Do You Need a Brand Roadmap for Your Business?

Yes, you do! 

A brand roadmap is a guide assembled from the findings gathered from a strategy workshop. Working with a brand strategist offers expert insights and an outsider’s perspective to make sure the assumptions you base your business on are realistic and, whenever possible, supported by data. A brand roadmap includes all the brand essentials your business needs to stay consistent and drive the brand look and feel.

How do you complete a brand roadmap?

Development of a brand roadmap starts with a series of brand strategy workshops that explore and define several key topics. Once these items are specified, the roadmap is the document that clearly discloses all the findings. These include:

• Competitor Analysis. An evaluation of your competitors to gain insights into their products, sales, and marketing tactics so you can differentiate your company effectively.
• Brand Promise. Your business’s promise or commitment to the customer, implicitly or explicitly, about what they can expect from your company.
• Positioning Statement. A positioning statement describes what your company does, defines your company’s target market, and details your company’s differentiator.
• Core Values. A set of guiding principles and fundamental beliefs to govern how your company operates.
• Brand Attributes. A set of personality traits to define a company’s culture, customer, voice, look, value, and differentiator.
• Brand Archetypes. A way of presenting a brand as a person to capture its symbology, values, behaviors, and messages.
• Customer Journey. A description of a customer’s entire experience while interacting with a brand.
• Customer Personas. A semi-fictional depiction of your company’s ideal customers based on market research and interviews.
• Visual Design and Style Guide. A set of standards that define the look and feel of your brand, including stylistic direction and guidelines about typography, colors, photography, graphic elements, and logo variations and placement.
• Action Plan. A list of tactics with a timeframe and defined milestones outlining the steps your company needs to take to achieve its stated business goals.

How can a brand roadmap help you succeed?

A brand roadmap must be tailored to the individual company and reflect the company’s goals and objectives to be effective. An effective brand roadmap also requires defining a deep understanding of your competition and your customers. When you truly understand what is most important to your customers, you are better able to connect with them. And that connection allows you to gain their attention, earn their trust, and inspire them to work with you to solve their problem. Likewise, when you understand your competition, you can see where you stand in the marketplace and how you stand out. 

By creating a brand roadmap, you can ensure that your marketing efforts are coordinated and focused on your company’s most important goals. In addition, it will help your company stay on track and provide clarity for your team, who have a vested interest in understanding how you intend to grow your business. 

A brand roadmap can re-energize your company by giving you a sense of direction and purpose. That purpose helps you stay focused on what matters, especially when you’re in the midst of fast-paced growth. And that focus helps your business avoid the most common mistakes that often derail a business’s growth, such as focusing on the wrong audience or trying to solve the wrong problem. 

A brand roadmap can help you make informed decisions about where you want your business to go and how best to get there. It keeps you focused and on-task to build momentum as you grow. And it helps your business stand out — to customers, employees, and investors — in an increasingly noisy and competitive market.  

Why might you need a brand roadmap?

If your business is not growing, ask yourself how clear you are about your customers, messaging, and positioning because something isn’t aligned properly. Then, a brand strategy workshop might be precisely what your business needs to fuel its growth.  To learn more about how a brand roadmap can help your business grow, schedule a 30-minute consultation today.