Having a well-rounded brand strategy helps you identify the marketing channels you must focus on, and defines every aspect of how your business is viewed by your customers.

Marketing and advertising is an integral component of every business. The US Small Business Administration recommends that businesses with do under $5 million in gross sales and whose net profit margin is in the 10-12% should spend at least 7-8% of their gross revenue in marketing and advertising. In other words, if you are doing $100,000 in annual revenue, you should be spending around $8,000 a year in advertising your business.

That is a lot of money. Yet a growing number of small and medium business owners dive into advertising without even thinking through the finer aspects of marketing such as targeting and communication strategy. In this article, we will take you through the four steps that should precede your marketing efforts. Having a well-rounded brand strategy helps you identify the marketing channels you must focus on, and defines every aspect of how your business is viewed by your customers.

Find Your Unique Buying Tribe (UBT)
The first lesson in marketing is that customers like to buy, not be sold. This is only possible when you find that unique buying tribe (UBT) who identifies with your business values and practices. ‘Business values' here can mean anything that your UBT identifies with. A UBT that prefers affordable products would buy from a business like WalMart while one that prefers convenience would choose Amazon. The idea here is to study and find the kind of buyer group to whom your products will appeal to.

Data Analytics
Once a UBT has been identified, the next step is to understand their characteristics better. This must go beyond the likes and dislikes of your UBT and must instead focus on the prevailing culture and trends among your audience. For instance, a gaming store may find their UBT religiously follows anime. One point to note here though - such trends among your UBT tends to evolve constantly. What works today may be passé in just a few months from now. A good way to understand ‘what's in' at the moment is to use social media analytics tools to pick the popular culture among your UBT. This step of your brand strategy building process needs to be constantly revisited in order to ensure that you stay ahead of the curve in understanding your audience preferences.

Identify a Brand Positioning
At this point, you know who your audience is and what they like. The next step is to define the way you would like yourself to be presented to them. This is called ‘brand positioning'. Do you want to be seen as ‘affordable' or ‘premium'? Do you want to project the convenience that your business provides, or the return policy? To put this in short, an ideal brand positioning strategy would require the business to come up with all the USPs (Unique Selling Proposition) that you offer to your prospective customers and picking one that will appeal the most to your UBT.

Build a Messaging Strategy
This is the final step of your brand strategy process. At this stage, you know who you want to target, the popular culture in their circles and the kind of positioning you want to achieve. With all this information at hand, you could now start building a messaging strategy. This process involves identifying all the relevant communication channels to pick (billboards, social media, radio, etc.) and the language you use to communicate your brand. It is important to keep this messaging in sync with your brand values and at the same time ensure that this appeals to your UBT.

Building a brand strategy is only the first step in your marketing process. Marketing your business is a long-drawn affair that includes revisiting these steps above multiple times for the various UBTs you want to reach out to. Also, marketers seldom meet their objectives in the first attempt and this would require marketers to tweak and test each step of the above process several times until you hit the sweet spot.

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