How to create a strong brand strategy roadmap: Steps, examples and templates

Most companies are familiar with the concept of a brand strategy, but what about a brand strategy roadmap? The companies we work with here at Fabrik know they need a brand strategy to determine how they’re going to present themselves to their target audience, and outshine the competition.

Your brand strategy is what helps you earn the loyalty and trust of your target audience, identifying everything from your marketing mix, to your visual and verbal identity.

Where organizations often struggle, is figuring out how to distil that brand strategy into a simple step-by-step guide the shows every team member how the company is going to get from the position it’s in today, to its “desired state”. That’s where the brand strategy roadmap comes in.

While there’s no one-size-fits-all way to refine the “strategic plan” for your brand’s future, a clear strategic roadmap template can significantly boost your chances of success.

That’s what we’re going to give you today, along with examples, insights, and tips on how you can optimize your brand roadmap and unlock stronger results.

What is a brand strategy roadmap?

A brand roadmap, or brand strategy roadmap is a concise document that outlines exactly how you’re going to reach your goals and convey your brand vision to your target market. It aligns concepts like your brand’s vision, purpose and values, with your goals and the challenges you need to overcome.

Your roadmap also outlines the strategies you’ll use to thrive in your industry, earn customer trust, and differentiate yourself from competitors, along with the specific tactics to achieve these goals.

In simple terms, a brand roadmap takes the essence of your comprehensive branding strategy, and combines it with your overall brand idea or vision, to align and synergize your teams.

The idea is to simplify the process of implementing your brand strategy, by giving your entire team an insight into what your brand stands for, the challenges it needs to overcome, and the methods you’ll be using (both now and in the future), to increase market share.

Here’s an example for Amazon, and we’ll show you how we created this roadmap in moment:

What a strategic roadmap template should include

Designing a brand strategy roadmap can be complicated. It requires you to distil your long-term plan for branding success down into just one or two pages, covering all the information every team member is going to need to help you reach your goals.

Notably, many companies end up producing various strategic roadmaps over their lifetime. They may have one roadmap when their brand initially launches, focusing on raising brand awareness for a “master brand” and connecting with potential customers.

They may also introduce additional roadmaps for specific strategic initiatives, such as a marketing roadmap for the launch of a new product or service.

The best brand strategy roadmap examples, however, usually contain the following information:

Brand essence: Vision, purpose, and values

At the top of most brand strategy roadmaps, companies identify their “vision”, or the long-term goals they want to achieve with their brand. With Amazon, for instance, the vision is to become the world’s most customer-centric brand.

While your vision statement identifies what you want to achieve, your purpose identifies why your brand exists. For example, Fresh Student Living exists to provide students with safe, affordable, and comfortable lodging options as they complete their studies.

Your values identify how you’re going to achieve your purpose and reach your vision. Ultimately, they dictate the beliefs, behaviors, and motivations of your brand.

Goals and challenges/issues

Your goals are simple enough to define for most brand strategy roadmaps. They identify what you want to accomplish with your current brand plan and business strategy. Do you want to gain a competitive advantage by differentiating yourself from other brands?

Are you trying to raise awareness of certain products and services with your ideal customers, or position yourself as a brand leader in your industry? For a short-term roadmap, your goals might even be more specific, like increasing revenue by 20% in the next year.

Your challenges or issues, look at what might prevent you from achieving your goals. For example, you might have a hard time earning market share if your industry is growing more competitive, and the type of service or product you offer isn’t unique.

Brand strategies and tactics

Last, your brand strategies identify how you’re going to reach your goals.

If your biggest goal is to attract new customers to your company, but you’re struggling with limited marketing activities, and reach, your strategies and tactics might include:

• Investing in omnichannel marketing: Using new forms of brand communications, like email marketing, and social media accounts to connect with customer personas.
• Forging partnerships: Connecting with influencers and other companies as part of a strategic program to increase brand awareness and reach.
• Conducting research: Learning more about your new customer personas so you can showcase the right brand values in your marketing materials.

Your strategies are the core methods for growth you’re going to implement, like investing in new visual elements to make your brand stand out from the competition. Your tactics describe the steps you’re going to take in more detail, like designing a new logo, or investing in brand photography.

Building a strategy roadmap

Designing your strategic roadmap

The easiest way to design an effective brand strategy roadmap, is to work with a branding expert. A company like Fabrik can work with you to identify your brand essence, the goals you want to achieve, and the strategies you’ll need to implement for success.

Here’s how the team at Fabrik creates strategic roadmaps for our clients…

Step 1: Identify your brand essence

As we noted above, your brand strategy roadmap needs to provide an insight into your company’s vision, purpose and values to align your teams, and keep everyone on the same page.

Before you do anything else, dive into the essence of your company, identifying the key elements that identify your brand, and differentiate it from the competition.

Outline your:

• Brand purpose: Beloved brands serve a specific purpose. They don’t just sell products; they deliver something specific. For example, Seraphine creates clothing and accessories that combine comfort and style for parents.
• Brand values: What are the core values and beliefs that will drive everything your business does? A strong brand identity relies on a set of clear beliefs, such as a focus on sustainability, a commitment to customer service, or a passion for innovation.
• Brand vision and mission: What do you want to accomplish in the long-term? Your mission statement will identify what you want to achieve and how you’re going to reach your goals, your vision statement will highlight your long-term “big idea” for the future.

Step 2: Determine your brand idea

Your brand idea contributes to the essence or soul of your brand. It’s a way for business owners to organize concepts like your brand story, go-to-market strategy and marketing mix, and brand promise into a simple format.

It inspires employees to deliver on your brand promise consistently and commit to delivering exceptional customer experiences. You can create a separate document to define your “brand idea”.

Here’s what it might look like, and the 5 components you can focus on:

• Brand promise: The promise you make to your customers that separates you from the competition. Are you going to deliver the easiest, most convenient experience around, or the most innovative and unique products?
• Brand story: Your brand story humanizes your brand, identifying where you came from, what you’ve accomplished so far, and what’s guiding you forward. A well-identified brand story can help to align brand communications across different channels.
• Innovation: Your innovation strategy determines how your business and product portfolio will evolve over time. It’s how you’ll take the next step in building your company, addressing new customer needs, and responding to market trends.
• Purchase moment: Purchase moment looks at how you’ll move customers through the purchasing journey, from using content marketing to raise awareness, to leveraging sales teams and different channels to facilitate sales.
• Customer experience: Your focus on customer experience determines how you’ll build powerful relationships with customers, adapting to consumer’s emotional needs, preferences, and goals to achieve your business objectives.

Step 3: Conduct market and competitor analysis

The next step in filling out your brand strategy roadmap is identifying both the goals you want to accomplish, and the issues you’ll need to overcome. When you dive into this part of your template, you’ll need extensive research to guide you.

Conducting market research will help you to identify trends and opportunities in the landscape, with insights into changes in customer behaviors, priorities, and pain points.

Combined with insights into the demographics, behavioral data, and psychographics of your customer base, this analysis will help you to identify clear goals. You might uncover market opportunities in new regions which require you to expand your reach and brand awareness.

Market research, combined with a comprehensive SWOT analysis of existing competitors in your industry, will outline the issues you need to overcome.

Looking at your competitors will give you an insight into how you can use your comprehensive brand strategy to separate yourself from other companies, with unique marketing efforts, a memorable brand personality, or a new go-to-market strategy.

When conducting this analysis, think carefully about your current brand positioning, and how you want to grow in your market. Do you want to be perceived as an affordable, customer-centric company, or a luxury vendor?

What do you currently do better than the competition, and where do other companies have an edge?

Step 4: Establish your branding strategies

Now we reach the point in designing your strategic roadmap where you need to start thinking of strategies you can use to achieve your goals, and overcome key issues.

In the example template of the Amazon brand strategy roadmap mentioned above, we identified goals like “increasing loyalty” and boosting differentiation.

Based on our analysis of Amazon’s current position in the market, resources, and attributes, we defined certain strategic measures and tactics the company could use.

Omnichannel marketing methods, such as paid and organic advertising across social media, email, and earned media, helps Amazon raise brand awareness, increase audience engagement, and consistently share powerful messages with its customer base.

Alternatively, building strategic partnerships helps Amazon to deliver better experiences to customers; by ensuring they have the broadest range of products and manufacturers to choose from.

Here’s another example of how a company might plan to achieve its goals and overcome issues, based on the Tesla brand:

Step 5: Create your brand strategy assets

Next, you’ll need to develop the assets required to implement your strategic plans and tactics.

The assets you create may vary, but you might need to invest in:

Visual assets

If your goal is to build and strengthen brand awareness, you’ll to create a strong foundation for your brand, with an eye-catching logo, color palette, branded photography, and even meaningful font choices. Depending on your goals, you might even need to think about packaging design.

Ensure you have visual guidelines in place to help ensure brand consistency as you distribute and use visual assets across all channels, marketing campaigns, and consumer touchpoints.

Editorial and messaging assets

A strong messaging strategy is crucial to achieving numerous goals in a brand strategy roadmap. Ensuring you’re using the right tone of voice and language to resonate with your target audience, and convey your brand values, promise, and mission in an efficient format is crucial.

Your messaging assets might include a set of editorial guidelines and key messages that draw attention to your unique value proposition, and what you offer to your customers.

You could also create a brand personality template, identifies how your brand messaging should make your company sound. Do you want to be seen as motivational and inspirational like Nike, or sophisticated and forward-thinking like IBM?

Marketing strategy assets

Your marketing strategies essentially determine how you’re going to use different marketing channels and methods to reach your target audience. If one of your strategies involves working with public relations companies to build brand awareness, you’ll need branded business PR templates.

If you’re going to be using specific social media channels as an essential tool for earning customer loyalty and increasing engagement, you’ll need to identify how you’ll build marketing campaigns for each channel, and what kind of content you’ll create.

For instance, are you going to use a lot of videos and authentic photos on Instagram, and long-form articles on LinkedIn? You may even need to consider creating additional assets, like email marketing templates, to accompany your marketing plan

Using your brand strategy roadmaps

Once you’ve developed your brand strategy roadmaps, and the assets you’re going to need to support your growth tactics, the next step is using your roadmap to your advantage.

Share your brand roadmap with your team, alongside any other resources they might need, such as editorial guidelines for visual identity, tone of voice guidelines, and customer service policies.

Work together on implementing the tactics you’ve established, and pay attention to how each effort pays off. Remember, your brand strategy roadmap might need to evolve over time, as you experiment with new tactics to achieve your goals.

Leverage analytical tools to maintain insights into:

• How your audience responds to your visuals, messaging strategy, and personality. You can do this by using social listening tools, and reading customer reviews and testimonials.
• How effective your marketing efforts are at increasing brand awareness, boosting sales and conversions, and earning the loyalty of your customers.
• Whether you’re making progress towards your brand mission. You can track this by analysing your brand equity, and how your customer base grows over time.

As you learn and gather insights from each stage of your brand development strategy, constantly review your strategy roadmap. Ask yourself if your goals are still the same, whether the challenges you’ve faced in the past are evolving, and if you need to consider new tactics in your strategies.

Build the ultimate brand strategy roadmap

A brand strategy roadmap can be a valuable resource for any company, whether you’re launching an organization for the first step, or taking the next step towards global growth.

With a comprehensive roadmap, you can identify your company’s vision, purpose, and values, and how you’re going to reach the desired “next point” in your brand’s development.

Of course, developing brand strategy roadmaps, even with the examples and templates we provided above, can be complex. You need a strong insight into market opportunities, a holistic plan for sending the right brand message, and the ability to adapt and evolve quickly.

If you need help building a comprehensive brand strategy, or a brand strategy roadmap, Fabrik can help. We’ll work with you to identify the right direction for your brand, giving you the tools and resources you need to achieve your branding goals.

We can help you design stronger visual assets, marketing materials, and brand guidelines that keep you moving consistently towards new opportunities.

Build a solid foundation for brand success. Contact Fabrik today.

Fabrik: A branding agency for our times.