THE 8 MOST IMPACTFUL BRANDING SERVICES 

Brands are developed, not made. It means you don't have direct control over how people perceive your company; you can only influence it. Moreover, a brand-building strategy isn't just figuring out your logo, catchphrase, or the colors that represent you, it is the holistic approach to how brands should be seen outside and inside the company, and that includes building the brand out of your value proposition, or the statement that tells why you are different from you competitors and why they should choose you instead.

Simply put, brand-building is difficult. And in the case of a startup company that wants to set up a brand, it would take additional cost and resources, and successful companies like Deep Structure relegate their branding efforts to agencies like Evolv, as the process of building a brand requires a particular set of skills and experience to pull it off successfully, considering factors that stack against you such as the ever increasingly competitive market and the complexity of the digital marketplace.

If you decide to have an agency build your brand, you should know the brand services and deliverables you can get, depending on which aspects of branding need an expert redesign.

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What are Branding Services?

As mentioned, one of the main goals of setting a successful brand is to set you apart from your competitors and make it recognizable at first glance. Many startup companies often go public, fresh with products and services ready to be purchased, without any signifier of your brand like brand logo or brand voice, thinking that the best marketing strategy is to let 'the product speaks for itself.' This approach is admirable, but in the event that you want your customers to come back to you, how should they know it's you? If you decide to make a pre-built logo design on-demand, you come at a risk of that brand identity that isn't holistically yours, even with the promise of rebranding later when you get successful. 

This is where a brand agency comes in. Experts understand the significance of how we want people to perceive our product for marketing efforts, whether how we communicate, how we look, and how we assert a brand purpose statement.

How does a branding agency measure success?

Branding agencies summarize all aspects of an organization by purposefully designing graphics, content, and experiences to influence public perception over time. Their main success metrics are:

Short-term effects:

1. Employee retention: Employer brand is one of the best investments you can make in how it profoundly affects your company's productivity, which directly translates to better revenue. Your team wants to be proud of where they work, and knowing the company’s values puts special attention on their welfare.

1. A boost to legitimacy: With a great branding agency, businesses can start looking professional in weeks. Leveraging social proof from a strong brand allows you to assert your right place in the market.
2. Digital organization: If given access to your digital assets like logo files, a branding agency can quickly organize them so all departments and employees can easily find them. 
3. A clear strategy: Branding agencies often do an audit and market research to understand the gaps and room for improvement in your branding strategy. If all the initial meetings went well, you should have a clear direction of what you need to do next and why. 

Long term effects

1. Brand Equity Increase: Having a branding agency working alongside you makes your journey toward higher authority in your industry a lot easier, thus increasing the perceived value of your company. It's always good that people think highly of your products and services and are willing to pay a higher price, even if you don’t want to.
2. Lower Operation Cost: A long collaboration with a branding agency who have experiences with small business branding services like Evolv, often shows that working with them lowers your expenses, particularly in your brand-building strategy. Moreover, branding itself also makes marketing campaigns cheaper like digital marketing, as you make less effort to let people know about your product and services, as a strong brand can do it organically and effectively.

1. Talent Acquisition/hiring: Having a positive employee experience from a strong brand compels your team to refer you to their colleagues, increasing the chance of getting skilled employees without the cost that it entails when recruiting one. 
2. Trust & Credibility: Maintaining a great brand over time can lead to your audience trusting each and every new product you release. Moreover, even if you experience shortcomings, gaining credibility and making yourself accountable through great brand communications will readily earn the trust of your customers. After all, they understand you can always shoot to be the best but not perfect.

1. Decrease Client Churn: A chunk of business revenue understandably comes from repeat customers, and it is always one of the focuses for a brand to retain brand loyalty from its audience. Focusing on being the best makes you the best, and customers love having the best. 

The 8 most impactful branding services

Brand Discovery Session

In this in-depth discovery session, a branding agency should be able to pinpoint and articulate 7 essential elements that make up the soul of your brand. These elements are the answers to the following questions:

1. What’s your product or service offer?
2. What are its features & benefits?
3. What’s your target audience 
4. What are your brand vision & values?
5. What’s your offer & brand positioning?
6. What’s your brand Messaging
7. What’s your brand tone & voice

Brand Style Guide

This invaluable document helps improve brand recognition throughout all departments, vendors, digital platforms, and client interactions. It should paint a comprehensive picture of the who, what, why, when, and how of a brand looks and feels. Having a rulebook of the brand elements serves as your reference to make sure that your brand will be consistent throughout. The document puts brand guidelines like:

1. Brand discovery information
2. Logo and identity design rules
3. Stationary templates
4. Marketing Material templates

Brand Identity design

This is the first thing that pops into people’s heads when thinking about branding, in general. This service essentially realizes what people should see when they think of your business brand. The services handle brand visual elements that include:

1. Logo design
2. Typography pairings
3. Color design
4. Patterns & Graphics
5. Grids & Layouts
6. Social banners & icons

Stationary & Marketing Materials

With a brand style guide ready to go, branding agencies’ teams of designers and marketers can start creating beautiful, consistent, experience-focused marketing materials. These bespoke deliverables include:

1. Business cards
2. Sales presentation deck
3. Email signatures
4. Sell-Sheets
5. Process documents 

Branded Photography & Headshots

Authenticity is key, and having real photos drastically improves a brand. Brand agencies should be ready to include an overhaul to all brand photography on every platform. This includes: 

1. Employee headshots
2. Facility photos
3. At-work photos
4. Asset photos 

Website design & Development

A website is an indispensable digital home for your business and is pretty much a requirement for companies of any size. A branding agency helps make the browsing experience enjoyable, sleek, user-friendly, unique, and purposeful by working with UX/UI designers. All websites, to be worthwhile, need to focus on the following:

1. Information Architecture 
2. Website User interface design (UI)
3. User Experience Design(UX)
4. Size Responsiveness and Speed
5. Website optimizations & Debugging

For example, we worked with A Production Building Solutions to redesign their website into a more modern feel to fulfill their desire to get bigger clients.

Branded Content Creation

Branded content creation must align with the company's values and sales goals. A branding agency will be able to use the insights from a brand discovery session to create unique content that meets your target market where they’re at. Includes:

1. Content strategy
2. Video Production
3. High buyer intent articles
4. Social media content
5. Event Photography
6. Client/Employee tutorials 

Brand awareness 

Brand awareness helps businesses spread their message and offering across multiple platforms in various ways. This is where all the preparation in the steps before comes together. It’s essential to always remember to be valid, consistent, and helpful. Brand awareness strategy includes:

1. Paid Media: If you must pay for the eyeballs, it’s paid media(e.g., pay-per-click ads, sponsorships, etc.). This is a great way to boost your brand awareness and generate leads, a set audience interested in your brand but still contemplating whether to purchase or not, if you can handle the cost that comes with it. 
2. Earned Media: Social Proof is an amazing thing to leverage as it is often the most effective and generates high-quality leads, a set of potential customers that will most likely purchase a product or service from the brand. Moreover, focusing on organic brand awareness is cheaper. All that it needs is a workforce and time to create a lot of worthwhile and high-quality content for an extended period of time, as results often take months.
3. Owned Media: Think of newsletter subscribers, followers on social media, and current patrons - owned media to develop brand awareness in a closer audience-brand relationship. This is where you have more direct control of your brand awareness strategy. Interest is gained in helpful content that sets to help clients first and foremost. 

1. Referral Partners: Brand awareness strategy also goes beyond recognition from your customers. Referral partners are all businesses specializing in providing your brand with backlinks, citation listings, and recommendations that increase your authority as a leader in your industry. 
2. Outbound Sales: You can also be direct in your marketing campaigns through outbound sales. Branding agencies help you build a dedicated team looking to sell to the ideal customer selected through segmentation and analysis. They are reached out through cold emailing, calling, and other more direct forms of communication.

Final Thoughts

One must recognize the impact of a brand on a business. A strong brand captures attention and leads a highly competitive and saturated marketplace. Moreover, a well-built brand expands your connection with your customers beyond transactional; it gives a lasting impression and emotional investment.

And this is why branding services extend beyond just logos; branding agencies seek to uplift companies holistically to position them at the forefront of their industries.

Your journey toward a leading digital brand might be difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. Get in touch with Evolv! Work with a team of experts that know everything there is to know about branding and brand strategy and realize the hidden potential of your brand to lead and grow!

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