Establishing a powerful brand is a no-brainer for businesses that understand its relevance. A strong brand not only boosts recognition but also helps you stand out in a crowd of competitors.
But what if you’ve never built a brand before? How does one start to create a brand from scratch? What does branding even entail? Well, that’s where branding agencies come in. These companies have essential expertise and resources to shape, develop, and launch your brand to the market. Below, we’ll look at branding agencies, what they do, and the benefits of hiring one.
What Is a Branding Agency?
A branding agency is a firm that specializes in developing a brand’s unique identity, voice and values for businesses, products, or services. It builds a strong identity for brands. It then relays this identity to your target audience in a manner that not only resonates with them, but also helps you achieve your goals.
So contrary to popular belief, branding firms don’t just design cute logos and websites. Their biggest responsibility is to influence how consumers, staff and other stakeholders perceive your brand. This perception determines whether they’ll become a part of your brand or not.
Below, you’ll find a more comprehensive list of duties that branding agencies undertake:
What Does a Branding Agency Do?
A branding agency brings a lot to the table. It helps with crucial tasks like:
Strategy
One of the things that a branding agency does is to create a branding strategy. It works in tandem with the brand owner, helping them to:
- Recognize the brand’s primary objective, hence, integrate it into their mission and messaging
- Analyse their competition – this is necessary in identifying the best way to position the brand, thus, give it a competitive edge
- Find the best marketing channels suited for the brand
- Identify potential techniques to attract the target audience
- Guarantee brand consistency
Creation
Although strategizing is important, creation is where a branding agency truly shines. It builds elements, which are visually appealing. This not only helps in attracting the right audience, but also differentiating your brand from the crowd.
During this creation stage, the agency assists you in creating features like your business logo, tagline, packaging design and more. In addition, they offer help with things like:
- Creating a captivating brand story: When launching your brand into the market, don’t focus solely on marketing your products or services.
It’s also crucial to have a compelling story of how the brand started, and its journey so far. Thankfully, this is something that a branding agency can do for you.
- Coming up with a unique brand voice and personality: In this case, the branding agency will help you identify your brand voice. More specifically, they will help you figure out the message to convey audience and how to say it on different mediums.
- Forming a brand style guide: This is a set of guidelines, highlighting how different elements can be used for branding purposes.
It lays out detailed instructions relating to the usage of colours, logos, imagery, typography and many more. This then makes it easier for your brand to maintain consistency and recognition. It’s particularly important if you plan to outsource certain tasks like content creation.
- Designing an eye-catching website: It goes without saying that branding agencies also help with web design. Most agencies work with a team of experts, including professional web designs.
As such, they’ll help you develop a site that’s visually appealing, and highly searchable so that it attracts the right audience.
- Building a content marketing plan: Unlike logo and web design, content creation is not a one-off project. You need to create content regularly to draw, engage and retain customers. This can be overwhelming for small-sized companies with limited staff.
The good news is that if you work with a branding agency, they can handle this too. They’ll create a long-term content plan and constantly update your blogs and socials with fresh content.
Measurement and Analysis
As with any other aspect of your business, your branding project should be monitored closely and the results measured regularly.
A branding agency knows the metrics that can be used to gauge this performance. Furthermore, they know how to interpret the results, and make necessary adjustments so you can achieve your branding goals. They evaluate performance by checking factors like:
- Changes in website traffic
- Customer engagement from online and offline efforts
- Conversion rates from your marketing and advertising campaigns
- Improvement in brand visibility and brand awareness
Why Hire a Branding Agency?
Are you still on the fence about hiring a branding agency? Here’s a list of benefits you stand to gain:
- Save time – creating a strong, professional brand is not something that can be rushed. It requires time, dedication and patience. A branding agency can spend the right amount of time on this to give you the best results.
- Experience – based on the details provided above, it’s clear that branding involves a variety of tasks. From designing websites and logos to creating strategies and content plans, branding involves a lot. With a branding agency, you can rest easy knowing that each task is being handled by an expert in the respective field.
- Cost-effective – a branding agency can save you money by ensuring that everything is done right the first time. Besides, most of these firms offer a variety of services in one package, helping you save some dough in the process.
Conclusion
Branding is an integral part of running a successful business. Due to this, it should be handled by a team of experts who know what they’re doing. This calls for a branding agency.
And just in case you’re wondering what else they can do for you, such firms help with strategizing, performance monitoring and creation. Creation encompasses all the design work, from building a website to designing logos and creating a brand style guide.
Other benefits of working with a branding agency include time savings, money savings and access to a pool of talented individuals.