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How to Develop a Brand for Your Agency

Develop a Brand for Your Agency

Irrespective of the field you are in, having a strong brand is crucial. If your agency has a strong brand, it will offer your business focus. It will also help you in describing your firm, the services you provide, and others. Here we will discuss how to develop a brand for your agency.

What is Personal Branding and Why is it Important?

If you understand what you are and who you are, it will be easier for you to determine the prospects to chase and those to ignore. These and many more are reasons why creating a strong brand is essential. Develop a brand for your agency is very important at profit level. The steps below will help you in develop strong brand for your agency.

Audit Your Brand

Irrespective of how large or small your agency is, your website visitors, clients, and followers on social media already have a way they see your brand. Most times, there is a disparity between the way you want to see yourself and the way the clients see you. Branding typically has to do with the perception you have of yourself to that of your customers.

Before you move any further into branding, you need to do a comprehensive brand audit. Evaluate all areas of your brand, its present perception, and the entire brand cohesiveness. When you do this, it will aid you in understanding your present standing and the areas you need to change for the future.

The following can help with a brand audit:

Ask Your Clients Questions

Understanding the way your website visitors, clients, and followers on social media see you is a crucial aspect of any brand audit. You can do this via numerous methods, including the following:

  • Develop an online poll and provide it to all email subscribers, website visitors, and followers on social media.
  • Interview customers so that you can understand the way they see your brand and yourself.
  • Pay attention to conversations on social media and monitor keywords to see the way people define you.

As regards insights, you will get the most information from interviews. However, they are also the most difficult to prepare. It is less difficult to run online polls, but the data they provide is limited.

A fast method of getting insight is to utilize a tool for social media monitoring to view how others are speaking of your brand. Search for keywords that showcase the negative or positive experiences

of your brand. If you have a massive number of followers, you can take advantage of a tool for social listening to see the keywords that have to do with your brand that people are using.

If you decide to go through the direction of a poll/interview, the following are a few questions you can ask:

  • Is our brand experience or website unique from that of others?
  • Why did you choose to collaborate with us? How did our brand help with this decision?

Finally, ensure you monitor all replies in another spreadsheet.

Appraise Your Competitors

Customers will make an opinion of your brand using your competitors as a bar. For this reason, it is reasonable to add the evaluation of your brand in your brand audit. You can begin by putting down your major competitors. Group them using the following categories:

  • specialization: if they are focused on a niche or a full-service agency
  • location: if they serve global or local clients
  • target market: the type of customers they serve

With this information, you will be able to pinpoint your aspiring and direct competitors. Note that direct competitors are those agencies that have the same niche, size, and target market as you while aspiring competitors are developed agencies you hope to be like.

Take a look at the way those competitors branded their agency. Check out their websites, marketing collateral, and presence on social media. You can also read their blogs, sign up for their newsletters, and follow their pages on social media.

Ask yourself the following:

  • Is their brand messaging, design, and copy cohesive and consistent?
  • Do they use professional, quirky, or funny copies?
  • Does their brand image go with their price point and target market?

Evaluate Your Present Brand

Next, you need to ascertain what you believe of your brand. Do you convey this perception via your marketing collateral? To answer this, you need to begin by collecting all aspects of your brand. It should consist of the following:

  • website copy and design
  • logos
  • email newsletter and blogs
  • marketing collateral, like white papers, e-books, and case studies
  • sales collateral, like rate sheets and brochures
  • social media messaging
  • style guides, email signatures, and communication plans

Typically, any aspect of your agency that gets to a customer should be included in your analysis. After collecting all these, you need to evaluate them using the following:

  • expectations—for instance, if the identity of your brand goes with the expectations of your clients
  • consistency—if all the elements of your brand are cohesive and uniform
  • clarity—if your positioning is passed through the elements of your brand

Any component that does not pass the value of your brand will break the experience. Note all these elements before you head to the subsequent step.

Point Out Where You Want to Be, Where You Are, and Where You Are Meant to Be

Before develop a brand for your agency, you have to determine the type of digital marketing agency you want to operate. You will need to have an in-depth look at yourself to find your vision and values. You can also ask your entire staff and ask stakeholders, including clients and investors, for ideas.

The crucial thing to do is to fit the agency you can develop into that you want to develop. A fantastic agency is created when your interest fits with your market trends and expertise. It is essential to include recent market trends in your brand identity. Taking advantage of the rising trends, like drones and social mobile, can aid you in develop a distinct brand for your agency and make you unique from competitors.

Also, create a list of the expertise you are presently able to access, both freelance and in-house. If you plan on becoming specialized, you need to make sure that you have the skills.

When you are through with this, clearly put down your philosophy, mission, and values. After covering this, you can now go on to develop the great brand for your agency. Here are the steps you need to take:

Determine Your Brand

If you have carried out an audit of your brand by now, you will have an idea in mind of what you want your brand to be. Here, you will take this a bit further. Begin by carrying out an analysis of the following:

  • What is the type of clients you have drawn in till now?
  • Are there any market gaps you could provide service to? Any rising technology you could become proficient at?
  • What are your employees proficient in? What do they love doing best?
  • What is the type of customers you want to draw in?
  • What do your employees or yourself detest doing the most? This is a question lots of agencies overlook. But it is very vital as it is impossible to develop an organization based on something you have no love for.

With this information, begin a sketch of your brand. A great way of doing this is to develop a brief and compelling mission statement. Together, the vision and mission statements are the how, why, and what of your organization.

Strike a Balance between Implicit and Explicit Branding

Your brand is a merge of the things you say and things you don’t. The things you say include your vision and About Us page. You are clearly or explicitly informing people of what your brand entails.

It should consist of things potential clients can quickly read through to attain an idea of what your brand is all about. These could include keywords like vibrant, bold, and amazing among others. Past this, your brand also consists of implicit elements, which include your client list, design, and chosen images among others. They are the things you don’t say.

Your aim should be to ensure both your explicit brand statements and implicit elements align with each other. If you say you are professional and your website is filled with cartoons, then you are not doing justice to your brand. When you begin developing the identity of your brand, ensure you have this balance in mind.

Get Ideas from Your Competitors

Although you need to make efforts to be unique, don’t forget to find out what your competitors are doing. They may just have found the perfect means of drawing in target clients. It is not always a terrible idea to get inspiration from your competitors. This is especially the case in industries with a high level of competition where there is a high demand for the attention of a potential client.

There is a possibility that your competitors who have been successful have probably tried out the leading approaches to get to their target audience. If all the information and data shows that a particular approach is what is in vogue, you may not make any headway if you try something else.

When studying your competitors, observe the following:

  • what type of clients they draw in
  • how they portray themselves to these customers

Search for alignment of client image. If a competitor states that they have worked alongside HP to develop a youthful, bold, and fresh redesign, can you find anything in the image of their brand that portrays these values? If yes, what copy, colors, and UX did they utilize in showcasing these values? Use this information as ideas for your brand, especially if you plan to draw in the type of customers other competing agencies have.

Be Sure of Consistency

If you take a look at some of the most influential brands in the world, you will see a similarity; when it comes to their brand messaging, they are incredibly consistent.

Imagine the half-bitten apple of Apple devices or the yellow M used by McDonald’s. You will instantly recognize these brands because of how consistent their brand presence has been till date. When it comes to agency consistency, it means the consistency in the way they communicate, in copy and in design.

Every aspect of your brand that your customer comes in contact with should possess a cohesive and consistent message. If the colors of your brand are purple and yellow, your logo, blog, Facebook cover image, and email signatures should include these colors. If you label yourself as professional, your tweets and website copy among others should resonate these.

Importantly, you need to be consistent with the way you communicate with every stakeholder. Develop a plan for communication with a style guide clear enough for each member of your team to follow. All the messages being sent to clients should go with this guide. To get ideas, you can go through the identity guidelines of well-known brands.

Showcase Your Projects, People, and Passions

When you are running a business when your products are individuals, it becomes a major aspect of your brand to showcase them. There are two parts to this:

  • showcasing your work
  • showcasing the expertise, knowledge, and culture that make it possible to do your work

When it comes to creative agencies, it becomes even more crucial to do the second because creative thinking is often as a result of the culture that encourages it. So what are the available options of showcasing your culture to enable you to incorporate it in your brand image?

One way of doing this is to take advantage of social media. Make your presence on social media, especially all those channels with a massive level of visual, like Facebook and Instagram, an aspect of your brand identity. Utilize these platforms in showcasing the culture of your company, side projects, client projects, and other things that portray your beliefs, ambitions, and interests.

You are offering clients a peek of what interests your people, what they are like, and what their passion projects, as well as yours, are. Social media is an incredible means of getting this done. Social media helps you go beyond telling; it lets you show as well. Developing a good brand involves a lot more work. However, an elaborate brand audit along with these tips will give you a head start in develop a great brand for your agency. From here, you can adjust, grow, and develop a brand that captures your vision.

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Era Innovator

Era Innovator is a growing Technical Information Provider and a Web and App development company in India that offers clients ceaseless experience. Here you can find all the latest Tech related content which will help you in your daily needs.

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