Did you know it takes between five and seven impressions for a buyer to remember a brand? But catchy logos and ad campaigns aren’t the only things you need to grow your brand. While your brand growth partly relies on your brand image, many other moving pieces help create the brand-to-buyer connections new companies lack.

Canadian start-ups are full of innovative products and services that aim to satisfy the pain points of their target consumer. Unfortunately, even companies with great products flounder because they don’t have the right tools to build their company brand. 

Brand growth is a purposeful cycle that builds upon brand strategy, architecture, expression, activation, and measurement. Once you implement these tenants for brand building, you’ll have all the tools you need to grow your brand exponentially.

What is Brand Growth?

Brand growth is the process of building your company’s physical and mental availability. Brand growth focuses on each company’s long-term goals and incremental milestones along the way. Your brand should grow in two branches; one takes up equity in your market and the other in the minds of your target consumer.

As a brand grows, the space it takes up in its relevant market also grows. Start-up brands have no equity in their market, so their brand growth strategy should start from the beginning and work outward in categories like:

• Market penetration
• Market development
• New product development
• Diversification

The folly of some new brands is believing that marketing is only about selling products. The truth is that while marketing does sell products, it’s also responsible for your brand image, awareness, recognition, growth, and more. So, when you’re coming up with brand marketing strategies, ask what it can do for the company brand in terms of expansion and growth.

The Five Tenants of Brand Growth

Internet resources offer many tips and tricks on brand growth, which all help to some extent. But, each of those tips will fall under one of the five tenants of brand growth. Learning the foundations of building your brand now will help you use numerous brand growth tools down the road.

1: Creating a Brand Strategy

A brand strategy is a roadmap for the growth of your business. It is the plan that encompasses every other tenant of brand growth. Every phase of brand growth should begin with a brand strategy.

There are a few ways in which a brand strategy is integral to growing your business. The first is that it sets your goals and expectations. Having defined criteria that you can measure with metrics helps you generate goals for your marketing.

Moreover, brand strategy encourages organization. Therefore, your brand will exude cohesion and professionalism on par with your competitors.

The biggest brands in the world have created processes that their marketing teams have meticulously executed. Apple is one of the most recognized brands on earth, and they are known for having a specific set of core values that make its product experience unique. These core values translate into how they design products, how customers interact with them, and even how they package them.

You can develop your brand strategy in-house by understanding your target market, your values, and what messaging resonates with this group. Or you can turn to an outside agency specializing in developing comprehensive plans for growing brands through strategic media relations and creative storytelling.

2: Developing Brand Architecture

Brand architecture is about organizing and naming your products or services. Most businesses begin with a single product or service but find themselves with many offerings upon expansion. The ill-defined organization of those offerings can halt brand growth in its tracks.

Brand architecture is easier to understand using an example. Let’s say you’re a start-up tech company in Canada. You created photo-editing software and started selling it via online subscriptions.

As you get more users, you realize you want to add a video editing platform as well. Now, you have two software as a service offerings under your brand, which you can designate as sub-brands. A quality brand architecture will designate differences between each services branding while maintaining your unique brand image.

Think about the Microsoft office lineup. MS Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook all have unique branding. But, they also align with the parent brand, providing clarity and cohesion for consumers.

Your business will grow healthier when the company brand and your sub-brands present a united front. You become recognizable and trustworthy in the eyes of potential buyers.

3: Expressing Your Brand

Brand expression focuses on how you funnel the narrative of your brand story to your ideal customers. This business brand growth strategy may be the broadest in your toolbox.

Each time a consumer interacts with your brand is a “brand touchpoint.” Brand touchpoints are opportunities for brand expression. A touchpoint can be many things, including but not limited to the following:

• Physical and digital advertisements
• Social media and blog content
• Logos, insignias, and signage
• Product design and packaging
• Employee uniforms
• Company fleet makes, models, colors, and details
• The interior design of physical stores
• Web design

You are in control of all these touchpoints. From graphic design to copywriting, you’re the puppetmaster behind how people interact with your brand.

Covering all the bases of brand expression at once isn’t always possible for start-ups and small businesses. So, making strategic decisions about where to focus your brand expression efforts is important.

Consider focusing your efforts on touchpoints that offer the highest returns for the effort and money it takes to create them. For example, companies find using conversion-driving content to create a brand funnel worthwhile.

You also have the option of outsourcing these projects to brand expression efforts. With a little help, you can cover more touchpoints than you would in-house and reap greater returns.

4: Activating Your Brand

Imagine a line tethered from your brand to the consumer’s mind when you think of brand activation. When they see elements that remind them of your brand, the line activates; it tightens and draws them toward you.

The stronger your brand activation, the more taught the line becomes. But how do you create the line, let alone pull it?

Brand activation is another area where consistency is key. Its success depends on thoroughly defining and executing your brand identity, including:

• Brand story
• Messaging hierarchy
• Tone and voice
• Brand aesthetics
• Logo and usage guidelines
• Brand colors and usage guidelines
• Typography and iconography
• Photography and usage guidelines

Once these standards are in place, you may use them in your marketing campaigns. With a solid reference, you ensure the consistency of your marketing across all platforms. Thus, consumers begin identifying certain colors, words, and symbols with your brand, forming and tightening that line.

5: Measuring Your Brand

Brand measurement is a continuous process that helps facilitate brand growth. By reviewing the efficacy of your marketing efforts, you may reflect and tweak on an as-needed basis. You can conduct brand measurement in four phases.

Phase 1

First, you must record and collect metrics. Pay attention to important consumer data metrics like:

• Content marketing click-through rate
• Landing page conversion rate
• Advertising campaign conversion rate
• Demographics of the audience reached
• Social media interactions
• Product or service reviews
• Customer service data

You can also collect data through consumer surveys to get direct feedback from your buyers. Finally, you should perform a content audit of your and your competitor’s content. Although you can complete this phase through manual entry, using CRM software will save you time and increase the accuracy of your data.

Phase 2

The next phase of brand measurement is organization. Organize each data set collected to understand what resonates with your audience and doesn’t.

For example, say your last social media campaign flopped. You won’t know that until you organize the number of likes, shares, and post interactions from it and compare it to last season. The same goes for SEO ranking, click-through rates, conversions, and other metrics.

Phase 3

Phase three is all about interpreting the data. Take the flopped social media campaign from earlier as an example; what made it different from the successful campaign last season?

There will be some aspects of the content that didn’t resonate with your audience. It could come down to language, imagery, and even tone.

Phase 4

Once you identify the gaps in your brand touchpoints, you can move on to the final phase; tweak and test again. Make appropriate changes moving forward based on your interpretations of that data. At regular intervals, go through the brand measurement process again, tweak, and grow.

This time-intensive process is hard to do alone, especially when you try to combine it with all the tenants of brand growth. That’s why it helps to have extra hands on deck to uplift your brand.

Start Your Brand Growth Journey Today

Brand growth is a full-time effort. Many start-ups in Canada and even established brands have trouble keeping up with the demands of launching and proliferating their brand. Don’t let the time commitment of this necessary process keep you from building your brand.

Instead, consider hiring a third-party expert to take care of it. At Brandhouse, we take a pragmatic approach to developing your brand through creativity and innovation. If you’re ready to build your brand with the help of our best-in-business brand strategists, contact us today for a free consultation.