What’s The Difference Between Brand Strategy and Marketing Strategy?

For businesses, branding and marketing are important aspects for growth and sustainability. But the two and their differences are often misunderstood, not just in business itself, but by companies and even their own marketing departments. Because they are different things, the strategies used for branding are marketing must be different as well. To truly understand how the strategies should differ, the differences between branding and marketing must first be understood.

Branding

A company’s brand is your targeted audience’s entire experience with your company. It is a sum off all the information about a product, service, or organisation. It is formed first in the mind then is reinforced at all points of contact. Branding is the process of establishing, reinforcing, and enhancing experiences with an organisation or product. It communicates a promise made by you to your intended audience and created a distinct and memorable image to your customers. Branding is a strategic pull tactic to help build customer loyalty. It is achieved through simplification (less = more). It reinforces the truths of an organisation. It is used to influence purchasing decisions by occupying a spot in a customer’s mind. It is, simply put, “a promise delivered.” It is everything about your company, and so you must define what it stands for, and communicate that to your targeted audience as you identify what they want and tell them why you are better than your competitors.

Marketing

Marketing is simply the active promotion of a brand’s product or service. It is reaching out and engaging with people. It is a way to stay at the top of the minds of decision-makers you are doing business with. It is a push tactic. It is a tactical maneuver used to cultivate customers. It is a form of one-on-one communication used to promote a brand’s products or services in the market and is used to influence a customer’s immediate decision to purchase something.

In short, then, marketing is the means of getting your message or promise out to customers while your brand is how you keep the promise you made through delivery to customers. Marketing promotes an intended value while branding reinforces it. For example, if you have a substandard service, marketing will help you get a sale while branding will only enhance the thought of your substandard service. Branding will, at the end of the day, give your customers the knowledge they need to either underline your name or draw a line through it.

Taking these differences into consideration, you can see that a branding strategy will lay the foundation for your marketing strategy. Your branding strategy should plan out:

🌟how you will communicate with your targeted audience – understand your targeted audience’s motivations for selecting your product so you can persuade the rationally but motivate them emotionally

🌟where you will communicate your messages – know where your audience is, i.e. where they get their information (blogs, print media, YouTube, etc.) and position yourself there

🌟who you will communicate your messages to – understand your audience – their concerns, aspirations, personalities, behavior, etc. so you can shape your messages effectively

🌟how you will evaluate success– measure your level of success with key brand metrics

In comparison, a marketing strategy will include:

🌟goals – these can include a variety of things, such as sales, profits, tracking website visitors, subscribers to YouTube channels, etc.

🌟target audience – define your audience clearly and precisely for will be mostly to buy from you

🌟SWOT analysis – an honest review of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This will help guide your strategy

🌟competitive review – reviewing your top 3-5 competitors and what their key messages are, what venues they use, their tactics, etc. will help you develop your messaging appropriately while still keeping in line with your brand and determining in which similar areas and ways you might wish to compete

🌟schedule of activities – determine which ways/activities you will communicate information to your audience. These can be marketing, public relations, events, symposiums, print ads, internet marketing, etc.

🌟monitoring of results – decide how you will monitor results and determine how a strategic marketing approach/campaign worked or not. Your overall strategy should be flexible enough to be able to adapt if a tactic doesn’t seem to be working out well.