Who is a Brand Consultant?
Brand consultants assist businesses in promoting their products. They help clients achieve their goals by providing analysis, solutions, and overall marketing experience.
This would be accomplished by an in-depth study of the brand and collating it with that of the competitors.
Alternatively known as brand strategists, with their expertise they can turn modest businesses into high-flying concerns through market research, website audits, content marketing, and keyword research.
Defining Brand Strategy
At its core, brand strategy is about shaping the perception of your brand and business in the eyes of the public. The process of strategizing is equal parts research, science, and art.
What branding does is, in a nutshell, define the brand’s persona and market positioning.
Roles Of A Brand Consultant
Brand consultants, even referred to as brand marketing consultants or brand strategists, carry out an array of functions. Under their oversight, they establish a firm’s branding strategies and help to fructify the brand’s design and communications strategy.
- Comprehend the Company’s Essence And Objectives:
Once the brand consultant is onboard, the onus falls on the consultant to liaise with the management and the branding and marketing departments.
The main objectives of this interaction are to fathom everything from the vision, short-term and long-term goals, brand values and strengths, the target demographic, and the brand history with as much clarity as possible in order to chart the path ahead.
- Research:
There’s a lot to branding and a brand consultant’s obligations. But, research is where it all starts. Procure information from the firm via a questionnaire if need be. This would give you a rudimentary idea of the market they are in, their goals and their target demographic.
First up is the primary research aimed at resolving client requirements. Secondary research, if required, analyzes the competitive brands and pertinent trends.
A Q&A session with the management usually follows one in which the client shares everything there is to know about the firm. This stage involves evaluating the business and getting to know it intimately. All this information is put together cohesively and forms the brand strategy.
- Preparing a Blueprint of the Marketing Strategies:
Once the research is out of the way, the next step would be to prepare a blueprint for the marketing and promotional activities that will support the brand’s endeavor with the aim of elevating its reach and brand equity.
- Taking Stock of the Bottlenecks:
The services of a brand consultant are often engaged to rejuvenate the firm’s brand value. Over time, due to a lack of innovation or change, a firm’s brand value may stagnate. In this scenario, the on-boarding of a brand consultant is to oversee the identification of any bottlenecks that prevent the brand from rising to its true potential.
The pain points may be many – getting hamstrung by too many processes, low employee motivation, branding methodologies used, etc. Every potential problem should be considered and ruled out to arrive at an effective conclusion.
- Study the Competition
In any sector, all facets of the competitors must be researched thoroughly. This research will help to better design and strategize marketing plans and measures to help outlast the competitor and benefit the firm by gaining a competitive edge.
- Work on Customer Service:
The customer is the lifeline of any business. Preparing customer support programs that guarantee a good ownership experience. Customer support doesn’t end with the sale of a product or service. It extends to retaining those customers and converting them into loyal ones.
Why the Need for a Branding Consultant Company?
1. To Catapult Your Social Media Presence:
You may have your social media schedule, and content all sorted out. The content is ready to post each week, and the hashtags are taken care of.
But yet, you are faced with stagnant growth on social media. A dormant social media presence would translate into stagnant growth. If you are looking to amplify your social media presence, thinking outside the box is required. That’s where a brand consultancy firm comes in.
2. Making sure your blogs rank on Google With SEO
SEO is a complicated and often overwhelming branding strategy that may be beyond the scope of entrepreneurs or small businesses.
But if you’re creating blogs to share information or expertise, SEO guidelines have to be adhered to, or else the content won’t rank, and subsequently, not many will read it.
3. Garnering brand visibility among stakeholders and Investors:
Blogs are a fantastic way to get noticed by the stakeholders in your business. Blogs help capture your brand’s essence in a way that social media can’t quite do yet. With the right choice of keywords embedded in your content, it won’t rank on the Google Search Engine.
Your website/blog is your branding that will help you get featured. A robust personal branding presence will have investors taking you seriously.
Investors always invest in the person more than they do in your idea.
Signs you Need a Branding Consultancy Firm:
You can watch out for a few things that will indicate the need for a branding consultant. Sometimes an outside perspective is exactly what your business needs to find the right way to expand your business. We at TRD Studios, the best brand consultant company in Hyderabad, will be only too happy to share that perspective with you.
- Your Social Media Needs Rework:
You may have a large follower count and yet have trouble getting clients and making sales. If you are getting less engagement from the community, you need a branding consultant to gauge the problem, which may have something to do with the content you are posting or communicating with your followers.
- Your Blogs Have No Audience:
Blogs take considerable time and effort to put together. After striving to do the appropriate SEO research and adding backlinks and images, it’s natural to expect that you would like people to read them.
Google Analytics will be able to provide information on how often your blogs are being read along with other metrics. If you are not aware of how to utilize these resources to measure your reach, a brand consultant company in Hyderabad such as TRD Studios can help you.
- You are Unable to Reach Out to the Press:
You can work to boost your social media presence and blogs with the help of a personal branding consultant so that journalists come to you.
Or, you can reach out to them yourself.
Press interviews aid in no small measure when it comes to placing your personal brand in the spotlight. It is something to consider that most entrepreneurs usually don’t.
In the scenario where there is low social media engagement, and people don’t seem to be reading your blogs, a journalist will be unable to recognize your expertise. In the event of you reaching out to them, lack of content or engagement will be a red flag for them.
Even as your brand presence starts to gain traction, it’s still advisable to adopt emails to put the word out about your brand, old-fashioned as it may be.
Skills And Qualifications Of A Brand Consultant
Brand consultants require excellent communication skills, both verbally and in writing. They interact with a great many individuals in the case of their work. Good interpersonal skills are, therefore, a boon. They also ought to be able to “read” the people they are targeting with their branding efforts. Other abilities required for the job would be:
- Creativity:
Identifying new and innovative methods to help a brand progress will require the consultant to indulge in some out-of-the-box thinking to get the job done.
- Being Media and Internet Savvy:
A deep and current understanding of which communication channels are most successful in achieving a target objective provides the best opportunity for success.
- Ability to Multitask
Brand consultants may often be juggling branding assignments from multiple clients. Time management and effective multi-tasking are valuable attributes to have.
- Teamwork:
To successfully conclude branding projects to the client’s satisfaction, liaising between different departments will be required. Good teamwork and savvy negotiating to reconcile the disparate requirements of various departments are handy skills to have.
- Attention to Detail:
Brand consultants should work efficiently and ensure that nothing falls through the cracks and no detail is overlooked while planning the branding strategy. After all, the devil is in the details.
Conclusion
Entrepreneurs often tend to voice their frustrations regarding their struggle to fund new clients. They opine that they feel unappreciated and often go unrecognized for their accomplishments.
Investing in a personal brand will fix all these woes. The social media presence, multitude of followers, and willing investors will all come to naught without the presence of a personal brand.
TRD Studios, a well-known and reputed brand consultant company in Hyderabad, will be an equal partner in your efforts at personal branding and make sure your opinions and feedback are evaluated and incorporated at every stage of the brand-building exercise.
