Great Reasons To Hire A Brand Consultant
Great Reasons To Hire A Brand Consultant
From my personal experience I can confirm - when businesses hire a marketing manager, they expect this new hire to be everything - a designer, a marketing strategist, a branding specialist, a web developer and a content producer. These skills are rarely available in one person and when they are, they'll cost you the hours, years, blood, sweat and tears this individual put into acquiring such diverse skillset. And most of the time, your business does not require these desired skills all the time.
Most small to medium businesses do not have the capacity or budget to employ a team of designers, developers and marketing specialists full time. For these businesses, the ideal scenario is to hire someone to create or refresh their branding; get your website up and running; create the marketing and branding blueprint; design templates then pass it onto a smaller in house team to manage.
After many years of working in house as a senior marketer and designer with a vast skillset, I finally realised that the best way to move forward was to offer my services as a consultant which proves to be the exact thing that both I and SMEs need.
As a brand consultant I can supplement in house staff - I develop strategies, branding, websites - anything that the business requires and I often train teams or individuals as part of the handover process. This way I save SMEs money as they don’t have to hire me full time - I become part their team for the duration of the project. I get to do what I do best and they can grow their business, not their overhead.
What Is Branding And Why Is It Important?
A brand is set of features that distinguish one organisation from another. A brand is typically comprised of a name, tagline, logo or symbol, design, brand voice, and more. It also refers to the overall experience a customer undergoes when interacting with a business — as a shopper, customer, social media follower, or mere passerby.
Branding is the process of researching, developing, and applying a distinctive feature or set of features to your organisation so that consumers can begin to associate your brand with your products or services.
Branding is an iterative process and requires getting in touch with the heart of your customers and your business. Branding is what your business needs to break through the clutter and grab your ideal customer’s attention. It’s what transforms first-time buyers into lifetime customers and turns an indifferent audience into brand evangelists. It’s what you need to stand out, make an impact and take your business to the next level.
Branding activities are absolutely vital for your business because people will view your business how you portray it. With proper branding, you can drive new business and increase brand awareness to a great extent.
SMEs And Branding
Entrepreneurs and business owners are infamous for feeling as though they can do everything alone. However, the sheer presence of brand strategy and brand consultancy in London is enough to outline how important a little help can be from time to time. Sometimes, you simply need to step outside of your comfort zone, and borrow the expertise of someone who can examine your company from a new angle.
Brand consultancy is more than just a way to improve your brand recognition or awareness. The right brand consultant can surgically dissect your business, and determine how everything from your logo design, to your brand voice, and social presence works to support your goals.
“Your brand is what other people say about you when you aren’t in the room”.
- Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon
Small businesses often consider branding as only something large companies do. SME owners associate it with big advertising campaigns, something unaffordable, and not for their small business. A nice to have, not a must have.
However, there is much more to branding than advertising. It is about how your business interacts with your customers or clients. Yes, this includes a logo, but it’s also about how you answer the phone, how you interact with your customers, how you process a sale and how you carry on that relationship. Although a graphic designer can create some of this, threading the personality of your business through everything that you do is where a branding consultant comes in.
A brand strategy consultant will help you to understand your clients and customers so you can respond to their needs and preferences accordingly. Ultimately, one of the main elements that will inform everything you do as a brand, is which clients and customers you’re trying to appeal to. A brand consultant will help you to create a user persona that should make your branding campaigns and marketing communications more effective.
When someone starts a business, it is their dream, their life’s passion, and it’s very difficult for them to step back and look at the business through impartial eyes. This is why a brand consultant can be so valuable. Their unbiased opinion can see things that you may have overlooked and may be harming your competitive edge, which is where their experience kicks in. The brand expert may be able to very quickly provide ideas and suggestions that you may not have considered and those suggestions, big or small, can have a massive impact on your business.
What Do Brand Consultants Do
A brand strategy consultant will work with you to:
Design a blueprint or template for all the components of your brand (including a manifesto, values, vision and mission - your story, your started your business in the first place).
Define your target market and goals.
Research your market, competitors, and industry.
Discover your business personality and communication strategies.
Execute unique components of your brand, such as your logo, branding, marketing plan, and messaging.
Remember, your logo and website are only parts of your brand. A brand consultant works alongside you to design every element of your brand blueprint – ensuring everything matches your unique concept and voice. Brand consultancy is a plan for sustainability, and it is often essential at business inception, as it outlines the first step in a brand’s life.
Top 10 Reasons To Hire A Brand Consultant
1. Identify your brand
No two brands are alike – or at least they shouldn’t be. Working with a brand consultant allows you to identify what you want your brand to become in the eyes of your competitors, peers, and customers. It’s about finding a strategy for differentiation that you can use for the life of your business, or until you choose to rebrand.
2. Objective and fresh outlook
Whether you have an internal marketing team or creative team, hiring a branding consultant will offer a fresh pair of eyes to your brand. It is always hard for the company’s internal team to be objective as they are exposed to the company’s branding every day.
3. Opportunity for innovation
A branding consultant can bring in a stance of innovation that the internal creative may disregard. A completely unbiased opinion is agreed upon which creates a room for strategic opportunities.
4. Access to the best in class tools
A branding consultant is aware of ways to create a brand that expresses the company’s vision, culture and objectives. To individualise the brand, digital branding consultants have their own marketing tools, software and licenses that wouldn’t be available with the in-house marketing or creative team.
5. Effective Return on Investment
Any business (big or small) has to invest sufficient time and money for branding their product or service. If you hire a branding consultant, it will go beyond the employees’ skill set and will generate new opportunities which in turn will grow the business bringing in more revenue.
6. Alleviate the Training Cost
Asking your existing employees to go beyond their skill set, it will require extra training for which you will have to hire an extra employee to train them. Think of the cost of training, paid time off and additional benefits, the new hire will cost you more than a good branding consultant.
7. Advantage of Cross-Industry Experience
An experienced branding consultant bring the experience of having worked with a cross-section of industries. A consultant comes with a portfolio which gives the business a completely fresh perspective because your brand isn’t confined to the industry in which it operates.
8. Proven expertise
Branding consultants provide extensive research, identity services and strategies that your in-house marketing team won’t be able to provide. Branding consultants offer unique and proven areas of expertise distinct from traditional in-house marketing.
9. Unbiased and Strategic Perspective
A brand requires a strategic approach, a bigger picture and an outside perspective. The hired branding consultant will survey and analyse the competitive landscape from an unbiased standpoint.
10. Better Access to the Knowledge
Branding or rebranding is a common task for a branding consultant. While working with a branding consultant, you can be confident that their knowledge is up-to-date as there are multiple brains working simultaneously to achieve the best results.
Do you need a branding consultant? Click here to see how I can help you.
