Reasons to hire a branding agency

If you’ve been do-it-yourself brand building so far, you can see how much work goes into it. But how much is too much? Hiring brand marketing experts can be the smart move, but you’ll want to ask yourself a few key questions before you hand the reins over to a branding agency.

What is branding? Branding is a pretty broad term, but in a nutshell, it’s about the associations past and current customers make with your business and products. It involves a lot of elements such as your company image, what’s it like to do business with you, your products, communication, customer service, follow-up and so on. It’s the entire experience of engaging with your business (even a simple word-of-mouth recommendation) goes into building and maintaining your brand.

Before you consider whether or not you need to outsource your branding, you’ve got to know where to start. If you have absolutely no idea where your brand stands among your competition, you might want to consider a brand identity survey to shed some light on things.

To determine whether or not you need to hire a branding agency, you ought to consider what your current brand strategy is—and go from there:

Resources: If your company’s brand management is DIY, how many hours are devoted to marketing, designing and testing? Brand marketing takes time and skill. If you have an employee handling this job half-time, not only could you be limiting your brand power but it might not be enough of a priority.

Perspective: Is your internal brand builder able to get a healthy outside point of view on your brand assets? When you’ve been at a company for several years, your perspective can get a little narrow and set in its ways, making it tougher to “think like a customer.”

Consistency: Does your company have high employee turnover? If so, branding responsibilities might be getting passed around between different workers. This can negatively affect the focus and consistency of your brand management.

The best way to answer this question is by asking your audience and customers about your brand. If you haven’t surveyed your customer base yet, you can always use a survey to connect with them. 

Basically, you want to find out:

• What brands come to mind in your industry?
• Are people aware of your brand?
• What do they think of your brand?
• Are your customers loyal?

Once you begin surveying and collecting responses, remember to set benchmarks to track your progress over time. When you set internal business benchmarks, you’re helping your company define goals. But it’s also important to note how you stack up against the competition by using external benchmarks.