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Choosing a Branding Agency: Know What You Need

Choosing a Branding Agency: Know What You Need

Whether you are launching a new business or new product or looking to rejuvenate a brand identity that is no longer delivering, chances are your marketing team is going to be searching for a partner agency to develop that new brand concept.

But before you start interviewing agencies, take a step back and do some homework. The first step in choosing a marketing agency to develop your new brand is to know what you want.

What are you looking for in a branding partner? What will you want that agency to deliver?

While a brand identity is much more than a logo, there may be times when a logo refresh and design truly is all your team needs, but other branding efforts will go much deeper. Knowing what you want from your branding partner will help you choose the right marketing agency for your brand.

Which of these elements of brand identity development do you need from your marketing partner?

1. Market research

If you are looking to create a brand that stands apart from the competition or to home in on what your current brand really means to those outside your own marketing department, you need to include market research on your must-have list.

The research done for brand development will be different from that done as part of your product development process. Your checklist for brand development essentials should include a marketing and media audit that will look at the current view of both your own brand (if you are rebranding) and the impression your competitors are making on customers, prospects, the media and industry analysts.

Know whether this research is something your in-house team has the time and experience to tackle, or if it can be done more efficiently and more completely by a marketing agency with a wealth of experience in the field.

2. Broad-based brand concept

Do you want your branding partner to help you craft a high-level brand concept that can be adapted in many different ways? Be sure you spell that out as you determine your needs.

Is the brand being developed one for the entire company, which will need to adapt to a range of products or services? Before starting work with a marketing agency, your team should have an idea of all the circumstances the resulting brand identity will be used in.

3. Specific messaging

Maybe you already have a well-established corporate brand, but need a partner to help you drill down with messaging specific to a product, service or target audience. If that is all you need, be ready to say so.

You will likely want this level of service, also, if you are starting from scratch to launch a new brand. The broad-based concept listed above will get you started, but think of it as the trunk of a tree, with each branch being specific products or audiences for which you need targeted messaging that connects back to the larger purpose and overall brand.

4. Visual design elements

Here is where the logo comes in. Along with a color palette, fonts, rules for usage, and guidance on the types of images to be used in marketing and other communications.

Create a list of what you want your branding partner to create as part of the final brand delivery.

5. Internal structural changes

Sometimes truly embracing and embodying a brand concept requires changes within an organization that can be difficult to identify and initiate from within. Or even if your marketing department can recognize the need to, say, restructure how customer service is provided to match the image your company wants to portray, getting buy-in is sometimes easier when the advice comes from outside.

Include in requirements or RFP for a marketing agency that you want them to take the 30,000-foot-view of the company and look at how all departments contribute to creating a living brand identity.

6. Campaign strategies

As you create your checklist of deliverables you will want a branding partner to develop, consider including a series of campaign strategies that set your new brand’s implementation into motion.

A brand identity can only have impact if it is reaching the target audience, so a complete branding program should include the strategies for public relations, internal communications, and marketing—both traditional and inbound—that will carry out the identity.

7. Complete campaigns

If your marketing team is as strapped for resources as most, you may also want your branding partner to create the content to put those campaigns into action. Carrying forward content creation and implementation with the same agency that developed the brand positioning saves time and money spent bringing a different partner up to speed.

Think about how many campaigns you want to have ready to go as your new brand is introduced, and include in your agreement with your chosen marketing agency precisely what you expect to be a part of those campaigns.

Here are few tools that may help you solidify ideas and define what you want your branding partner to provide:

What more would you want a marketing agency to provide when you partner with them to develop and launch a new brand?

6 Steps To Creating Enviable Brands

Download our guide 6 Steps to Creating Enviable Brands to learn the crucial steps you should follow to create an enviable brand for your company.

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