Key Skills for Brand Strategists in the Digital Age
Building a strong brand is a must for any business, which means that brand strategists will always have a place in any organisation. This is more true than ever in the digital age, a time when businesses are competing for customers’ ever-decreasing attention spans.
However, whether you’re an established brand strategist or dream of becoming one, it’s important to realise that you’ll be facing stiff competition for jobs. There are plenty of professionals who want to work in branding, so you’ll need to ensure that your resume is in tip-top shape by learning some essential skills. In this piece, we’ll go over the most important skills that every brand strategist needs to have in the digital age.
An Understanding of the Customer
Building a brand is all about connecting with your audience. This means knowing who you’re targeting and how they think. While marketing is the most obvious educational pathway to learning these skills, supplementing your knowledge with a graduate diploma in psychology can also be tremendously valuable.
Training in psychology can help you understand what your customers want from a brand, both from a conscious and a subconscious level. For instance, small details like the type of colours you use can have a big impact on how you’re perceived. Red, for instance, inspires feelings of urgency, and is best used if you want to grab your customers’ attention. On the other hand, blue allows you to build a feeling of trust.
Understanding colour psychology and other tips and tricks can help you make more informed decisions about your brand elements. Of course, consumer psychology is incredibly nuanced and isn’t as simple as simply picking colours to achieve certain effects. Take your entire brand into account and study the specific demographic you’re targeting to create a collection of brand elements that speak to your audience.
Foundational Marketing Skills
Although branding and marketing aren’t the same thing (contrary to what some people think), they’re inextricably linked. As a brand strategist, it’s crucial to know how a brand fits into different marketing strategies, as well as which promotional avenues work for specific types of brands.
If you’re trying to build an image as a luxury brand, running loads of social media ads during Black Friday probably isn’t the way to go. Instead, you should aim to cultivate a more exclusive image by sticking to organic channels, creating content that pulls your audience to you rather than pushing your messaging on them too forcefully.
By understanding the type of brand you’re trying to build, you can help your marketing department craft a more targeted marketing checklist. This, in turn, contributes to the brand image you’re going for.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is a helpful tool in any area of business, and branding is no exception. Not knowing how to leverage AI effectively will hold you back, especially in this day and age. The primary uses of AI for brand strategists are graphic design and content creation.
For the former, you can use tools like Sora and Midjourney to create compelling brand visuals, including social media images and even logo markups. You can also use one of the many LLMs out there to produce or enhance written copy for your website and promotional material, although you always want to edit it yourself afterwards. Not knowing how to use AI isn’t a good thing, and neither is overreliance on it.
Creative Copywriting
We’ve mentioned that AI can help with content creation. This does nothing to take away from the fact that copywriting is still an essential skill for anyone wanting to be a brand strategist. If you’ve been exposed to AI writing (which you probably have, whether you know it or not), LLMs write in a very specific way.
Tone of voice is an essential brand element. While it’s possible to prompt AI tools to alter their tone, this approach has its limits. To build a brand that stands out, make sure that you know how to write in a brand’s voice, while also keeping your copy appropriate for the medium you’re writing for. For instance, if you’re writing product page copy, make sure that you’re incorporating SEO best practices. If you’re creating ad headlines, on the other hand, learn how to keep your writing short and sweet. Being a versatile writer has been a valuable skill since time immemorial, and this has not changed with the dawn of generative AI.
Data Analysis and Metrics
In the digital age, you need to back your strategies with hard data. Brand strategists who can interpret analytics are able to make smarter decisions, track campaign success and understand customer behaviour in depth. Tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot or social media insights platforms allow you to see which campaigns are resonating, which messaging is falling flat, and where improvements can be made.
Beyond just reading the numbers, it’s important to translate them into actionable insights. For example, if a particular social media post performs exceptionally well, analyse why. Was it the wording, the visual or the posting time? Understanding these patterns enables you to fine-tune your strategy, build stronger campaigns and ultimately strengthen your brand. Data-literate brand strategists combine creative instincts with analytical insights, giving them a distinct edge in today’s highly competitive digital landscape.
Key Takeaways
To succeed as a brand strategist in the digital age, you need to have a wide set of skills. These include understanding the psychology of your target customers, understanding the basics of marketing, knowing how to use various AI tools and being a skilled writer.
If you add these tools to your professional arsenal, you’ll be sure to find plenty of work as a brand strategist, no matter how competitive the job market becomes. Start honing the skills we’ve listed today to be the best brand strategist you can be.