A brand strategy is a decision about the foundation of your business.

One that helps you choose:

• The unique value you bring to the market
• For whom (ideal customers)
• How (differentiator)

That one decision dictates everything else you do: sales, marketing, messaging, website, operations, customer support, pricing, positioning, offer, service, product, and even human resources.

All of it stems from that strategy.

Most businesses skip that decision — out of fear of choosing wrong, not knowing how to start, just wanting to get running and figure everything else out as they go, or because they’re already relatively successful and don’t feel the need for it.

Eventually, the reality sets in:

• They attract less-than-ideal customers
• Don’t know how to communicate what they do
• Hit a revenue ceiling, and nothing seems to work
• End up offering custom work because they don’t know what to do

Without that core decision in place, everything is a test—and there’s no clarity on how to effectively reach your ideal customers.

So, how do you make the decision that drives your company forward?

We’re about to get nerdy up in here. 🤓

What is a Brand Strategy?

Before we dive into the how, let’s define the what.

A brand strategy is not a personality, message, design, or your purpose, mission, vision, and values.

Those are brand components that come after you have a brand strategy in place.

A brand strategy is a statement about your unique value, ideal customers, and differentiator.

Here’s the statement template we use at Shft, adapted from Marty Neumeier’s Onlyness Statement:

It’s an internal statement—one that you share with your team, not plaster on your website, but drives your marketing messages.

If you don’t have a statement like that, you don’t have a brand strategy. And are likely guessing at why customers should choose you. Or, worse yet, trying to make a basic expectation as a differentiator.

How to Write Your Brand Strategy

The easiest way to start is by tackling the four components of the statement above — making those decisions so you can compile them into a single sentence that your team can memorize.

Category

Determining your category is the easiest of the four components.

The simplest way to start is to ask yourself: how do I currently describe my business?

Brand positioning agency, web development firm, AI development agency, infrastructure as code consulting agency, IoT remote monitoring firm, communications agency.

What is your business?

Next, test if that’s the right category for you:

• Drop your category into a Google Search to see if similar businesses show up in the results.
• Repeat that on the AI platform of your choice (like ChatGPT)
• If similar businesses show up, you’re in the right category
• If not, tweak your word choices and retest

You want to find a category that your ideal customers actually search.

If you try to be clever here and come up with a label that no one searches for (i.e. a new category), you’ll have to spend a lot of time and money educating your market on the category before they even consider your product.

Unique Value

Next, determine the unique value you bring to the market — the value customers can only get from you.

The easiest way to think about unique value is the transformation you bring to your clients.

It’s not a process or deliverable. It’s what your process or deliverable does for your ideal customers that they can’t get anywhere else.

Here are some examples:

• Enables you to operate your platform efficiently in-house
• Turns data from your equipment into prioritized to-do lists
• Extends the life of your high vacuum system

Hint: sometimes it’s easier to start with your differentiator to determine the value you bring.

How/Differentiator

Your differentiator spells out how you provide that unique value in a unique way.

It’s found at the intersection of:

• What you do exceptionally well (often hidden in a process or deliverable)
• What your customers want or need (it has to matter to their business)
• What your competitors can’t or won’t do (they can’t copy it)

Think beyond personality, quality, your team, the “fact” that you care, or being authentic. Those are lazy differentiators that are really basic expectations of giving you money.

Look at the category you chose and see if anyone else in that category provides this value.

Here are some examples:

• Implements and upskills your team on IaC workflows
• With our data strategies and custom remote monitoring systems.
• Using heavy-duty components and following a 7-point Uptime+ remanufacturing process to maintain OEM specs and tolerances

Ideal Customers

Lastly, it’s time to define your ideal customers.

There are two directions you can take:

• Positive: driven, ambitious, ready to change
• Negative: overwhelmed, frustrated, at the end of their rope

Positive descriptors are best when a mindset change is the motivating factor to buy.

For instance, our clients at Shft tend to have reached a point where they’ve tried various marketing tactics and realize that another hack or system won’t fix their fundamental issues.

Negative descriptors are best when pain is the motivating factor to buy.

Examples include:

• Determined CEOs of 7-8 figure service companies
• Engineering leaders seeking to scale their platform velocity
• Overwhelmed HR leaders looking to solve conflict in their team
• OEMs struggling to make sense of their data

Write Your Brand Strategy Statement

Once you’ve determined those components, it’s time to write your brand strategy.

Here’s that template again:

A few tips for you:

• Be concise. You’ll want your team to memorize this statement.
• Choose your words. Play with word choices until you land on the exact right meaning. Most words have multiple meanings.
• Make it easy to say. Don’t choose complex words. Make it easy for your team to rattle off without even thinking.

Here’s Shft’s brand strategy as an example:

You can see our components fairly easily:

• Category: brand positioning agency
• Unique Value: makes you the only choice
• Differentiator: turning what you do, not who you are, into a brand os
• Ideal customers: struggling B2B service CEOs

That statement took 31 iterations to get to the point where we felt it encapsulated who we are and the value we provide.

Don’t be afraid to play with word choices and tweak this statement until you feel like it fits you. Remember: it’s the foundation of your business. It needs to feel like you.

Craft Your Brand Strategy

Creating a brand strategy to drive your business is the smartest thing you can do for revenue growth.

Everything else — messaging, identity, experience, purpose, marketing, sales, website, product, offer, customer support, pricing, positioning, and even hr — is built upon that foundation.

I know the temptation to jump straight to a logo and website when rebranding your company. We’re in the middle of a rebrand here at Shft, and I’m more than ready for our new website to be live.

But without a brand strategy in place, you won’t have the right message, design, or story to share on your website.

Get the foundation in place first. Everything else gets easier that way.

Don’t want to DIY your brand strategy?

We’re taking on 4 more Brand OS clients through the end of the year.

Put the Shft team to work crafting your brand strategy, positioning, messaging, experience, identity (tone of voice and design), website, content, and marketing — all so you become the only choice for your ideal customers.

Until next week,

#SassyJason out.

✌🏼