7 Reasons Why Your Blog Needs a Brand Strategy

I meet people all the time who run their own businesses and blogs, and I always hear about the uphill battles because of the competitive nature of online spaces. My advice is almost always the same 7-word answer: “You need a very strong brand strategy.” Here are the 7 reasons why.

Having a good brand strategy for your blog can help to:

• Set You Apart from Your Competitors
• Communicate More Clearly and Concisely to your Audience
• Build Trust and Loyalty
• Align Your Marketing Efforts
• Increase Your Relevancy in the Market
• Build a Platform for Future Growth
• Attract Better Talent When You Need to Hire and Inspires Your Employees

Having a brand strategy will also help you to treat your blog as a business and make decisions accordingly. Google has been leaning towards favoring brands more with their algorithm updates and having a more cohesive brand presence online will certainly help your blog to grow.

Here are the 7 reasons why your bog needs a brand strategy. It can help to:

1. Set You Apart from Your Competitors

The process of creating a brand strategy for your blog, or for any business for that matter, involves defining your brand, highlighting your differentiating factors and your unique selling point, analyzing your competitors and identifying the unique space that you will occupy online.

This unique space will clearly show how you are different from your competitors and help to set you apart from them in the eyes of your audience. This can be a powerful way to break into a market if you can master this step and market yourself accordingly.

2. Communicate More Clearly and Concisely to your Audience

Your brand strategy will define you as a brand and identify exactly how you should be presenting your brand and to whom your message should be targeted. This will help you to keep on message and create consistency in your content and designs.

Sticking to your brand strategy will help you communicate better to your targeted audience and build your audience better.

3. Build Trust and Loyalty

A part of building and maintaining a well-designed, professional brand with a good brand strategy, is that it builds trust and loyalty with your audience. They get to know you faster because of your consistency, trust you easier cause they know exactly what to expect and become loyal fans or followers of your brand because of it.

This is a very important part of building up an audience and should be a big reason why you should invest a lot of time and energy into getting your brand strategy to work for you. It will help you to make decisions in the long run by always weighing up the effects that a particular subject, piece of content or video will have on the loyalty and trust of your audience.

4. Align Your Marketing Efforts

One of the biggest reasons why a brand strategy can help your blog is the fact that it will help you to align all your marketing efforts.

Once you have your main goal defined and a strategy of how you want to get there, you can create campaigns in support of the same goal. You can always ask whether a marketing technique or specific campaign you are planning, will help you to achieve your goal and whether it is in line with your overall brand message and strategy.

Your brand strategy helps you to aim at something and identify whether doing specific things will help or hurt your blog.

5. Increase Your Relevancy in the Market

Helping you to identify and fill a unique space in the market place will help to increase your relevancy in the market. Once you have carved out your place and build on that, your audience will become reliant on your content and unique offering.

It is also important to access your strategy and relevancy from time to time as markets change. Although you should always still stick to your unique selling proposition, if it is still relevant in the market, you should always adapt to new ways of communicating with your audience and ways of getting your content to your audience.

6. Build a Platform for Future Growth

A big part of your brand strategy is to focus on the ultimate future goals for your brand. Keeping this in mind is a good way to build your platform in a way that is ready for future growth.

Patience plays a big role in the future success of any business, especially online businesses. The everyday decisions and actions you engage usually have very little return on investment in the beginning and takes a long time to pay off. The Google algorithm takes months to rank articles and if you promote your blog on social media channels, it takes a long time to build up an audience.

But understanding that every step is important and should be done right and that it all helps to build your platform for your future growth can be frustrating at times. That being said, to have a brand strategy is a great way to endure these frustrating times and keeping your eye on the main goal of your brand.

The consistency and cohesiveness that your brand benefits from having a good brand strategy also helps to build the exact audience that you will ultimately benefit the most from. Even if you end up targeting very specific people because of your positioning, it’s better to have a small audience of your exact target audience than to have a big audience that is difficult to convert to your offerings.

7. Attract Better Talent When You Need to Hire and Also Helps to Inspire Your Employees

And the last thing on the list of reasons why your blog needs a brand strategy is because it’s will help you to attract better talent when you need to start hiring a team of people to help out with your business. Remember that just like any business, expansion, and scaling is usually part of the long-term goal and that would require you to hire a few or even many employees.

The more organized, on point, on message, well-designed, well-communicated and strategically relevant your brand appears in any market, the more likely you will have people that would be happy to work with you. This will give you the advantage of selecting the ones that you feel to be best suited for your brand.

Aside from the hiring of employees, your brand strategy can also help you to effectively communicate your brand message to employees internally in ways that will motivate them, inspire them and get them excited about being part of your brand and its vision.

Having highly-skilled, passionate employees that believe in your brand and communicate the same to the outside world can be a very powerful marketing force that is hard to contend with and will greatly benefit your brand.

Conclusion

Whether you are a small blog, just starting or a well-established brand with an audience, it’s absolutely key to the long-term success of your brand to have a good brand strategy.

It’s not something that has to take up all your time or cost you a lot of money to create, but the necessary time and effort to create it will ultimately pay off big time in your favor and you will be grateful for it.