Yes — And What You Need to Know Before That First Call
If you’re planning a rebrand or a new brand launch, and you need the support of a brand development agency to get you across the finish line, you want to ensure you’ve invested in a team that’s going to make an impact.
The last thing you want is a group of creatives spitballing “cool logos” without expertise, proven methods, or a client base that has benefited from their work. Your brand is more than a logo. It’s your message, your personality, your voice, your identity, your mission, and your aspirations. It’s the gut feeling people get when they think of your business.
Your brand shouldn’t be left up to chance. Instead, select a creative agency that makes data-driven decisions to guide your branding efforts. Here’s how they do it.
Start Here: Your Business Data
Interpreting your business data is your first step toward understanding how to approach branding. The decisions made during the branding process, from your brand colors to your brand story, are all dependent on where your business stands now.
Brand development services from a leading creative agency often conduct a business audit to answer these questions:
- What are your hurdles?
- What’s working? What’s not?
- What do you want to emphasize?
- What do you want to sunset that’s no longer relevant?
- Where are competitors finding an advantage?
- What factors will affect your business in the near future?
Here’s a helpful example: an online payment platform isn’t attracting enough clients in the lucrative field of healthcare. Although their solution makes it easy for patients to pay bills online, healthcare only accounts for 10% of the business. Clearly, other platforms are taking the lion’s share of this massive industry. The payment platform’s leadership team wants to increase its number of healthcare clients and communicate that it provides a secure tool for an industry where privacy and trust are more critical than ever.
Understanding your business is a critical starting point for a brand development and web design agency. The team you choose will begin thinking of ways to reshape the brand to increase its credibility in a specific market.
Data-Driven Branding Services from a Creative Agency
After you’ve consulted a creative agency for an initial audit of your needs, it’s time to conduct a competitive analysis to determine how other brands are functioning. This approach serves several purposes:
- Identifying relevant competitors.
- Understanding their brand’s strengths and weaknesses.
- Learning from the most successful of these players.
- Discovering differentiators to exploit.
Branding agencies use analytics software, publicly available databases, and other resources to collect data on competitors and analyze it to determine an approach to your brand. Their work may include conducting interviews and surveys, social listening, studying your competitors’ online footprints, reviewing their ad campaigns, and much more. This information guides services from your brand development and content marketing agency as the team begins to build your brand’s visual and verbal identity.
To continue our business example: Imagine that this online payment company discovered that those who are capturing the healthcare market share have centered their brands on a color palette, typography, and iconography that evoke trust and human connection. A first step for your brand development agency will align with these competitors where appropriate, while also adding distinct differences that make them stand out.
And that’s just the beginning. A strong creative agency may also provide web design and content marketing agency services, allowing the business to develop messaging, mission and vision statements, web content, taglines, unique value propositions, talk tracks for the sales team, and more that help to communicate everything that a brand aspires to be.
Choose a Creative Agency with a Proven Strategy for Your Rebrand
It all starts with data and the tactical work of a leading brand development agency. Before you move forward with a creative agency’s services, ask them about their approach to branding. Gauge their precision, thoroughness, and thoughtfulness. View examples or case studies of their branding efforts. Understand if their creative decisions are intentional.
If the marketing team you’re considering offers a robust process backed by successful outcomes for their clients, consider reaching out. Your creative agency for web design and more should mirror your drive to elevate your business with wise marketing investments. Settling for less could leave you with a brand that “looks the part” but can’t truly play the leading role.
Peter Mishler is a senior copywriter. He enjoys learning everything he can about your business to help build your authority and web presence. Peter is the author of three internationally published books, for which he has received critical acclaim and national writing awards. He loves spending time with his wife and two children.
