How to Execute a Successful Brand Launch Strategy

Whether you’re launching a whole new business or refreshing your current look, a brand launch will bring wanted attention to your business. A well-executed launch can engage your audience, remind them of your business, and keep your customers informed.

The goal of a brand is to establish an emotional connection with your audience while distinguishing your business from other offerings. Successful brands are clearly identifiable and clearly differentiated from competitors.

This post will cover how to execute a successful brand launch, including ideas, strategies, and best practices, as well as how to decide whether or not you need a brand online marketing consultant. 

The Importance of Developing a Brand Strategy

Distinguish Your Business and Offering

Your brand presents your business and offering in a memorable, immediately identifiable way. The best brands instantly inform people of who they are and what they do. Just think of big brands like Nike, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, or McDonald’s—since you were a small child, you could recognize these brands from their logo and style. A brand strategy ensures your business has a verbal and visual style that resonates with your audience and matches your mission, values, and the product or service you provide.

Differentiate From Competitors

Your brand sets you apart from your competitors by clearly portraying what your business offers and what it stands for. By choosing a brand name, tagline, description, logo, colors, and other style elements, your business differentiates itself from competitors. How can you use branding elements to illustrate what your business does best and why you do it better than anyone else?

Build Customer Brand Loyalty

Brand loyalty helps to promote your business and build a lasting connection with customers. It’s an incredibly powerful tool, but it takes time to build. Once established, it can keep customers and audiences coming back to your business time and time again. This strategy is so successful that some brands can instill lifelong loyalty that creates repeat business, word of mouth, and loyal brand ambassadors.

How to Execute a Brand Launch

Creating a Brand Name and Tagline

Before you begin designing or marketing your business, you need to have a business name, tagline, and consistent description of what your business offers. Take careful care in this section of your brand strategy since your business name will be with you for a long while. It’s far less work to update your brand style than it is to completely change your business name down the road.

When choosing how you will describe your business, whether in a tagline or simple description, consider what your company values most. What is your mission, and what will you offer customers/clients? How can you distill that in one sentence or a catchy phrase? For Blue Summit Supplies, one of our taglines is “A simpler approach to office supplies.” 

💡 Creating Your Company Core Values

Pick a name that isn’t too complicated to say or spell, and ensure you are able to get some version of the matching domain for your website. You should also pick something that doesn’t limit your business. Even if you can’t see it now, you may want to grow and expand into different markets in the future. For example, Blue Summit Supplies is specific enough but doesn’t limit our company to one product, like Blue Summit Envelopes or Blue Summit Paper Supplies might. 

💡 12 Tips For Naming Your Startup Business

Establish a Cohesive Aesthetic

Your visual design strategy should complement and enhance your business name and offering. It also needs to be consistent. While a logo plays a big part in your aesthetic, it’s only one small piece of your visual brand.

What colors does your brand use? What fonts do you use? How is your logo placed, and what are the dos and don’ts of recreating or printing it? What does your company-wide email signature look like? What types of visuals do you want used on your website and throughout your content?

Ensure you include visual details in your brand guide to maintain consistency across platforms and team members. All of your social media accounts, website pages, and printed materials should share this cohesive look. We aim to have a consistent style across all of our content so that when our audience sees an article from us, they recognize our aesthetic and logo.

Order Unique Branded Swag

The more people see your brand, the more they will remember it. Putting your logo on branded products gets your brand in people’s homes, offices, and out into the world. Branded swag helps to build brand recognition amongst your customers, community, and industry, especially if the branded items are unique and interesting. It's also a great way to show off your new look during a brand launch.

Ensure you choose products that will bring people value, entertainment, or joy. What items would your audience actually use? Consider all of the swag you’ve received in the past. What stands out to you, and what did you keep? What swag was forgettable? What did you throw out or never use? Ask your team for input on the type of swag they would like to see and use from your company.

💡 Learn more about the benefits of branded swag, including where to find custom products and how to choose the best branded swag for your business.

Plan Your Announcement and Brand Promotion

How and when will you announce your new look and brand strategy? It’s important that you’re consistent with your messaging from the start since this is how your audience will recognize and remember your business.

New businesses should have their logo, messaging, and overall strategy planned before making a business announcement or having a grand opening (whether in-person or virtual.) You want the first look the public sees to be what you’re going to stick with, at least until you go through a brand refresh.

If you’re refreshing your brand, make sure you have everything ready before making the switch. Your audience is used to identifying you in one way, and you don’t want to confuse them. Ideally, share information about why you are updating your brand, the journey your business has gone through so far, and what the switch means for your business and clients/customers.

Make a list of all of the places you need to update your brand (logo, imagery, messaging, etc.) and do it all at once with an announcement about the update. This should include all of your social media accounts, website, brand marketing materials, business cards, signage, etc. Doing this all at once will prevent confusion, and a big brand launch announcement will bring positive attention to your business.

Build a Brand Strategy Guide For Consistency

A brand launch announcement tells your audience about your brand and the strategy behind it, but you need to do more to ensure your team is on the same page.

Create a brand style guide that contains everything current and future hires need to know about your brand. The more specific you get, the better people can follow your guide instead of making brand decisions in the moment.

Include notes on how to use your logo, how to describe your business, fonts to use, colors to use, your business values, and notes on how your business speaks internally and externally. What tone of voice does your business use with the public? Are you formal or fun? Modern or traditional? Is it okay to use humor? Do you use emojis or animated gifs in your content?

Your brand guide is a go-to document for making marketing and engagement decisions. It keeps everyone on the same page and ensures graphic designers, web designers, social media consultants, sales representatives, and content writers (whether internal or contracted freelancers) know exactly how to represent your brand.

Do You Need to Hire a Brand Consultant?

A brand consultant or brand development company can help you efficiently and effectively move through the phases of establishing and promoting your brand. They’ll provide a level of expertise that will help you stay on schedule and execute all of the elements needed for a successful brand launch.

Marketing consultants can also provide specific graphic design, marketing materials, or web design if your business doesn’t have its own designers. Even if you have your own designers, it can help to bring in brand experts who have specialized experience developing brands. This includes understanding current trends, knowing what to avoid, and how to differentiate yourself from your competitors.

Weigh the pros and cons as well as your budget, remembering to factor in the time and costs involved for your own team to take on this monumental project.

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