The 7 Steps to Marketing Success - Creating a Strong Brand that Appeals to your Target Audience

Written by Jane Gregory

Marketing can feel overwhelming when you’re starting out in business, or are a small business owner, because it’s just one of so many hats you have to wear.

Even when you find the time to think about your marketing it can be really tough to know where to start. Should you get active on social media? Spend time working on your brand? Or how about a website or paid advertising? SEO or influencers? Or should you look at ebay, Amazon or ETSY? Write a blog or post on Linkedin? Arrrgh!

With so much to think about it’s no wonder that many businesses struggle to market effectively and consistently, and that’s why we’ve put together this mini series to hopefully give you a clear track to run on. Over the next few weeks we’ll be looking at the following 7 Steps to Marketing Success:

1). Know your target market

2). Create a strong brand that will appeal to them

3). Develop powerful key messages, copy and images

4). Develop a strategic marketing plan

5). Implement your plan

6). Maximise your existing customers

7). Staying competitive

Step 2: Creating a Strong Brand that Appeals to your Target Audience

To help you define your target market, you need to really understand your own brand, so you can work out who you’re a fit for. You should ask yourself some searching questions such as ‘Why does my brand exist?’ ‘What are my brand’s values?’  ‘What is my brand’s mission?’ ‘Why would someone buy into my brand’s ideas and ideals?’ ‘How is my brand different?

Remember last time we talked about Apple? Well the Apple brand (not the company, not its assets, just the brand) is valued around £1.2 TRILLION, which is pretty successful by anyone’s standards. Yet they have persuaded fewer than half of us in the UK who could buy their phones, to do so, and only around one quarter of us who buy computers, to buy theirs.

Why? Because those of us who don’t buy their products, haven’t bought into their brand, the brand story, the emotions the brand evokes (brands are quite emotional beasts, honestly, but we haven’t space to go into that here) it hasn’t resonated with us sufficiently to motivate us to buy their stuff. In other words, we’re not their target market, so therefore the brand doesn’t resonate with us.

Is Apple bothered by that? Well of course they’d like to sell more product and get even bigger, but my guess is that they understood pretty early on that no brand ever in the history of brands has, or will ever appeal to everyone, and no brand should ever try. So what you should do therefore is be crystal clear who/what your brand is/is about, who it’s for and why they’ll like it, and stop worrying about those you’re not a fit for. End of.

There are some great brand exercises to help you with this, and we guide you through some of them on the Creating a Brand workshop (as well as exercises to help define your target market). Once you have this base established, you can start to develop the personality and tone of voice of the brand, which then needs to be applied consistently.

Only once you’ve done all the above should you start thinking about your brand style i.e. logo, colours, fonts, images etc as this should be a visual shorthand for who your brand’s for, what it’s values are etc. (unfortunately too many people only focus on the brand style, and forget the rest!)

So either find some good branding exercises to help you get started or come on our FREE branding workshop, and we’ll get you moving in the right direction.

Ready to Take Control of Your Marketing?

Don’t let marketing overwhelm hold you back! signup to any of our free marketing and social media workshop on our website. You can also access our FREE 1-2-1 help and advice any time by giving our Gateway team a call on 0114 224 5000.