Question: How does strategic branding help businesses grow?
Answer: Strategic branding helps businesses grow through reaching their ideal clients, prequalifying new leads, simplifying your communication process, and more.

Strategic branding can be a big investment – why should you make it?

Choosing where you’re going to allocate funds for business promotion is a big decision – and you have so many options in our digital world now. Facebook ads? Google ads? In person marketing? Updating your website? All of them have pros and cons – but there’s an investment that underlies all of those, and will genuinely make everything you do to promote your business more effective, and simpler to apply. That investment? Strategic branding.

And I get it – that’s a big claim. One thing, that makes everything in your business easier? Even saying it, I feel like an online guru telling you I have the recipe to solve your business’s problems, and I never like that feeling, because there’s no magic bullet for business. However, there are more powerful, and less powerful moves you can make, and strategic branding is DEFINITELY in the former category!

What makes strategic branding so foundational?

Understanding what strategic branding can do for your business comes down to a few simple aspects of marketing and communication, that you probably already know.

1 – Speaking to your ideal clients brings in qualified leads

If you have a small business, you’ve probably heard (or read) the phrase “ideal clients” about a million times now – but if you aren’t 100% certain what it means, let’s break it down. Your business’s ideal clients, are the people your products or services perfectly solve a problem for. They’re the people you want to work with, or the people who absolutely need the thing you sell. This looks different for every business, there’s no cookie-cutter ideal client profile that applies to everyone, beyond that simple statement of “the people who need the thing you sell”.

Strategic branding speaks to those people, and those people specifically – both visually/aesthetically, and via your messaging. Everything about a strategic brand identity is shaped around their preferences and desires – and that’s what will bring them to your business more directly. So those Facebook ads I mentioned earlier? The Google ads? Any marketing, really – with the foundation of a brand strategy that aligns directly to what your ideal clients are already looking for, the graphics and messaging you use everywhere you promote your business will have higher conversion rates.

2 – When your branding is strategic, leads sort themselves

The last thing business owners – myself included – need to be spending their time on, is customers approaching them for things they don’t offer, in price ranges that aren’t relevant to their products or services. If you’re a service provider, you’ve likely been there before – a client, in your DMs, asking for a discount on what you offer. This is especially common if you’re a creative.

There are a lot of ways to respond to price shoppers – but there are ALSO ways to help prevent this experience before it happens, and the strongest one, is via strategic brand messaging. That’s because strategic brand positioning isn’t just about what your ideal clients expect, it’s a cocktail of your ideal clients’ needs/expectations, what you do, and how you do it. Which means it should absolutely take into account the market-tier you serve (whether via services or via products). If your packages are luxury-tier, and you offer what you do at luxury-tier pricing… your branding should both visually and communicatively align with that! If it doesn’t, you’ll run into need/solution mismatches with the clients who reach out to you.

But when your branding strategically does this portion of communication FOR you, then you spend less time sorting leads, because your leads, in a lot of senses, sort themselves!

3 – Brand standards keep your content consistent

A major benefit to having a strategic brand developed for your business, is the set of brand standards you’ll receive at the end of that process. The benefits don’t stop at who the brand brings to your business, and the leads it filters out for you! There are also impacts it’ll have on your internal processes, not only from a “how long does this take” perspective, but also from a “never start from scratch” perspective.

We all know sharing consistently on social media is a major growth strategy for small businesses, but there are about a million barriers to making that happen when you’re wearing all the hats in your business at the same time. Everything from “I don’t know what to post” to “ugh I have to design another piece of content for Instagram”. But having strategic brand standards helps with both of these problems and more! When you have a strategic brand to use as a starting point, figuring out what to post can be as simple as taking a little reminder-peek at your content pillars, and prompting an idea about something to share with your audience. And actually designing the graphic to go with that post?

If you don’t have social templates that were included in your branding package, you at LEAST have the fonts, colours, tone – and maybe even some stock images or branded images of your products/you that you can use to make things much, much simpler! And simpler processes, are far easier to stay consistent with. That way, you spend less time on things you DON’T want to be doing, and more time doing what you love.

4 – Setting client expectations early leads to less audience confusion

The earliest point you can set client expectations, is when they very first see your content somewhere. Whether that’s an ad, a social post, or your website, it should, from the MOMENT your new potential lead sees it, set their expectations for a variety of baseline pieces of information about your brand. What you do should be obvious, no matter what that potential client sees or where they see it. Whether it’s for them, should also be clear. The value of your work should also be clear – and clarifying all of those components visually? Well it’s pretty much priceless, when it comes to eliminating audience confusion. Confused customers don’t make purchases. Strategic branding is specifically designed to ensure you’re clarifying aspects of your work from that very first touchpoint!

What if I already have an established visual identity?

You might be thinking, “well, I already have branding, and it’s been established for a long time, so changing it is pretty much impossible now.” I’m here to tell you, you can ABSOLUTELY balance a branding update that brings more strategy into your business’s visual identity, WITH an existing visual brand. Making your content more strategic doesn’t always mean reinventing the wheel – sometimes it means making small, targeted tweaks to your existing identity, that bring it closer in line with what your clients need!

If it’s time to add strategy to your brand identity, let’s talk!

Reviewing your branding’s performance is a complicated task – and I’m the first person to tell you, making brand changes might not solve all of your small business’s problems. But, if you feel like it’s time to talk to someone about bringing your branding into a place that speaks more directly to your ideal clients, and helps your business grow – let’s chat! I’d love to help you determine whether shifts in your branding would change the game.

Whether it’s the right time for you or the wrong time, there’s no arguing that strategic branding is a powerful, foundational piece of ensuring your business grows as effectively as it can!