Why hire an agency for your company branding
When you think about a business, any business, what comes to mind first? If they’ve got a strong personal brand, it’s likely that a logo, tagline or advertising campaign pops into your head. This is because creative and through-provoking company branding is the key to giving a business a leg up on the competition.
If you’re running a business and you’ve got a solid brand in place, ongoing brand building and management are still crucial elements to make an impact on your target audience and keep them loyal and interested.
If you don’t know the first thing about branding or your current brand strategy isn't working, it may be useful for you to hire an agency to take care of it. We’re here to explain the reasons why you should work with experts!
Here’s why you should hire an agency for your company branding!
Is your current brand strategy working?
Before you hire an agency, it’s important to ask yourself the tough questions regarding your brand strategy. You may be in love with your branding, but if your customers don’t share the sentiment then you’ll need to take stock of why that is. Ask your audience and customer base by way of market research surveys to determine where they stand on your current brand. If you don’t already have a customer database, there are plenty of free online tools that can help you find people in your target market, SurveyMonkey being the most popular.
You’ll want to find out some key information that can be filtered back into your brand, and this will include:
- Do people know about your brand?
- If they do know about it, what do they think?
- What other brands are popular within your industry/marketplace?
- Is your current customer base loyal?
These questions are paramount to knowing how to proceed with adapting your personal brand to appeal to the needs of your customers, both returning and prospective. Set internal benchmarks for your company, as this will assist your progress forward when you finally sit down with an agency. A branding agency will assist you in setting external benchmarks that can help you understand how you stack up against the competition as well as how to proceed forward.
What are the benefits of working with a branding agency?
Strategy
Even if you have an in-house designer, this is only one small piece of the branding puzzle. A branding agency will have all of the tools and methods to approach and create a thorough brand strategy. An agency will be skilled and experienced in digital design and communications as well as ways to concretely put these skills into place. What a design agency brings to the table is strategic thinking. This will be directly related to the way they move through their branding approach.
An agency will manifest their strategy in relation to the customer experience. This is why a designer cannot work on branding alone, as a clear articulation of a brand narrative is necessary for it to reach your target audience. An agency will be well versed in strategic communications that can be developed into creative concepts and put forth for your marketplace to consume.
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Consistency
An agency will be able to keep your branding consistent across all platforms and over a period of time. It’s very important that both the quality of your content as well as the overall tone of your brand do not waver. A branding agency will understand the importance of keeping things consistent, and this will allow your market to quickly identify and understand your brand. As mentioned, working with an in-house designer may offer you consistent content, but the skill to be able to market this in a consistent fashion is where the agency will come in.
A brand agency’s plan will likely include multiple-channel branding that should span across social media, digital display and print. One of the definite skills of an agency is that they’ll be able to translate the right content for the right channel and keep things consistent across them. An agency should always project cohesion while making your materials accessible. This level of consistency is often overlooked by internal staff members who may not have the foresight to understand the needs of your marketing plan.
Time and turnover
Unless you have someone on your team who dedicates all of their time to both marketing and design then it’s unlikely you’ll be able to beat the time and turnover of an agency. If branding isn’t allocated to someone who is making it their top priority, chances are you’re going to fall behind the efforts of your competitors. Further, internal turnover can lead to stress and lack of consistency as a result of tight deadlines.
Allowing an outside firm or agency to take care of your branding is an excellent way to make sure that full attention is dedicated to crafting a consistent brand while turnaround times are reasonable and respected. The assurance that daily activity is being dedicated to your brand including social media posting as well as advertisement publication, you can relax. An agency will handle this work with compassion and care while making sure that everything gets done! What more could you ask for?
Perspective
Working with a brand agency can offer some serious insight and outsider perspective that you will not get working with an internal member of your company. When it comes to the bottom line, this will be an internal task. However, we believe it would be impossible to achieve your branding goals without an outside perspective.
An agency will come well equipped with the tools to figure out what’s trending in your marketplace, a skill that any old designer or marketer may not be well-versed in. Essentially, when working with an agency, all of the bases are covered: design, social media management, copywriting, strategy and outsider perspective. If you are unable to find someone who encompasses all of these skills, why wouldn’t you consider outsourcing? Think about it!
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