A company is a more than a brand but it’s your brand which consumers, business decision-makers, and employees buy into first

The work a brand strategy agency performs for your business doesn’t just cover:

• your logo, your font, and the colours you use in your internal and external communications,
• the products and services you sell,
• the people you employ, or
• the ways in which your company connects with and appears to the outside world.

It’s much more than that.

It’s almost impossible to put a monetary figure on the worth of a successful brand but we all instinctively know how priceless a respected and recognisable brand is to a business.

A brand is almost ethereal – it has the power to influence how your customers and staff feel when they think about your company and the value they attach to it.

But as with anything ethereal, it’s extremely delicate.

Your actions as a business must always reflect your company ethos and approach because the power and the value of a great brand has to be earned over and over again.

You have the power to create a great brand

A great brand is founded upon a true story you want to share about your company.

You want that story to impress the consumers and business decision makers you target as well as the people you most want to employ.

It’s a story of the value you deliver to your clients, the environment you provide to your staff, your guiding business principles, and how your company interacts with the wider world.

To create your brand story, you have to know:

• who you want to sell to and why,
• how your company goes the extra mile for customers and what that extra mile actually consists of,
• what your company supports and what it backs away from,
• how your company behaves to its staff and its suppliers, and
• the impact your business has on the wider world.

Your company must set itself lofty goals and ideals yet not so lofty that it loses its approachability and its sense of humour.

Your company’s word is its bond.

Your company’s trustworthiness and the fact you’ll always do what you promise for a customer comes shining through online, over the phone, and face-to-face.

It’s our job to work with you on developing your brand story and how it’s presented.

After that, we then develop a brand strategy framework so that we’re able to tell the rest of the world what’s different and better about your company.

And working with the right brand strategy agency team has been shown to increase sales revenues by up to 23%.

Better still, you’re left with a more profitable and manageable business at the end of it.

Our brand strategy agency services

The stages involved in developing a brand strategy with More Than Words

There are a number of different stages involved in the creation of a brand strategy prior to its launch.

Some of the more important states are:

• the creation of buyer personas
• identification of your more lucrative target markets
• sense of purpose discovery
• development of your external brand story narrative
• development of a brand strategy for your “internal” clients
• the creation of a content marketing and distribution strategy
• the creation of branding guidelines
• the launch and maintenance of your external and internal brand strategy campaigns

What are buyer personas and why are they important for branding?

Your products and services solve a number of important issues in your customers’ lives and for their businesses.

You already know which problems they’ll solve but how much do you actually know about how substantial a difference your products or services make to customers’ lives or businesses?

By truly understanding from a buyer’s perspective…

• the problems your products and services solve,
• the money they save for customers, or
• the opportunities they present to customers

…you can build up an idea of the life, the hopes, the fears, and the motivations of your buyers.

You can then build stories around those lives.

You can begin to answer questions in depth like:

• how and when do they make decisions to buy your products and services?
• which websites, social media platforms, and publications do they rely on for information?
• what questions do they type into search engines to find out how to solve a problem, make more money, or make their personal/professional lives easier?
• how much pressure are they under from bosses or spouses/civil partners to get a purchasing decision right?
• what are the consequences if they make the wrong decision?

By understanding your existing and potential clients on a much deeper personal and professional level, you get a much stronger idea on:

• the type of content you need to produce to appeal to them and
• the platforms they’re most likely to look to for answers.

How a new branding strategy helps you select the most lucrative markets to operate in

Our brand strategy agency team may create two buyer personas for your company, we may create twenty – for each company, the number of buyer personas is different.

You’ll be able to recognise many of your existing customers within the buyer personas we create.

The fastest growing and most profitable firms generally have fewer buyer personas.

The fewer the number of targets, the more precise the content you create for them and the less you spend making sure that content is seen.

Working with us, you may discover that you spend much more money, time, and energy identifying and selling to some customers than others.

An important element of any brand strategy process is focused on profit maximisation.

If you’re spending time, money, and energy competing for ten different types of buyers but only making decent profits from three of them, why not position your brand to appeal to just those three types of buyers instead?

Your turnover may decrease but, following internal rationalisation and reduced expenditure, your profit margins will increase.

Perhaps you’ll make the same amount of overall profit targeting those three audiences than you did targeting ten – perhaps you’ll make more.

Either way, your business will be easier and cheaper to run.

What to expect with our branding strategy service

A full brand strategy consulting service package from More Than Words will include in the first part:

• discovery of existing target markets and refinement (where required) into a smaller number of more lucrative target markets (with narrowing of products/services offered to those markets if possible),
• creation of a sense of purpose and a brand history,
• amendment to or replacement of existing website and to social media platform presences, and
• brand strategy presentation to finesse planning done so far.

Following completion of the first part, we then move onto:

• creation of content strategy,
• decisions made on where to place content and other promotional materials, and
• creation of branding manual to cover visual and linguistic (both spoken and written) company presentation, and
• creation of content (with or without support from your internal teams).

Your brand strategy will then be reviewed every three months.

Find out more

Your branding strategy review will not only help you decide for certain which markets you want to target and your range of products and services.

It also helps us decide on a wide-ranging and comprehensive content marketing strategy to recommend for your company.

To speak with an account manager about your branding strategy in the context of a wider content marketing campaign, please call us on 0330 010 3495 or you can email our content marketing team by clicking here.

What is branding and why is it important?

For business decision makers and consumers, branding is the memory, the image, and the gut feeling they have about your company and its products and services.

The right to rent-free space in a customer’s mind isn’t free.

Usually, a customer has to have up to 7 interactions with you before they’ll consider spending any money with you.

You need to make sure your company, its visual appearance, and the content you create is memorable, it engenders trust, and it evokes positive feelings.

In today’s digital martetplace, 60% of millennials expect a company’s branding to be consistent wherever it’s seen.

If your branding lacks consistency or your branding does not connect well to your target audiences, your company is in danger of losing out competitively to other firms targeting your existing and potential clients.

Creating a consistent brand strategy for a strong connection to the outside world across all platforms

The most effective branding strategies are built upon a company’s goals and its ethos – its brand story.

A lack of clear brand personality can damage a company’s image and this often causes a customer to look elsewhere.

Our branding agency services team makes use of a variety of successful brand strategy elements in the work we carry out for clients to improve the results they receive from their marketing and general external communications.

Great branding guides and reassures existing and potential customers through every step of their buying journeys leading to an increased chance of making a  sale.

To distinguish your company from your competitors, you need to develop and build upon having an identifiable and respected brand.

Standing out in a competitive marketplace

Distinctive branding, both visual and linguistic, shows customers, staff, and suppliers how you are different and what you stand for.

The various elements of a brand strategy touches on everything a company does – from the products and services a firm chooses to sell to the tone of voice with which it sells those products and services.

Branding clarifies exactly who you are to the customer so that there is no confusion over what they can expect.

8 out of 10 consumers will continue to buy from a company that they trust.

For customers who have not bought from you yet, the confidence they feel in making a future purchase from you depends greatly on your branding and your content.

Branding to base future business growth on

Your brand strategy toolkit contains much more than the font you choose or the colours you use in your visual presentations to customers.

Think of the branding plan we present to you as a mixture of:

• a business plan,
• a sales and marketing approach,
• a recruiting sergeant,
• a defence against competitors, and
• a way to cement goodwill in the minds of existing and potential customers for your company over the longer term.

Having a consistent brand provides much needed familiarity to your your target clientele and it gives you the best chance of continually outperforming your competitors.

Develop a brand which builds trusting, long-lasting relationships with customers, staff, and suppliers

Maintaining relevance and visibility in a saturated market is difficult.

In the current business environment made even more competitive than ever by the internet, new rivals seem to constantly emerge telling your customers a story about how:

• they’re bigger and better than you,
• they offer their customers more,
• they go two extra miles and not one, and
• they have superior products or services to you.

It’s for these types of situations when branding, one the most important defences your company has against its competitors, is at its most effective.

By building consistent, trusting relationships with your existing and prospective customers through branding, they remain more likely to use you because they know you will deliver on your promise.

The benefits of being a strong and trusted brand

To establish leadership in the markets you operate in, your whole company and its branding need to appear to the outside world;

• to be imbued with an energy to innovate,
• to place at its centre fairness and equity in the way it behaves,
• to support the same causes as your target audience, and
• to be committed to taking care of your customers long after the sale is made.

The four elements must be clear and concise in all of your company’s external and internal communications.

That includes on your website, on your social media platforms, and across all of your published content.

Your communications need not only to share the same visual and linguistic branding – they must appear as authentic to the outside world.

Brand and marketing agency services from More Than Words

Our brand agency team delivers a suite of effective branding strategies to clients which:

• clarifies their company vision to the outside world,
• differentiates them positively from their competitors, and
• is specifically designed to help achieve often ambitious commercial goals and growth targets.

Your new branding will be a reminder to existing customers of the unique selling points of your business and of the products and services it sells.

Your new branding will be a siren calling to customers yet to purchase from you – your clear branding and focus gives potential clients a reason to get in touch.

We’ll create a strong brand which showcases your company as professional, trustworthy, and authentic.

More now than ever, values like these are the values which your customers instantly recognise and appreciate and with which they want to align themselves.

We develop your brand voice to capture the attention of your target audience.

We use it throughout all of your digital and offline content from social media posts to your website design.

This is the tone of voice you use to speak to the wider world – to your customers, suppliers, staff, regulators, and more.

Your visual and linguistic communications style will run through all the content we produce for you.

Every item of content we produce for you will build upon your brand story.

Contact our brand strategy agency team

We’re open during office hours between Monday and Friday.

Please call us, email us, or fill out the contact form to talk with one of our brand strategy agency team about developing a long-term brand strategy to increase revenues and profitability online and offline.

We’re available on 0330 010 3495 or you can email our content marketing team by clicking here.

We’re based in North Shields town centre if you want to come and visit us. There is plenty of free parking outside and we’re only three minutes’ walk from North Shields Metro station.