What is a Brand Strategist?

April 23, 2020 Guest User

What is a brand strategy?

A brand strategy is a specific plan or set of goals designed to develop your brand. Well structured and executed brand strategies will affect all aspects of your business based on your customer's needs and the actions of your competition.

What is a brand strategist?

By employing a brand, companies are hiring brand strategist professionals who provide solutions, analysis, and marketing expertise to help them sell their services and products. They achieve this by analyzing the company's brand in comparison to its competitors. The successful implementation of a brand strategy can transform small to medium-sized enterprises into market powerhouses, using content marketing, keyword research, website auditing, market analysis, and other services. Plans are developed using market intent, online presence, and competition analysis, the goal is to facilitate your business in its race to outrank its competitors.

What are some benefits of a brand strategist?

Professionally conducted competitor analysis will allow you to understand the keywords they are using. These words can be used to design your websites to reflect the best practices of SEO (search engine optimization). Brand strategists also keep their fingers on the pulse on the latest trends in social media, allowing them a greater insight into your customer's personas and the types of solutions that they are looking for.

A brand strategist will conduct a complete analysis of the business including things like the company's websites. The goal is to identify any factors that may result in a poor Google ranking. They can advise on how to strip the site and build it up from its foundations if needed. Comprehensive website analysis looks at the optimization of the entire web page, to see if the best SEO practices are being implemented, such as metadata optimization and tagging.

During the process of building a trustworthy brand strategy, research will be conducted on both your products market and its closest competitors. This will include packaging, pricing, services offered, and how to distribute your product aggressively. The overall goal of a successful branding strategy is to make your product more appealing to customers while surpassing the performance of your competitors.

How to choose the right strategist?

Choosing the brand strategist the best suits your needs can be challenging. Best practice would be to interview a minimum of five experienced firms before narrowing them down to two assessing their capabilities in different areas.

Experience

Assessing the depth of their experience is the essential tool in picking the right brand strategist and their capabilities. The right candidate needs to be able to use a variety of channels, and mediums across multiple touchpoints will be essential to the success of any strategy that used instruments. A brand strategist should be able to deliver both brand design and strategy.

A shared vision

Your ideal brand strategy partner will believe direction in vision have your company and be able to design strategy that both aligns with and compliments your brand. A successful brand strategist can visualize a company's future and is capable of utilizing strategies that can help a business's branding reach that point.

Goal orientation and creativity

A brand strategist should I have the ability to remain focused on setting objectives and achieving goals while remaining as creative as possible. While branding is a science, there isn't one mathematical formula for success; it's usually a matter of trial and error. The perfect brand strategist needs to remain stable while retaining the passion of a visionary.

Three Signs it may be time to hire a brand strategist.

1. Your company, while stable, has begun to stagnate.

So far, your sales process has been successfully implemented, but late, your company's growth has begun to taper off. You realize that you reach the upper limit of your capabilities, and you need a more robust brand employment branding strategy. A strategist will help you identify your customer's personalities more effectively and promote your business by communicating with your customers more vividly. When your company has experienced a slowdown, this is the perfect opportunity to regroup, consult on a new brand strategy, and determine the next steps to take.

2. You recognize your limitations.

The most successful entrepreneurs are the ones that realize they don't know everything. You understand to achieve specific goals; you need to stop trying to do everything yourself. Unless you have a solid background in branding, it's unrealistic to expect to become an expert overnight. The time and effort you spend learning this new skill could be better spent elsewhere using your particular set of skills. Another benefit of employing a professional brand strategist is that you will get the benefit of an outsider's perspective. They will be able to give you an unbiased view of your brand and point out any areas where you may be failing. As this is their particular field of expertise, you can expect they will have points of view and marketing angles that you will never think of. They should be able to identify and capitalize on ones that your competitors may have overlooked Employing a second, third or fourth pair of eyes is always a smart business move and inevitably saves you money, time and energy.

3. Your client base is changing.

It is not uncommon for the needs of clients to either change or evolve. Employing the services of a brand strategist can identify these changes; working with the strengths of your current brand, they can prepare it to transition with your customer's needs. Occasionally this may mean rebranding on a smaller scale. Making some changes to your brand and identity to help you effectively reach these customers again. Identifying these issues early on can prove crucial to keeping on the right foot and potentially sidestepping preventable branding issues further down the line.

Want to work with a brand strategist?

If you can choose to work with a strategist, you will need to do so with an open mind and be capable of taking both negative and positive feedback. Too many entrepreneurs failed when they chose to cut corners on their branding. Learning to partner with a compelling brand strategist, like Made By Pony will provide you with solutions designed to bridge the gaps and improve your company's overall brand identity.