Weaving your creative agency branding into your communications

Your brand is your creative agency's personality. But it goes beyond this too, it's also your reputation - what you do and what you say. 

So, it's crucial you proactively manage your creative agency branding to ensure this aligns with the reputation you want to own! Whilst as a business owner, it's likely you are already communicating this brand across all your communications, this is not enough. Branding can’t be done in half measures! To successfully build your reputation fully, you need to weave your brand into the fabric of your company - everyone in your organisation should be involved, whether they are customer facing or not. 

Identification, emotionality and bonding - to successfully reach your audience, you need to adopt storytelling to hit these three markers. Seems simple right?

But of course, this isn't an overnight transformation. It takes time and dedication from those within the business to build up a strong brand, requiring consistent delivery upon your business's promises and values. In today's blog post, I'll be exploring how to successfully weave your agency's branding into your communications to enable you to form a solid foundation to build upon. 

How do you choose your agency’s branding?

You may already have ‘branding’ but before you begin fabricating this into the core of your company, you need to ensure this is aligned with your focus and intention. Otherwise, you may be detracting from your business! So, consider: does the brand actually add value to your creative agency? Or, does it suggest the opposite? 

First impressions count and, immediately we associate certain graphics, fonts and colours with specific feelings. You may be wasting your time if you are promoting something that doesn’t truly reflect who you are as a business. So, you may want to consider re-evaluating and re-launching your brand. After all, this will be difficult to amend once advertised - remember, a brand is for life!

How does creative agency branding work? 

Not only does strong branding captivate your audience and leave a lasting impression, but it also allows your clients to know what to expect from your organisation. Simply put, it distinguishes you from the competition and clarifies why you are the better option. 

How you wish to be perceived by your audience is crucial as it will influence how your organisation operates and communicates. And, ultimately how you communicate will lead to a good - or bad, reputation. There are several other benefits of a strong brand, including:

• Increasing employee pride and job satisfaction
• Generating new customers
• Boosting business value
• Building trust and confidence within the market

It's important to note that branding encompasses all areas, not only customer service and marketing - from visuals and advertising to social responsibility. 

It's certainly not to be overlooked as an expensive marketing tactic that only 'big brands' use! Rather, it relies heavily on common sense and understanding your market thoroughly - you don’t have to utilise expensive tactics to make an impact. Branding involves consistent communication across a variety of channels, and therefore costs vary wildly. At its most basic level though, every email, tweet, letter, image, business card and so on, should reflect who you are as a creative agency.

Remember, tweets and email campaigns are both examples of highly effective free marketing! And, therefore, are excellent opportunities to test out your brand messaging before moving on to more sophisticated approaches later down the line. 

How to weave your creative agency's brand into your communications

We live in an age of communication overload! Every day - even every hour, each of us will utilise several different channels to communicate with our friends, families and our interests. Therefore, brands now need to consider how and where they will interact with their audience. The ultimate goal should be to not only reach the target audience but to also generate a connection. It’s all well and good reaching your audience, but how will you ensure they come back to you in the future?

 So, how do you go about weaving your brand message into your daily communications so that it resonates with your customers? Let’s make sure you’re hitting the mark with this step by step checklist: 

#1 Understand your customer

Who are you trying to reach? It's natural to want to try and target everyone - after all, you never know who might require your services! But, this is not how a successful brand is built - it’s impossible to appeal to every single individual.  

Instead, you need to specify and narrow down your search by creating your ideal buyer persona. It's likely you'll have more than one of these, but by building a fully rounded picture of the ideal customer, you'll be able to identify the right tactics to reach them. So, what should you be including in this customer persona? Here’s a few points to get you started:

• What they do
• What industry they are in/job title
• Their age
• Their qualifications/education history
• Where they live
• The challenges they face on a day to day basis
• What triggers them to look for a solution
• And, what questions they ask the sales team during the sales process

With this specific person in mind, you’ll be able to craft your communications highly effectively as you consider exactly how you would speak to this individual person. And the result? You should benefit from an increase in conversion rates!

#2 What are your key values and mission statement?

Blink and you’ll miss it! 

You will often only have a few seconds to make an impression on your customers, so you need a concise, clear message that will engage them in this short window. Ask yourself: what does our message boil down to? The key points you take away from this question will form the basis of your communications across your marketing strategy. 

Remember, it's not only the points you choose to put across to your audience, but also how you deliver these. How are you going to quickly form a connection with a customer that sees them return to you in the future? Critically consider your tone of voice, your font, images and when you post onto a platform to improve how these messages are received - remember, it all draws back to who your specific buyer persona is so keep this mind!

#3 Consider call to action and customer journey

Whilst it may seem obvious, so many of us forget to include a clear call to action when communicating with our audience. What do you want your target audience to do as a result of your message? Perhaps it's to visit your website, download an ebook, purchase a subscription or listen to the latest installment of your podcast. 

Whatever it is, it's crucial you make this journey to the end goal easy for the customer. A complex, long-winded call to action will see you face significant drop off rates and could have a negative impact on the perception of your brand. So, really analyse your customer journey and simplify this where possible. 

Customer journey is often an area brands neglect, but has a significant impact on the overall impression of your creative agency. Do you want to be renowned as a difficult company to buy from? Or, one that streamlines the process and delivers on what it’s target audience actually wants? I’m sure we’d all agree on the latter!

#4 Delivery of the message

How you deliver the message is just as important as the message itself, if not more vital. Where visuals are appropriate, such as platforms like Instagram, you should look to create content that weaves in your creative agency branding. You should have a unique message that sees you distinguished from the competition. But, if you fail to deliver this correctly, you will be ineffectively translating your brand and this could do more harm than good. 

Remember, branding encompasses everything - from the font and colours you use, to the messages itself, each element should be aligned to ensure your brand is consistently portrayed to your audience. An image of a fluffy chihuahua is unlikely to successfully communicate the branding of a super-strength pet leash! 

 #5 Be authentic and transparent

Customers feel inspired by authentic brands and as a result, become emotionally invested in the success of a brand. The key is to be reliable, respectful and real - if you promise something to your customers and fail to deliver, you will be false-advertising your brand. Once damaged, it’s difficult to correct this reputation. Think back to the last time you received the wrong item, how did the business react? Did they ignore your complaint or act quickly and provide you with a discount for future purchases and a free sample?

Of course, mistakes are inevitable - if you do make a mistake, stay accountable and own up to this issue. If you can, publicly amend the issue raised, but be sure to follow through with your actions. Emotions are key to branding, so ensure your actions are in line with how you wish to be perceived. 

In conclusion

Weaving your creative agency’s branding into your communications can seem like an unnecessary addition to your workload. And, to truly be effective, your whole team needs to be on board with the process - it seems like a lot to take in! But, once you begin actively communicating your brand, you can successfully enhance your creative agency. Certainly, this time and energy is a worthwhile investment! Showcasing your brand will highlight how you differ from your competitors and see your customer loyalty skyrocket as you build real connections founded on emotional investment. 

Branding can secure your success for the future, as you create a solid foundation that appeals to your target audience.

With 25+ years of experience in the industry, I can assist you with enhancing your brand and clarifying your message to weave into your company communications. To learn more about me and what I do click here or get in touch here and discuss your individual requirements today.