The Building Blocks of Your Marketing Strategy Step 4: Build Your Brand

How do you come up with the elements of your content strategy? To figure out your Five Ws, you’ll need to do some work that will include determining your goals, finding your key topics, thinking through your target audience or ideal reader, and more.

Note that building your content strategy does not begin by creating content. In fact, we won’t even get into actually creating content until the next section, because before you do so, you have to know what you’re creating, why you’re creating it, who you’re creating it for, and where and when you’re posting it.

Deliberately Build Your Brand

Literary organizations, bookstores, and even authors need branding, too! But what exactly is branding? When the term started, it was used to refer to the brand on cattle, which differentiated one ranch’s cattle from another. As goods went to market, a product’s “brand” was who it was made by, distinguishable by label and packaging, so that a customer could know who they were getting their product from, and if that company was known for high-quality products.

Today, a brand goes beyond just the logo and label. David Ogilvy, the father of advertising, once defined a brand as “The intangible sum of a product’s attributes.” That doesn’t just include the product, the logo, or the label, but the voice and style they use in their messaging, a customer’s history and experiences with the company or product, how the company makes the customer feel, and how attached they are to the company’s mission. For example, Apple’s brand isn’t just their products and their logo, but the feeling of being part of a creative and forward-thinking community.

The Benefits of Cultivating Your Brand

There are a number of benefits that come along with building your brand:

Brand recognition: By using the same logo, colors, voice, and other consistent elements of a brand, you become more recognizable to your customers (who hasn’t immediately recognized a brick-and-mortar Barnes & Noble from way down the road!). This recognition makes them more likely to choose you or create an affinity towards you.

Increased customer loyalty: Having a consistent brand, especially in your messaging and voice on how you tell your story, can increase customer and audience trust and affinity, resulting in higher loyalty. This is why some readers have their favorite bookstore they shop at, or why they purchase books published by a certain publishing company.

Marketing alignment: By determining your brand voice, messaging, colors, and other attributes, you’re helping align your marketing efforts across various channels, creating more consistency and coherence.

Community-building: Part of a brand also includes what they stand for. People aren’t just loyal to a brand whose products they like but who welcomes them into a like-minded community.

Elevated perceived value: Brands with a clear logo, recognizable colors, consistent voice and fonts, and that center around their topic of expertise are perceived as being more “put together” and thus deliver higher value than businesses or organizations whose brands are inconsistent. A higher perceived value can help you draw in and retain customers, and even charge higher prices as well.

Elements of a Brand

What can you or should you include in your branding?

Logo: If you’re a business or organization, create a logo that is simple, easily recognizable, and represents who you are. You can even consider doing this as an author, too.

Colors: Choose your brand colors, one primary and one secondary. This will help give your content consistency and can be a visual signal to your followers.

Font: Brands tend to have their own unique fonts as well, so choose a primary and secondary font to use on your website, in your newsletter, and on your social media posts.

Voice: Another key part of creating a brand is figuring out your brand voice. Is your voice confident and knowledgeable? Is your voice simple and humorous? Is your voice nerdy and punny? Having a consistent brand voice allows you to show your audience who you are, which will help attract the right audience. Your audience will also come to expect that voice, which is why consistency is key.

Topics: Another element of your brand is the topics you talk about, as we went over above. Consistently talking about certain topics will help create that brand recognition and affinity.

For example, a bookstore dedicated to the romance genre might choose a romance-related name, their branding colors might be all red, they might use a more cursive font in their content, and they will likely post all about romance novels, romance new releases, romance authors, literary date night ideas, and more.

In the next step, we’ll look at how to choose and set up your channels.

Hi! I’m Jessica, and I help literary businesses, organizations, and authors build and execute their marketing strategies. If you'd like to learn how to do this 👆, come work with me!