A brand strategist can help you:

1. Get your ideas down on paper so you can start taking tangible steps towards them:

It might all be floating around in your head, but to make measurable progress you require visible goals for both you and your team to strive towards.

If your decision-making group is bigger than yourself, it’s even more important to undertake a vision aligning and goal setting workshop to ensure everyone is on the same page and acting as a united force.

With management clear on goals, your team will have more clarity on the organisation’s direction. It can even be a good opportunity to take your team on parts of the journey to improve employee morale and encourage participation.

2. Align your actual identity with your visual identity so you attract the right clients:

If you’ve ever met with a service provider, been very impressed with their unique offering, and then landed on their homepage to see their brand doesn’t fit the persona, you’ll understand the importance of consistency between in-person, on paper and online.

Conversely, if you’ve ever found someone online and been very impressed with their brand, then met with them only to find that they are different to how they sell themselves online, y you may have been very disappointed.

Service delivery alone does not make up the whole brand experience, as much as we would like it to. A full brand experience encompasses everything from a handshake to a hard-copy brochure. It is important that the atmosphere of your service offering is communicated through your brand collateral, digital and in-person experiences. Doing this elevates the whole customer experience and connects you with the right clients.

3. Understand your customers so you can solve their problems, rather than generating more confusion:

Understanding your customer is just as important as understanding your business objectives.

By shaping your communications around problems solved for your target audience, they are more likely to respond with the desired action. To do this well you must first understand what they want, and how you are solving any hurdles to getting that.

A clearer understanding of your service/product purpose will result in clearer messaging and greater prospect uptake.

4. Customer experience mapping – don’t miss an email, don’t miss an opportunity:
It can seem over-engineered to ‘map out’ every intended interaction your customers are going to have with your brand, but it is essential that, every interaction has quality control and consistency.

Customers deserve well-considered and well-designed service and product delivery. For larger companies, where different team members will be handling different clients or different stages of the customer journey, it’s imperative to have clarity around what experience the prospect is to receive.

Deliberately designing these journeys will benefit everyone – your staff, and your customers.

5. Damn good design;

Great design makes you stand out above the crowd. Customers feel that they trust you more than your competitors, though they can’t quite say why. I developed my own brand with a brilliant team.

Each meeting with the designer, web developer, and photographer involved the sentence, “I just can’t accept subpar design”. Studies have proven that “design-led companies had 32% more revenue and 56% higher total returns to shareholders compared with other companies.”[1]

You will stay miles ahead with a commitment to good design, which includes giving streamlined and clear briefs – specialist outcomes are only as good as their brief.

6. Better marketing and communications in general:

It always begins with the research done in the early stages of a brand review, such as goal setting, stakeholder profile development, corporate culture improvement and more. From there we develop fit-for-purpose solutions that get the results.

Putting insights first and development and implementation second creates a far more effective and meaningful output.

7. Get cut-through with your marketing, sending the right messages and attracting more suitable clients:

The market is saturated with content. In the past it’s been a matter of quantity over quality, but that has dramatically changed in recent times.

From the insights gained through proper investigation, you should have a good understanding of what your clients want and the value you can provide.

With your ‘value-add’ and clear organisational messages you can craft more powerful content that will get noticed and create a positive impact on your business.

8. Crafting better online customer experiences to improve conversion:

The online experience is usually one of the most important and potentially engaging pieces of collateral for customers.

Depending on what you’re wanting to achieve with your website (which a brand strategist can help you define), the experience will need to be designed accordingly.

Improving the way potential customers interact with this online platform increases engagement, client warming, conversion and overall education of the product/service.

9. Understand your team better so you can improve team morale, productivity and wellbeing:

When considering an external marketing and communications strategy, it’s advised to develop an internal strategy in parallel. Often the success of your service and product offering relies on the people in your team, and they should be considered as a top stakeholder group when designing your brand ecosystem.

The better the systems, processes and support networks in place for them, the better they can fulfil their responsibilities, and the better your client acquisition and retention will be.

10. Improve internal systems and processes to maximise efficiencies, in turn providing better service and conveniences:

If a system has a missing or weak link, the whole eco-system suffers. This could be miscommunication, slow and outdated internal administrative processes, poor quality control or inconsistent client follow up. These are just a few of the potential pitfalls when it comes to operations planning.

The solution can range from basic system integrations to complete internal overhauls – either way, these undertakings are designed to improve overall effectiveness, efficiencies, employee morale and ensure you are servicing your clients as best as possible.

Even one small change can reduce the strain on internal resources.

11. Share your expertise, spread your story, humanise your brand:

Every organisation has a wealth of knowledge in its combined workforce, and the ability to share this effectively shows capability and builds trust with prospects and current clients. It is also a wonderful way to showcase skilled team members and help them with their professional development.

You have all the content you need in the minds of your staff – you just need to know how to draw it out and share it with the world.

12. Connect with the right specialists:

You can have all the plans in the world, but without the right specialists to execute your vision, your plans won’t have the intended impact.

Because the quality of consultants varies greatly I always recommend doing a thorough shortlisting process.

Pairing a considered consultant with a powerful brief is a sure fire way to branding and marketing success.