5 Brand & Marketing Tips
Continuing with our series of posts, we have asked a number of our consultants to give you their top five tips to help your business. Second to offer up some advice is Emma, a senior brand & marketing consultant who has over 18 years experience specialising in branding & identity, communications strategy and content to help take businesses to the next level of growth.
Tip 1 - Ensure your Brand Identity reflects what your business stands for!
Whether you are a startup or existing business, make sure that what you do as a business is accurately shown through your branding & identity. This will help you be seen by the right people and in the right way, ensuring that your business proposition is clear and easy to understand. Getting it right from the start is absolutely critical, not only can it be a costly process but it also takes time and you need to invest that time, making sure you get the right output. Even if you are an existing business, it is equally important to reflect on your branding, ensuring you are being consistent with the usage throughout your marketing communications strategies.
Tip 2 - Brand Identity is more than just a logo!
Many of my clients that come to me for branding help are those that have tried to do things quickly and cheaply. By doing so, they have soon realised that they have not achieved what they wanted in terms of branding that truly reflects their business service or product. I always say to my clients that branding and identity is so much more than just a logo! You need to think about all the different elements including your imagery, tone of voice & brand personality, fonts & typefaces and finally, a colour palette. These all represent your business and what it stands for. Stay true to your branding and be consistent with your identity usage across all your company marketing materials and social platforms. It is worth investing in properly to make sure you don’t waste both your time and money in having to do it again by trying to cut corners. The brief is the most important part of the process - spend time on writing the brief of what your business is about, what you stand for and how you see that being reflected. A well written brief will in turn lead to an excellent brand design.
Tip 3 - Write a Business Action Plan
Phasing your plan out will help you prioritise what is the most important task or activity. Including a rough timeline and some estimated costs will help you budget accordingly and will ensure you prioritise effectively according to your budget constraints. You will be surprised, quite often my clients think they need to do something first (such as investing in and building a website); but actually what is often more critical is other marketing communications such as social platforms and finding your audience. Once this is done you can then follow with a phase two of your website launch. Obviously, this is not always the case but don’t assume that what you think you need is what you DO need. Get an expert strategist involved who will help you make sense of it and create a plan that is right for your business.
Tip 4 - Write a Communications Strategy
Once you have an action plan, write a communications strategy of how you are going to achieve it and what you need to do. Think about the Who, What, When, Why, How approach, Who are you talking to? Who is your customer or client? What are you communicating to them? What are the key messages? What is the call to action? Why is the message important? How are you going to achieve what you are trying to do? When is the right time to execute your strategy? Being very clear about who your target audience is and what your messages are is a critical part of the strategy - get that right and everything else will start to fall into place with a solid plan.
Tip 5 - Launch & Learn
It is so important to always make time to review and analyse your activity. What worked? What didn't work? Have you looked at google analytics to understand website traffic impact? Have you looked at your analytics on your socials? Do you need help reviewing and analysing? What else can you do to review what you’ve done and take the right learnings in order to adjust your plans and strategies for the next phase? Asking lots of questions will help you understand what has worked and what hasn’t worked. Investing the time in this process will save you further time and money in the longer term.
I hope these five tips have helped you and if you would like to talk about your brand & marketing activity or have a specific project in mind, get in touch with the By Day team. They will discuss your business requirements and current challenges to help find the right consultant for you.