue-and-white color palette, you should stick with that color scheme when designing your website.
6) Develop Your Marketing Strategy
To effectively market your brand, you need to implement a comprehensive marketing strategy that helps spread awareness of your brand’s message. The following are a few strategies that are critical to strong corporate branding. Just remember to keep your branding (including the visual elements and message) consistent across all channels.
- Content marketing: Content marketing is developing high-quality, educational content relevant to your target audience. Doing so can help establish your brand authority, which will boost your brand reputation. It can include online marketing strategies such as email newsletters, creating a blog on your website, creating video content, and more.
- Social media marketing: Maintaining a regular social media presence will help you reach a large audience, thereby putting you in a position to strengthen your brand identity and spread awareness about your brand’s message online, all of which are critical elements to corporate branding.
- Outbound marketing: In addition to online marketing, you should develop marketing materials for the real world. For instance, using product brochures and digital signage to spread awareness about your brand at tradeshows and other outdoor locations or running ads in magazines or on TV that spread your brand message.
Example of Corporate Branding – Nike
As you have read about corporate branding and understand it theoretically, let us see any real-life example; for this post, we will choose Nike. A famous brand among athletes, they sell sports-related products like Sneakers, Sports shoes, Sports Tshirt, Shorts, Joggers, etc.
In the fiscal year 2020 – 21, Nike made $28 billion in sales, which makes it the highest-selling brand in Sneakers. To know how significant this number is at the second position, we have Adidas, which made $13.7 billion in the same year.
Nike’s sales are more than double of Adidas.
The main customer base of Nike is sports enthusiasts; they know their target customers, so they market their products according to them.
- Their most successful marketing campaign is the ‘Just do it‘ campaign
- The Nike logo is also designed by keeping the target customer in mind; it gives a sporty look.
- They have also advertised their products from famous athletes, like Micheal Jordan.
- Their marketing campaign also shows their core values, like ‘sharing hope and inspiration‘ and ‘Always striving for better‘; you can see these words in their ads and tagline. This is also a core value of an Athlete, which makes Nike more related to athletes and Sports enthusiasts.
- More importantly, their marketing campaigns are consistent. (Nike spent $3.11 billion in advertising and marketing in 2022)
Many of us can’t do such heavy marketing to promote our business, but if you can focus only on the first step, the rest of things will fall into place. The first step is to Identify your target customer.
Wrapping Up
The importance of corporate branding can’t be overstated, so you should follow these tips to implement a successful corporate branding strategy. By following these steps, you’ll be on your way to creating a corporate branding strategy that can help cement your brand identity and spread greater awareness of your business.
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Dev Patel says
Branding has gained great popularity in the coming years and it is growing in importance. So it is important to have a corporate branding strategy to have strong branding for your brand. Thanks for this blog!
BlogHeist says
Hey Dev!
We hope you could benefit from our post.
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Dev Patel says
Branding is really important in today’s competitive world. This was truly an easy-to-understand guide regarding branding. Thanks for the blog.
BlogHeist says
Hey Dev!
Thanks for appreciating.
It’s good to know you found our article easy to understand and helpful.
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Alexandra says
I agree to what you said that brand identity is essential to your success when it comes to business. Thank you for sharing this article, it really helps me in my business