What Is a Branding Agent: Best Explained & Do You Really Need to Hire One for Your Business?

What is a branding agent? If you’re having completely no idea about it, don’t worry, you’re not alone. When establishing a brand, a company, most business owners will focus more on the operation, not branding. It’s a massive decision, to be honest. Due to that, the first and foremost question you need to answer is: What is a branding agent? Then it will be followed by: Why should we hire them?

To answer these, continue reading for a full vision of what a branding agent could do for your company.

1. What is a branding agent: the simplest definition

You might believe that branding is marketing, but let’s clear this up. Those are not the same at all. Both are important when running a business, however, branding & marketing are distinguished areas.

Branding agents focus on assisting to create, develop, and re-launching brands. They’re the brain behind most brand’s strategies, guiding your business in the right way. Branding could be acknowledged as a series of fundamental activities that define your brand mission, vision, values, promises. And based on that, a branding agent will help you going on the right track. We would say that branding is a much bigger picture that requires a long period of time, consistency.

Meanwhile, marketing uses all of these materials, tools and efforts to communicate to customers then seal the deal. Therefore, a strong marketing campaign needs its guide or baseline, which is branding. So small biz owner, have you got your branding strategy laid out yet? Or now it’s the time to have a branding agent to support you?

2. What do branding agents do?

A branding agent should be one who takes great care of your business and works alongside you during the time. And to start with, you should look at them as a part of your team. A professional agent might start with some of the following tasks:

1. Learning about your brand: from your mission, vision to every detail of your core values.
2. Getting closer to your business goal, your expectation to brand’s identity, what’s the most important philosophy behind your brand.
3. Learning & adjusting your company’s target audiences, with as much details as possible about their interest, needs and behavior.
4. Learning about your market share, direct and indirect competitors.

This is a branding agent’s starting point to begin with, each is a piece of the puzzle to pull out a much bigger picture later. Next up, branding agents do what they are supposed to, based on the package you need them to cover. It could consist of the following:

1. Research and Analytics
2. Brand identity
3. Brand guideline
4. Brand positioning
5. Design (Logo, visual guideline, packaging…)
6. Brand Strategy & Planning
7. Communication
8. Internal & External Branding

At this stage, the branding agent will immerse and inspect closely into your brand/company to develop your reputation and the specific brand. Everything that is published must be considered carefully by the team to make sure it’s all consistent, from a piece of content to a whole catalog. And once they’ve done your brand-kit, it’s vital for your and your internal team to stay persistent to it. It will affect how the customers see you, what you want to tell the public and the mission, vision you’re representing.

3. How does a branding agent create impacts on my business?

After understanding what is a branding agent, we must start inspecting further on why every business should hire a professional one. Whether you are a business owner who’s looking for the answer to your big decision, or an executive presenting a plan to your bosses, we all need solid reasons. It has to be effective, worth the money you spend and help you look through aspects that add values to your brand.

Strategic planning:

When shaping your brand, or re-branding, it requires more than just an excellent internal team. An internal marketing team could not have their hand over market reports and competitor reviews with unreferred eyes. They mostly will have the pride and passion for the brand they’re working in, and that’s why you need another point of view. A branding agent, by the meantime, with their ability and experience is just great to investigate problems, obstacles and planning a bigger picture. They will have the unbiased view to bring your brand to a more dynamic, interesting scene that you think.

Multimarket experience:

Since it’s expensive and extremely hard to have an in-house research and planning team, hiring a branding agent is critical. Most agencies have work under multi-market projects, which means they have a more creative approach to one problem. This also a great merit since one brand could be affected by a lot of elements, which includes stakeholders from many industries. A strong foundation of working for clients across many industries will provide a deeper, fresh perspective to solve your brand’s obstacles. Especially with re-branding, you will have to conquer the challenge of the current branding and market to breathe a new life into your company. And that’s when branding agent’s experience comes in handy.

High level of expertise:

As you can see, recruiting and building an internal research and planning team is extremely costly and takes a lot of time. And in fact, very few companies could do that. And at the same time, you need a much higher level of expertise to plan and execute these tactics. Have we talked about the process? Since agencies have worked through so many projects before yours, they have all the experience they need to make things go in the right direction.

After such a long read, we hope that understanding the essentials of what is a branding agent and how they work will benefit your business in the long run. After all, it’s important to build your brand’s reputation and grow your business to hit the goal you’ve always been looking for.

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