What is branding outsourcing?
Outsourcing your branding involves identifying a third-party marketing services provider capable of creating and managing brand identity for your business. Brand identity services provide support establishing a company’s brand voice, which bridges the space between brand identity and brand messaging.
Branding services include designing company logos, writing taglines and slogans, assembling color palettes, and creating brand guidelines. Branding service providers also support the incorporation of brand elements into web designs, online content, marketing collateral, printed and digital assets, packaging, and other business assets.
Branding is perhaps the most important marketing asset that can be deployed by marketing, PR, and brand management professionals working to support the goals and objectives set by small to midsize business-owners. Branding and brand identity are powerful tools for making a business memorable and inspiring customers and internal stakeholders to support your business.
What do branding providers do?
Let’s expand on the services we’ve outlined above, so that we have a clear understanding of what branding providers do for their clients.
Perform market research and competitive analysis to lay a baseline for branding
Branding isn’t a marketing task that should be undertaken without a plan or roadmap already in place. In order to understand how best to craft your messaging, how to position your brand relative to competitors, and how to create brand elements and assets that are unique, brand service providers research existing competitors in your industry. Gathering the relevant data to inform client leadership in crafting an effective branding strategy is followed by competitive analysis to determine where opportunities exist that can be leveraged for success.
Establishing brand voice helps your business stand out
Brand voice is the mesh that connects your brand identity to your messaging, facilitating communication with your audience in a way that helps your brand to stand out from the competition. Brand voice provides a foundation to build consistent communication across multiple platforms and advertising channels.
Help create consistency in branding with brand guidelines development
The power of branding is in its ability to make your brand stand out and be recognizable across multiple platforms and digital channels. In order to achieve this, brand service providers help clients create style guides or brand manuals that establish the visual and messaging standards the entire company should adhere to. This includes how to use specific brand assets throughout the customer journey to provide a consistent brand experience.
Craft a unique brand identity to improve perception of a client’s business
With a strong brand voice in place, branding services can design and assemble the right combination of visual elements and messaging to convey the personality and tone of a brand. This includes creating a logo, color palette, and icons to represent a client’s brand. It also includes incorporating these elements into web design, social media channels, content, advertising collateral, and marketing assets.
Creating a brand messaging strategy conveys the client’s value proposition
An effective brand messaging strategy allows clients to communicate their value proposition and personality to their target audience across multiple digital channels and platforms. Brand messaging lives in the brand’s slogans and taglines and encapsulates its core promise to customers as to what they are able to provide that competitors cannot.
Benefits of outsourcing branding services
As with other outsourcing strategies for business processes, outsourcing branding services can benefit small to midsize businesses in a number of ways that can’t be matched by in-house marketing teams.
Branding services fill skill gaps with their expertise
Branding is arguably at the heart of every business’s marketing strategy and informs the decisions of clients at almost every stage of the customer journey. This makes branding one of the most multidisciplinary disciplines in marketing. Building a successful brand identity requires skills and expertise that are wide ranging and must constantly evolve to meet the needs of businesses seeking to remain competitive.
Branding service providers and marketing agencies that offer branding services have the resources to dedicate towards staffing individuals skilled in marketing best practices. They are invested in ensuring their branding-focused staff remain up-to-date through education and constant experience providing branding support to clients.
The related cost savings potential of branding services
The savings of outsourcing branding extend beyond the reduced labor and benefits costs of not having to maintain a team of skilled brand marketing professionals and related software tools in-house. Outsourcing shifts the cost of managing and maintaining branding services to a controllable cost your business only needs to consider when a project arises or if there are seasonal needs for branding services.
Outsourcing also shifts the costs related to the labor-intensive and technical complexities around market research and competitive analysis to a flat service fee with a service provider. Because of the efficiencies in the branding process that experienced brand service providers bring to the table, products and services can be brought to market faster, reducing associated costs and maximizing profitability over time.
Flexible, scalable branding solutions to meet client needs
Small businesses, startups, and entrepreneur-led endeavors just getting started have an extensive need for branding support at the start. Following launch, branding needs will continue to evolve to ensure new products and services added over time are inline with the established branding. Further, while branding provides a consistent foundation for businesses to build marketing materials around, that doesn’t mean your branding should be static indefinitely.
Because of the inconsistent demand businesses might have around branding, it is difficult to justify maintaining a skilled team of branding experts on-staff. Rather, it makes more sense to outsource branding services to a provider capable of scaling to meet unexpected needs or having the flexibility to provide branding support in the event of one-off projects.
Branding is a powerful risk mitigation tool
Creating a powerful brand for clients, branding services help to insulate businesses from a number of factors that could otherwise damage a company’s reputation and impact revenue streams. Strong branding ensures both visibility and trust for businesses in the minds of consumers, making existing customers more loyal and potential customers more likely to become invested.
Trust and a solid reputation go a long way towards protecting businesses against economic volatility and downturns, while also insulating those companies against poor performance or even failure of newly launched products and services. Thus, branding can stabilize cash flow and reduce customer churn, making the business a good investment for shareholders and help to grow the brand over time.
How do branding services price their services?
Much as other marketing-service based agencies and studios, branding service providers offer their services according to several pricing models, based on the type of work being performed.
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Hourly pricing models are used for limited-scope projects. Hourly pricing can be attached to graphic design work to create brand assets once the overall brand identity is in place. Businesses seeking web updates, content creation, and other services related to supporting the brand identity can expect hourly rates. Hourly rates can also be attached to a project for post-launch support services to ensure that the branding project is completed at an affordable set rate, with any incidental needs post-launch covered on an hourly basis.
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Set project pricing models are established through consultation with the client and set according to the full-scope of branding work that needs to be completed. This pricing might be used for a brand refresh or to help a new business bring a new product or service to market.
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Retainer-based pricing is an affordable, ongoing fee model offered by branding services to clients that need ongoing and regular brand support. This pricing approach can be considered an all-inclusive approach that covers clients for whatever branding needs might arise.
How to choose the best branding provider
When it comes to partnering with marketing agencies to support your branding needs, you have to decide if your marketing needs are solely brand related or if you have a need for additional marketing support. For small businesses seeking first to build out their branding, they could benefit from partnering with an agency that focuses primarily on brand creation and brand management. However, for businesses seeking a more robust level of marketing support, they should seek out full-service marketing agencies.
Once you’ve determined the level of marketing support you need, seeking to outsource branding services to a provider should follow the same approach you would take partnering with any other service provider taking over a vital business process.
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Whether performed in-house by leadership or through consultancy with potential partner service providers, a full gap analysis and needs assessment should be performed to determine what branding services are needed and what level of outsourcing is proper for the situation at hand. Does your organization need branding services support for a single project, or ongoing full support from an agency familiar with creating brand identities from the ground up?
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Once your organization has established the scope of branding support necessary, establish a realistic budget that you can dedicate to the partnership. Explore service providers and their rates, determine how they charge for different services, and determine which agencies offer the services you need at the prices you can afford.
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In addition to considering agency rates for their services, explore their portfolio of work to determine if they are aligned with your industry, can create the right brand for your business’s culture and vision, and whether they have the expertise to provide the services you require.
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Research potential service providers by exploring their reviews online and reaching out to current and past clients they’ve provided similar services to. Your goal is to determine how easy they are to work with, how well they communicate, and whether the value of the services they provide is worth what you will be paying.
Following these steps will help you create a short-list of potential service providers. You can further hone down this list through consultation to find out whether a firm is aligned with your culture and mission and how well they communicate and engage throughout the project. At this stage you can also explore how each service provider manages projects and what processes they might follow, which will determine how much or how little your team will be involved in the process of creating and launching your branding strategy.
