Your brand is your business’s biggest investment. It takes a long time to establish a brand and make it successful. It’s your biggest asset. For this reason, brand marketing management is an ongoing challenge. Defining your brand and choosing branding strategies is only the very beginning.

You should always have goals for your brand management. Define these goals and create a plan for achieving them. When one goal is reached, define the next and start working toward it. Just like anything in business or life generally, nothing happens without a goal.

Protect Your Brand

You have to protect your brand. There are legal considerations such as trademarks and copyrights. Someone may try to use your brand without your consent. You also have to protect your brand from inconsistencies, improper positioning and misrepresentation that can come from within your company or from a vendor or business partner.

Explore Financial Opportunities

Your brand is your greatest investment because of the loyalty it engenders among your customers. But there are other ways as well that you can reap the financial rewards of a well-established brand. Through licensing and franchising, you can multiply the profits your brand brings you. Just think about how M&Ms has extended its brand into ice cream, t-shirts, hats, other candy bars, and even its own store!

Maintain Consistency

As mentioned before, a brand’s consistency must always be maintained. You have to create standards for your brand and uphold them meticulously. Draft your guidelines in a PDF or other file and share it with anyone who may represent your brand. You’ll also need these guidelines defined and explained for brand managers and those who will eventually take over the brand.

Your guidelines should include an overview of the brand, including its vision, philosophy, values and story. The bulk of the guidelines should cover design features. Include colors, designs, logo and so on. Everything should be covered down to the smallest details like typography, dimensions of logo, how much space should be around the logo, etc. In addition to guidelines, you should also include what not to do and provide examples.

It’s good to also create a set of guidelines for employees. Branding is not just a concern for owners and brand managers. Every employee needs to be on the same page. Put together a style guide or best practices for employees to follow.

In all of your guidelines include contact information for brand managers so that they’re easy to reach if there are questions.

Branding Is for Everyone

Highlight the value of your brand not only to your customers, but also to employees, stakeholders, vendors, trading partners and others you do business with. Create a culture around your brand.

Remember that brand management is a work in progress and you should always seek to improve it.