RESOURCE GUIDE
Brand Consulting
Achieve your full potential with learned advice and close guidance from our team of branding experts
VISUALIZE ENGAGEMENT
A Complete Guide To Brand Consulting
Brand consulting is the process of helping a company create, build and maintain a strong, distinctive brand that stands out in the marketplace. It involves analyzing the market and understanding the target audience, developing a branding strategy, and creating a visual identity that reflects the company’s values and differentiates it from its competitors.
One important aspect of brand consulting is performing competitive analysis.
Competitive Analysis
Competitive analysis is the process of identifying and evaluating a company’s competitors and the strategies they use to succeed in the market. It allows you to understand the dynamics of the market and tailor a business strategy accordingly to gain more advantage over the competition.
By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of competitors, a brand consultant can help a company to identify areas where it can differentiate itself, and develop strategies to capitalize on those areas. This can include everything from pricing strategies to marketing tactics, to product development and more.
How to conduct a successful competitive analysis
Truly grasping the ins and outs of other businesses in your sector involves substantial planning, thorough research, and honest introspection.
Here’s a step-by-step process on how to perform a competitive analysis that will work for your brand.
1. Find out who your direct competitors are.
Your direct competitors would be any businesses with the same target audience that offer the same products and services as you do. You can pinpoint who they are by doing keyword research, checking online communities, and conducting surveys.
2. Identify your indirect and substitute competitors.
These competitors offer products or services that can serve as a substitute for whatever you’re offering. They could also be businesses that have a slightly different product but target the same customers as yours (e.g., accountants competing against bookkeepers). You can narrow these companies down by employing the same tactics you would for finding direct competitors.
3. Determine what you want to know.
Narrow down the key points of your investigation. These could be your competitors’ marketing share, business model and strategies, pricing, marketing approach, target audience – anything that you want to know more about.
4. Begin your research.
With your main competitors identified, it’s time to look at their websites, the type of content they’re creating, and the strategy they use for social media. Gather information about them the same way you’d study a customer.
5. Conduct a SWOT analysis.
SWOT is a strategic planning technique used to help identify and assess your brand’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. You can do a competitor SWOT analysis as well to get you into the mindset of the brands you’re up against.
6. Use proper documentation.
Remember that thorough documentation allows for consistency, efficiency, and standardization of the research process. A well-documented analysis will make it easier for you and your team to devise a concrete action plan.
Audience Research
The success of your brand is largely dependent on your ability to make customer-centric decisions. This is why successful businesses conduct audience research, which involves understanding what your customers need, making sense of it, and responding accordingly.
Audience research is done on a specific selection of people to find out about their shopping behaviors and habits. This ultimately makes you more effective in delivering your digital marketing strategy, as it allows you to better cater to the needs of your target audience.
What You Gain From Conducting Audience Research
Accurate buyer personas
A buyer persona is a detailed description of someone who represents your target audience. Although this character would be fictional, it’s based entirely on in-depth research of your existing or desired customers.
When you have accurate buyer personas, you can better understand what your actual customers need and want, allowing you to be more efficient in marketing, sales, product development, after-sales customer service, and other business aspects.
Audience-centric communication
Your content, whether it be social media posts, blogs, videos, paid ads, landing pages, or anything else, should be tailored to your audience’s language, values, and interests in order to effectively reach and connect with them.
Improved customer experience
Knowing your target audience well makes it easier to facilitate memorable, enjoyable, and worthwhile interactions with your brand. And with the trust you build through a positive user experience, you encourage visitors to become repeat customers.
Money, time, and resources saved
By utilizing advanced targeting techniques, marketers can save plenty of time, money and resources in the long run. The data you’ve gathered will tell you how to send the right messages to the right audiences at the right times.
Humanizing Your Brand
Your brand is not just about your logos, colors and other visual elements, which are just the superficial aspect that describes your business. It encompasses the entire identity of a business and how it is perceived by customers, employees, partners, and other stakeholders. Your brand is what gives your business its personality.
The importance of humanizing your brand
People generally respond better to brands that they feel a personal connection to, and are more likely to remain loyal to those brands. Humanizing a brand can help to build a strong and authentic connection with customers. When a brand is perceived as more human-like, it can help to create trust and loyalty among customers, which can lead to increased brand awareness and customer retention. Additionally, humanizing a brand can help to make it more relatable and approachable, which can help to attract new customers.
But how do you humanize your brand?
At LOJO Marketing, we follow these “best practices” to make your brand more “human” and relatable to your target audience.
Share valuable content and engage with the right audience
The idea here is to promote human interactions that create a fun, relevant or worthwhile experience with your customers.
Focus on human relationships rather than hard-core selling.
Today’s consumers don’t want to be sold to; they want to be informed about a product or service. Also, they appreciate brands that listen to their feedback.
Consistency is the key.
If you want to present yourself as a reliable and innovative company, your product, service, paid ads, social media posts, images, videos and other content should reflect this brand’s “personality.”
Take your audience behind the scenes.
Your website’s “About Us” page, social media posts and videos are great platforms that give “face” to your business. FYI, no one remembers “faceless” brands and “robotic” marketing strategies.
Benefits of having a strong brand
Creating a solid brand is a long-term game. In fact, it’s a perpetual process in which you adapt to the market trend, changing consumer behavior and sentiment, and ever-evolving technology.
Here are the benefits you can expect if your organization has a strong brand.
Effective advertising
Ads and branding always go hand in hand since you can’t sell something people can’t relate to or don’t recognize.
Effective Advertising is a result of knowing the audience, knowing your company values and what the service or product represents to the whole mix that speaks to customers with authority, knowledge and comfort.
More engaged employees
When you have a solid identity and your staff knows and believes in it, chances are they feel more invested in the organization.
The internal language and theme of a company can spell unity and harmony within the core business through the strong faith in the company from the employees themselves, at a genuine level.
More loyal customers
Again, a solid and humanized brand has no problem attracting and keeping customers.
Positive and consistent perception
You need a recognizable and trustworthy “face” that’s reflected in your product, quality of service, sales efforts and marketing content.
Brand Strategy
Contrary to popular belief, your branding strategy is not just the sum of your logo and other visual elements, although they are integral to any successful branding effort.
In a nutshell, a branding strategy includes the logo, colors and other visual elements, public perception, and brand awareness and sentiment. In short, it’s about the emotions you want to solicit from your target customers and other stakeholders (partners, employees, vendors, etc.) every time they see your product, logo, or anything that represents your business.
What constitutes a successful brand strategy?
A successful branding strategy goes beyond letting the world know your brand exists. A more important goal is to create a positive public perception and solicit a positive emotional response from your target audience every time they see and interact with your brand.
Despite the importance of having a solid brand, it’s a bit of a challenge to measure it because we’re dealing with intangible and almost non-quantifiable elements. Consequently, the closest thing we can do to evaluate this is to conduct a brand awareness survey, social media auditing and listening, and Google Trends and Google Analytics review.
At LOJO Marketing, our brand strategy is created by answering these critical questions.
-What are your brand’s objectives?
-How do you communicate your brand’s objectives and message?
-What pain points do you want to solve?
-How does your product or service benefit your target customers?
-What reputation do you want to build for your brand?What emotions do you want to solicit from your customers every time they see your brand?
-How do you identify your target customers?
-How do you identify your direct, indirect and substitute competitors?
-Who among your competitors are good at meeting your target customers’ needs and wants?
-What voice and personality do you want for your brand?
-How do you engage with your potential customers?
Working With Logos And Website Redesign
All business organizations need a visual identity to help customers identify and remember their products and services. But surprisingly enough, many small- and medium-sized companies skimp on professional logo design.
Think of your logo as a symbol, drawing or mark that represents your brand’s identity and its “promise” to the customers.
How important is a Logo?
You can’t design your website without your logo, consistent color palette, and other visual elements that represent your brand.
A logo is one of the most important visual elements because it creates consistency across your online presence, from your website and social media to landing pages, blogs and paid ads. Consequently, it can boost your brand recognition and help your target audience and existing customers recognize you from different digital platforms.
Logo and website redesign
A logo becomes even more important when you redesign your website because it allows your audience to recognize you even after making some changes.
By having a unique and memorable visual identity, your customers will know that they can still expect the same quality of service or product they’re getting from you.
It’s not uncommon for businesses to be apprehensive about website redesign, especially if it involves a significant or complete overhaul, because of the risk of confusing their audience. But with a memorable and unique logo, you can avoid this problem
Meanwhile, these are the things that warrant website redesign:
Content is king because it largely determines your success in social media marketing, Google ranking, and other digital marketing efforts. Your utmost priority should be giving your audience high-quality, engaging, and valuable content.
But to achieve success, you need a solid content strategy in which you need to create a list of content. This could be text, video, infographics, audio, ebook, cheat sheet, etc.
You should also consider timing and resources to achieve your goals. Think of it as a set of intended actions to fulfill your specific objectives.
LOJO's Brand Consultants
You need to use consistent visual elements such as logo, colors and typography to make your business easily recognizable; this is why opting for branding packages makes more sense than separate branded items.
Aside from having a cohesive visual identity that reflects your core business values, branding packages are an excellent choice if your goals include the following:
-You’re a new company entering the market.
-You want to rebrand your company after introducing new products/services.
-Your core business goals or target market has changed drastically over time.
-You need a large-scale marketing campaign to boost revenue, improve brand awareness, etc.
Services included in LOJO's branding packages
Our graphic designers and brand specialists will help you establish your brand’s image through a set of digital and physical resources, from logo and color palette to website, email templates and business cards.
Please continue reading below to learn more about the most common services included in our branding packages.
Logo
A logo is one of the most critical elements of brand design because it’s a symbol made of text and images that
identifies your business and makes you recognizable.
Think of it as your primary visual identity that reflects what your company does and its values. Depending on how you want to present your business to the public, your logo may be a figurative or abstract design, include your company’s name, or contain a memorable graphic mark.
Website
Another important element in a branding kit, your official website acts as your digital storefront where your audience can learn more about your products and services. Also, this platform serves as your online identity, or to be more exact, your multi-dimensional resume containing interactive and user-friendly elements that give visitors a pleasant experience.
Email templates
Email is one of the most potent marketing channels because of its high conversion rate and ROI, provided that you use strategies that convert your audience into actual buyers and maintain current customers engaged with your brand.
Effective email marketing campaigns also provide brand consistency to ensure that your customers can easily recognize you from your competitors.
Color palette
Did you know that the color palette in branding increases your brand awareness and recognition by up to 80%? Or did you know that it also plays a critical role in how your target audience perceives your company?
In marketing and sales, color palette plays an even more important role, with one study suggesting that ads in color are 42% more effective in catching the reader’s attention than the same ads in black and white format.
Other branding services
At LOJO Marketing, our branding packages may also include letterhead, brochures, package design and business cards. You may also ask our graphic designers to provide you with a typography service, which is the art of arranging letters to make your copy clear and visually appealing to your target customers.
