Brand strategy for conscious businesses in 5 steps
Impactful branding for conscious businesses is more important than ever. These days, customers seek out businesses that operate with intention and social responsibility.
You started your business to make a positive impact, but may need help engaging with customers who share your values. Conscious branding intentionally aligns your actions and messaging with what your ideal customers want.
We’re here to help you in your journey to grow. In five steps, you’ll craft an impactful brand strategy that’ll help your conscious business connect with the right audience.
You’ll not only get business clarity, but you’ll see higher reach and engagement as well.
“Branding is the process of connecting good strategy with good creativity”
Brand alignment is the heart of a conscious brand strategy. It helps all the components of your business work in harmony. With strong brand alignment, your customer’s experience matches their expectations.
Conscious branding encourages a positive emotional connection between your customer and you.
Does that sound good? Let’s get started with the 5 Steps of Brand Strategy!
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The importance of brand strategy
Before the five steps, let’s quickly go over brand strategy.
Simply put, it’s an intentional plan to build, shape, and grow your brand. And it’s more than a logo, fonts and colours—it’s the entire experience your customers have with your brand.
A clear brand strategy makes it easier to connect with your audience and give them what they’re looking for. You can craft a conscious brand strategy at any time, whether you’re just starting out or are considering a new direction.
“Branding is the process of connecting good strategy with good creativity”
Brand alignment is the heart of a conscious brand strategy. It helps all the components of your business work in harmony. With strong brand alignment, your customer’s experience matches their expectations.
Conscious branding encourages a positive emotional connection between your customer and you.
Does that sound good? Let’s get started with the 5 Steps of Brand Strategy!
Step 1. Define your brand’s past, present, and future
The first step to impactful branding for conscious businesses is to get a baseline.
Define where you’ve come from, where you want to go, and why this is important. What is your compelling story? What makes your brand unique, trustworthy, and relatable?
Your answers to these questions will become the starting point in an authentic and relatable story-led brand.
Here’s how to define your brand.
Find your brand’s origin story
Just like it sounds, an origin story tells how your company came to be.
What was the spark that ignited your passion? What event or thought paved the way for what you’re doing now?
A genuine and authentic origin story can help your audience make a real connection with your brand. An origin story doesn’t need to be earth-shattering – it just needs to be you. Go deep within and find your story.
Map out your brand’s future
This is the guiding vision for your conscious brand. It’s a definition of your big picture, long-term goals.
With this knowledge, you can start creating a strategy to meet your goals – whatever they may be. Keep this future-mapping in mind when making business decisions, and ask yourself: does this reflect my overall goal for my brand?
Start with your conscious brand’s WHY
The Golden Circle, developed by Simon Sinek, is a communications tool that encourages brands to focus on why they do what they do, before the how or even what.
This may seem counterintuitive at first glance, but we think it’s a great way to engage with your audience on a deeper level.
Starting with your why will help customers relate to the feelings that drive you.
Share your beliefs, and you’ll foster a community of loyal customers who support your vision for a better world. Impactful branding for conscious businesses starts with human-focused engagement that’s authentically you.
“People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it”
Outline your brand’s core offering
Once you’re clear on what you stand for and how you help your audience, you can communicate with intention.
Try to define your business in one paragraph, then one sentence. Share this core offering with your team, empowering them to better connect with your customers.
Define your brand’s industry and competition
While it can be tempting to market your conscious brand to as wide of an audience as possible, consider starting small.
Identifying your unique position in your industry—your niche—will tell you what your conscious brand does better than anyone. Highlight this unique difference in all your messaging to show your ideal audience that you know them inside and out.
Step 2. Align with your circle — understand your ideal customer
You started your conscious brand to make a positive impact in the world.
Who do you want to help? What inspires them to seek you out? What problems are you solving for them?
These are just a few questions to ask to help you understand your ideal customer. Once you do, authentically connecting with them will feel natural.
Your web copy, promotional materials, and brand identity will speak to them on an emotional level. And, of course, giving them the product or service they need will be second nature.
“When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one”
How to understand your brand’s ideal customer
Take time to daydream and be curious about your ideal audience.
Don’t be afraid to go deep and get specific. Think of their hobbies, their occupation, their age group—even where they hang out online.
Your goal is to know your conscious brand’s ideal customer so well that you can connect with them based on your shared values.
If you end up with more than one ideal customer, try to look for overlaps.
Are your ideal customers actually businesses? This exercise is still valuable! A business is made up of people, after all. Think about who will be making decisions about connecting with your brand, and how you can speak to their values.
Do you know who you aren’t a good fit for? Much like a shadow that highlights the detail in an intricate carving, knowing who doesn’t align with your brand can help you better understand the people you want to connect with.
Download our FREE Brand Strategy Template. The ultimate roadmap to start crafting your brand
Step 3. Create your brand’s identity and make it a living entity
Impactful branding starts with a strong identity.
Think of the brands you feel connected to. You can probably describe their visual style, or instantly recognise a social media post as theirs. This is down to their strong brand identity.
Brand identity is all the elements that make a brand cohesive – how the brand appears to the world. Some of these elements include brand colours, package design, a mission statement, and tone of voice.
Consistency encourages trust, so ensure your community knows what to expect from you.
A brand style guide helps to maintain this consistency. It’s a set of guidelines for how your brand should be visually represented at all times, in any situation.
“Identities are the beginning of everything. They are how something is recognised and understood. What could be better than that?”
Use these tools to create a strong brand identity.
Brand archetype
The 12 Archetypes were originally defined by Carl Jung. In branding, they get you to think about how and why you do what you do, instead of what you do.
Knowing your brand’s archetype will help you define your voice, messaging, and overall feel.
Personality and tone of voice
This is one of our favourite ways to help conscious brands align with their ideal audience. Here, observe your brand values and archetype, and align them with your audience’s values and archetype.
Uncovering the similarities between your brand and your ideal customer is a powerful tool for authentic connection.
Visual identity
Did you know that our brains process visual information 60,000 times faster than written information?
This is why you can immediately identify visual elements of your favourite brands.
When your brand’s visual components are cohesive and memorable, it creates a strong connection between you and your audience. They can recognise you without you having to say a word.
Impactful branding gives your audience what they expect.
Brand identity can feel overwhelming at first. However, starting out with a strong branding identity will help you make a powerful impact right away.
Next, let’s help your audience better understand your conscious brand.
Step 4. Outline a strategy roadmap—meet their needs with intention
When designing an impactful brand strategy, a roadmap is key. It’ll help you see how your ideal customer will engage with your brand. It’ll outline what they expect from you, and how you’ll meet their needs with intention.
A conscious brand strategy roadmap keeps you and everyone you work with on the same page.
Brand story for impactful branding
Your brand story is not the same as your origin story, although it can be part of it.
Your brand story aligns with your customer’s worldview. It will help you illuminate the issues you can solve for them, and what experience they want from your brand.
Take your brand story as a Hero’s Journey narrative (popularised by literature professor Joseph Campbell).
Our customer—not you—is the HERO, and your offering is the GUIDE that will lead them to a transformation.
Start by collating information from previous steps about your customers’ wants and needs, what problems they face, and how your offering will solve that problem in the way they expect.
Don’t forget to ensure the narrative is in alignment with your archetype. Use your brand story as a marketing tool.
Customer journey marketing funnel
Along with an impactful brand, your business success relies on a strong marketing funnel.
It’s how you turn your audience into customers, and customers into fans.
It starts with Awareness, which reaches the broadest amount of people. Then, the reach will narrow as your customer journeys from Awareness, to Conversion, to Consideration, to Friends, and arriving at True Fans.
Take what you know about your target customer, and outline the specific actions you’ll take to guide their journey through the marketing funnel.
Once you’ve outlined your brand’s marketing funnel, then you can prioritise the actions that’ll have the highest impact.
For example, if a goal is to increase course signups, then some actions are: create a landing page with keyword-rich content tailored to your customer’s specific needs, design an infographic for social media, and collect testimonials from past customers.
Next, let’s help your brand show up in the world with intention.
Step 5. Apply and expand
Your brand strategy is in place, and you’re feeling positive about connecting with your ideal customer. Your successful brand strategy is your guide, illuminating the way forward with intention.
Using the insights you’ve uncovered during this process, you can now apply the components of your conscious brand strategy with confidence into experiences your customer will have across all touch-points. For example content marketing, packaging, events, sale funnels, opt-in etc.
Often this is summarised in a brand guideline document to ensure you’re being consistent across all platforms—both now and in the future.
Wrapping up—creating a brand strategy for your conscious business
