Table of Contents
ToggleBranding is Your Brand Defined
A professional services branding is best understood as your firm’s reputation and it’s visibility in the marketplace. The strength of your brand can be measured as Reputation X Visibility.
There is another important dimension of your brand as well: how relevant it is to your target client audience.
Your brand is perhaps your professional services firm’s most valuable asset. If this is true, then developing a stronger brand is your most important task (that’s why we developed our brand building guide).
What is Brand Development?
it’s the process of creating and strengthening your professional services .
As we help firms develop their brands, we divide the process into three phases.
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The first phase is getting your strategy right and aligned with your business objectives.
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Second is developing all the tools you will need to communicate the brand, such as your logo, tagline and website.
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Finally, there is the phase of strengthening your newly developed or updated brand.
Why Do You Need a Brand Strategy?
When you don’t know who you are, why you exist, what you believe in, or what you’re trying to achieve, your business suffers. From customer communication issues to employee retention, a lack of brand strategy causes problems at every level of an organization.
When you have no strategy…
You don’t understand your purpose, vision, mission, or values, so you make marketing and business decisions that don’t reflect them.
You don’t have a documented marketing plan, but you hope that whatever you’re doing will work.
Your team is fractured by disunity, confusion, and conflict, making it hard for employees to feel engaged and interested.
You don’t have cohesive messaging, so your content tends to be inconsistent at best, and contradictory at worst. As a result, it’s difficult to attract people who share your values (customers, employees, etc.).
You can’t clearly articulate your brand, and as a result, you can’t carve out a discernible place in the market.
In short, without a brand strategy, you lose.
What to Know Before You Start Your Brand Strategy
If you’re starting your brand strategy from scratch (or trying to do things the “right” way this time), there are two key pieces of information you need to know beforehand. (If you’ve done your business strategy, you know these already.) They are:
1) Who You’re For
Who are you trying to sell to? What do they need/want? How are their needs not being met?
2) Who You’re Against
Who shares your space? Who will you be competing with for attention? How might they outshine you?
Your Brand Heart is comprised of four elements that help you clarify who you are,
what you do, and why it matters.
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Purpose: Why do we exist?
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Vision: What future do we want to help create? What does the future look like?
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Mission: What are we here to do? How do we create that future?
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Values: What principles guide our behavior?
Create Your Brand Essence
Your Brand Essence consists of your:
1) Identify your personality. Your personality is basically your brand’s human characteristics and attributes.
2) Identify your brand voice. This is the way your brand sounds and speaks. Remember that every brand voice is unique.
3) Identify your tone. You brand’s tone is basically your general attitude.
When most people think of branding, they think of a brand’s visual identity: the logo, colors, typography, and other elements that act as the “face” of the brand.
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Logo
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Typography
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Color
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Imagery