Brand Management – Growth’s Secret Weapon
Why you should work with brand management services.
As a business owner, you wear a lot of hats. Manager, marketer, or moves-maker, you’ve got a lot to think about on any given day. However, one of the most critical aspects of your business might be one you haven’t thought of recently: your brand identity.
Brand Identity at a Glance
What is my brand identity?
Before we delve into the nitty-gritty of brand management services and what they can offer, it’s fundamental to understand what your brand is and why it’s important. Even further, how can you define your brand identity?
It can be easy to view marketing as simply catchy logos or clever taglines (We don’t blame you, that’s the fun stuff). It’s more than just what a customer can see or read. It’s all-encompassing, the essence of your business, your values, and the emotional engagement that your customers have with your company. It’s the foundation of what comes to your customer’s mind when they think of you.
Brand identity is as nuanced as public perception, but it doesn’t have to be as complicated, particularly with brand management services.
Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to determine your brand identity:
Who am I?
The basic principles of your business. This can be your company’s mission, your ethics, or what sort of overall impact you hope to make on the world at large. Your customers need to know who they’re doing business with.
What do I offer?
The things your customers need from your brand. Explore your products and services and create a focused vision of how you can improve the lives of your clients or fix a problem they have. This is a business, after all.
Where am I going?
A strategy for the future. You don’t necessarily have to broadcast all your plans to your customers, but having one in mind is helpful for the overall success of your business. Will you grow or stay focused on your local community? Are you going to expand your products and services? A roadmap helps you avoid getting lost, and that can be true for your brand identity as well.
Why should customers choose me?
The reasons your customers should choose you. In almost every case, your business will have competitors. Try to determine why your customers should work with you over them. Is it your service? A better-designed product? Your sales or offers? Knowing clearly why you’re the superior option will be extremely helpful in your specific brand identity.
Determining the core of your brand can help define your brand identity and create a strong, recognizable relationship with your current and future customers.
Brand Management at Your Service
How do I manage my brand identity?
You’ve explored your brand identity and what you want to tell your customers about your business. Now it’s just a matter of staying true to that identity and making sure your relationship with your customers remains strong.
Brand Consistency
Straying from your business’s core identity, even a little, can have a significant impact on your customers’ perception of your brand. Inconsistency is a silent killer of your business’s growth, so it’s critical to maintain your core assets, products, and values.
- Use uniform logos and color schemes throughout your marketing. You want your audience to recognize you and changing things up in the middle of a transaction can quickly erode trust with your customer.
- Do your best to sustain the quality of your products and services. If you decide to change, introduce changes slowly to help your customers adjust to the new elements and become accustomed to them.
- Keep your core audience in mind when you’re designing your marketing strategies. Your customers are essential to your business. Don’t get so caught up in chasing new customers that you forget your familiar ones.
Brand Authenticity
In an uncertain world with a shifting landscape, consumers crave stability and candor. Brands that are open and honest about their business are desirable to prospective clients. Strive toward being genuine with your marketing and your communications.
- Be transparent with your pricing, if you can. If there’s a possibility that your pricing could change with options or add-ons, let your customers know about those as well. Clients will appreciate you being up-front about something as important as cost.
- Mistakes happen. If you make a misstep, own up to it and explain how your business is working to be better. Hiding it could work, but it will more than likely backfire, and you will have a tough time getting your customer’s trust back, if the relationship can be repaired at all.
- Your business operates in a society, so responsibly engage in the world around you. Become involved in your community, give to charities, or host fundraisers. Not only are these things good to do anyway, but they will also build an authentic connection with you and your customers.
Changes To Your Brand
It’s the nature of things to evolve, and the same goes for your business. You don’t always have to change, but trying new things can introduce you to new audiences and grow your brand. However, deciding which changes to make and how you introduce them determines if they’ll help your brand identity or harm it.
- Make changes with intention. Really think about the reason you want to make this change. Will it improve your brand identity and your customers’ experience? Changing just for the sake of something fresh is a recipe for disaster. Make sure your reasons are good ones.
- Introduce new elements slowly. Testing the waters is the best strategy when you want to try something new with your brand identity, and there are ways to introduce new things slowly. Create a survey to gauge the reception to this change or try the change on a smaller aspect of your business before you commit to it.
- Remember your audience. We’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. Keeping what your audience likes about your brand in mind when you’re thinking about changing is helpful to keep your customers happy with your business. You don’t want to change a fundamental part of your product and lose your faithful clients.
We’ve established that your brand identity is crucial, but how do you keep it intentional? How do you keep public perception of your business where you want it to be, or as close as you can get? The answer is simple, yet strategic. Try out a brand management service.
It’s impossible to be an expert on everything, and in today’s fast-paced world, running a business of any size will have you playing multiple roles. Branding and marketing are constantly evolving landscapes, so taking advantage of a tool like a brand management service is a smart move to focus on your products, services, and business strategies.
Brand management services help you maintain a strong brand presence without all the headaches of keeping an eye on every moving piece of your marketing strategy.
Here are a few advantages of a brand management service:
Consistency – Ironically enough, consistency has been a main theme throughout this article, because it is vital to your brand. Your brand management service is designed to keep your brand consistent with color schemes, brand-approved assets, and uniform messaging.
Recognition – Your brand management service establishes you as a strong brand that can deliver quality goods and services. Your business stays top of mind with the tools a brand management service can offer, and sometimes that can be the difference between customers choosing you over your competition.
Asset Management – Never have to hunt down your preferred logo again. Brand management services help you keep your visual elements, copy messaging, and color scheme in one convenient place, ready to use when you need them.
Business Improvement – A good brand management service will elevate your brand identity and your reputation, allowing you to improve your pricing models, increase your market share, and stand out from your competitors.
And More – A positive perception of your business through a consistent brand identity provided by a brand management service has unquantifiable advantages. Sometimes, a customer choosing your business is just about being in the right place at the right time, and brand management services deal in putting you in as many right places as possible.
No matter the size of your business, a brand management service can provide a versatile toolbox for your marketing success.
We certainly don’t want to add yet another item to your already full plate. On the contrary, we want to offer you a solution: brand management services. Having all your brand’s marketing needs in one place not only saves you time and headaches but is also instrumental in maintaining a key piece of your business: your brand identity.
Which brand management service is right for you? Xpressdocs has innovative software and all the tools you need to produce high-caliber, brand-approved marketing materials within a single, robust brand management service. Contact us or schedule an appointment to learn more today.