When should you invest in brand strategy?
Hiring a brand strategist can be one of the best investments you make in your creative business. By investing in brand strategy, you’re bringing in valuable outside perspective and expertise to help you get to where you want to go faster — an experienced partner and advisor who can help you connect your vision and goals for your business to the way you communicate and operate in your day to day. You’ll end up with an infusion of clarity, focus, and inspiration that become rocket fuel for taking action and propelling your business forward.
BUT brand strategy is also a big investment — and it can be hard to know when the time is right to take the leap.
Here are a few scenarios where working with a brand strategist could mean big payoff for your business.
You want to update the look and feel of your brand / website
This is often the reason entrepreneurs seek out a brand specialist, and it’s easy to start with the end in mind: I want a new logo or I need a new website.
But your brand is one of the most valuable and influential assets in your business. It needs to be ready to do a lot of seriously heavy lifting — attracting the right audience, creating the right impression, telling the right story, and converting browsers to buyers. That requires more than just surface-level shine.
Before you spend all your hard-earned dollars on a new design, it’s essential to be clear on your brand’s strategic essentials and where you want to go. If you aren’t sure about how you’d respond to the clarity and action steps I outlined in this post — or if you have a designer on standby who expects you to have this ready to go (many do!!) — you need a brand strategist to help you get your pre-design ducks in a row.
You’re ready to level up, scale, or hire a team
This is an exciting one! If you’re ready to bring new team members, increase your prices, or just take your offering to a whole new level, now is a great time to bring in a brand strategist. Turning those expanded goals into realistic priorities and a manageable action plan is really important at this stage, and a brand strategist can provide you with guidance, perspective, and expert advice to make sure it goes smoothly.
Additionally, they can help make sure that your core brand elements are clearly articulated (see the clarity section here) — not just “in your head” as is so often the case with creative entrepreneurs at this stage. They’ll also help you to clarify your messaging so you can clearly communicate the value of any changes you’re making to your audience (especially related to your team, offerings, or pricing). And If a rebrand is needed, they’ll make sure that the creative direction for your elevated visual identity is in alignment with your expanded goals and vision for the brand.
You’re pivoting your business, your audience has changed, or you’re adding something new
If the focus of your business is changing or if you’re adding something new, your brand will need to adjust, too.
You may be appealing to a new audience and/or changing your message to your current audience. Maybe you’ve realized that your goals or business values are changing and you want to make sure your brand reflects that. Or maybe you’re competing in a new marketplace and need to make sure you’re positioning yourself to stand out in the space.
Those are all strategic considerations that need to be mapped out and accounted for before you start writing the web copy or designing a logo — and a brand strategist can help you make sure you’ve done the research and have a plan for making your pivot or new addition the best it can be.
You’re overwhelmed by options or facing analysis paralysis
One of the things I love most about working with creatives is the amount of ideas and possibilities that are always on the table at any given time. We share a sense of optimism and the desire to bring beautiful concepts and ideas to life. It makes for incredibly exciting and motivating collaborations!
However, the ability to generate tons of ideas and possibilities can also lead to overwhelm when the time comes to make a decision about how best to keep growing your brand and business. (The constant comparison trap that is social media doesn’t help.) You begin to have trouble seeing the forest for the trees, uncertainty takes over… and that usually means that progress grinds to a halt.
If you find yourself in this situation, a brand strategist can help you get unstuck. They’ll help you step back and take a look at the big picture, identify where you’re trying to go, assess what you have to work with now (i.e. your time, your budget, your team, and any other factors that come into play), and help you set priorities and make decisions so you can get moving again.
You’re struggling to stand out or not growing like you should be
Maybe you find yourself somewhere in the middle of all the other options. You’re not totally stuck…. But you’re not growing like you want to be, either. It’s more like things are just… meh. You’ve hit a plateau, and no matter what you try, you’re not seeing the progress you were hoping for.
A brand strategist will help you take a fresh look at what’s going on inside your business as well as what’s going on in the external landscape. They’ll help you diagnose where things might be going sideways, where you could be doing things differently, or some opportunities you might not have seen to jump-start your progress. Then, they’ll help you map out your next steps for taking that next step up in your business.
In all of these scenarios, a brand strategist will help you do two things: get clear on where you’re at and where you want your brand to go, and then take action towards getting there. (Learn more about the clarity-action focus at the heart of brand strategy work here.)
If one of these scenarios rings true for you and you’d like to find out more about how I can help, I’d love to work with you! Take a look at the ways we can work together here, or reach out to schedule a time to chat.
