Creating a Solid Brand Identity for Clients
In an increasingly competitive business environment, the most important consideration for you and your clients is how to stand out. As a pro, you likely often balance a creative and consultative role with your clients, many of whom may not even be aware that they need to build their brand beyond simply having a website.
This creates an opportunity for you to expand the scope of your services and come in as a brand expert. By providing this additional value, you grow your business and create additional revenue opportunities. As you take on guiding your clients through the process, here are a few things to consider.
What Is Brand Identity and Why Is It Important?
A brand identity brings together all the ways a brand communicates itself with an audience. It works to communicate the essence of the brand and its core values, almost to predetermine people’s perceptions. This encompasses the tone of voice, visual elements such as colors, logos, art usage, and typography. The value here is that brand identity quickly determines if potential clients choose to do business with you. A few key reasons for a solid brand identity that you can highlight to your clients include:
It differentiates their company from competitors
It quickly communicates their business personality and shapes perception
It enables users to establish an emotional connection and promotes positive brand association
It drives conversion and profitability for their business
Even when clients understand the benefits of having a strong brand identity, they may not know how to go about developing one. That’s where you come in. As you step into this role, you can incorporate a few things to move the process along.
Ask Open-Ended Client Questions
Now, this is likely already part of your process when you onboard and get to know a new client and their business. Open-ended questions are thought-provoking conversation starters that help you develop an understanding of your client’s needs and pain points much better than directive questions can. Prompting an exchange where the client gets to paint a picture of how they see their brand, in turn, helps you execute their vision. A few questions to add to your arsenal for this purpose can be:
If your brand/business was a person, who would they be?
As abstract as this question may seem, it can get the wheels turning for a client to think outside the box of terminology and analytics and more towards what the essence of the brand is. This allows them to provide you with their mission statement alongside actual characteristics that can give you a sense of what their tone of voice and overall brand personality should be.
What would you like people to associate your brand with?
At this point, they get to tell you what perceptions or emotions they want users to take away when they experience the brand. This could also prompt them to give you examples of other brands they resonate with that you may pull inspiration or insight from while building their site.
What do you like or dislike about your brand identity currently?
This is where a client can point to elements they align with as well as some of their pain points or challenges you can assist in tackling. It also tells you what elements require immediate attention and what to prioritize for later in terms of planning out your workload.
Fill in the Gaps
Now that you’ve done the work to gather relevant information about the brand story, the work begins. This is where you determine what elements need to be developed and educate the client on what they have versus what they need. They likely already have their brand name and logo, now you both can work together to choose typography that fits their brand personality, colors to incorporate that evoke their desired sentiments, and imagery that tells their story.
You can also provide counsel on how to go about establishing their tone of voice and use of language. This goes hand in hand with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as the language they use will contribute to their visibility and brand recognition.
See Increasing Your Site Visibility.
Empower Continuity and Brand Protection
It is important to note that establishing a brand identity is an ongoing and evolutionary process. While your time working with a client may be limited, you can set them up to continue to develop their content and business around the elements you both worked hard to solidify. The overall goal of this process is to make sure the key elements continue to carry through as they keep interacting with their audience, even beyond their website.
One very effective way to do this is to help them integrate elements into their social media and ongoing communication. Social media usually serves as an open line of communication between your clients and the audiences they serve, plus a way to direct traffic to the website. As such, you want to make sure users get a sense of the brand identity from that first interaction that brings them to explore more.
This is where you can introduce Unfold Pro to your clients. The Unfold app helps businesses easily create standout branded content for their social platforms. It can help your clients gain new followers and drive engagement from current followers by building brand recognition across social media. You can either manage your client’s Unfold account or have them manage it themselves. This empowers them to:
Develop cohesive templates for stories and posts
Choose and edit imagery
Choose a curated color palette, fonts, and logo usage
Develop a brand kit and web dashboard
You can explore these features and more when you download Unfold.
Conclusion
Your role when working with new and existing clients can be expansive. For them, now more than ever, the importance of differentiating themselves is top of mind. And as an extension of their team, they look to you to help execute. Guide your clients towards solidifying their brand by asking thoughtful questions, providing them with options, and empowering them to continue the journey.
