When it comes to branding or re-branding your business, it can be hard to decide whether now is the right time to make such an investment. Whatever the size of your business, few companies have the luxury of a limitless budget and as the person in charge of making the decision, you're the one that has to balance whether branding is an effective use of your budget with the inevitable questions from the rest of the organisation like ' what will we get out of it?'
If you do decide to invest in some work on your branding, there are metrics you can use to measure return on investment. These might include:
- brand recall
- website traffic
- brand awareness through increased social media reach, impressions and followers
- sales leads
- customer retention
But branding is more than a set of neatly adding up statistics. It's the culmination of your passion, your purpose, your vision. It's the story you tell your customers or clients, the story that makes them want to become a part of the experience you're creating.
How do you want your business to be seen? What place do you want it to occupy in the market.
Sometimes it's the most immeasurable parts of branding - like how a brand makes a person feel - that really hit the spot for a business when they are captured well. Do you want to make that kind of connection with your target audience, or do you want to leave the door open for your competitors to walk through and steal your limelight?
Without a solid brand in place, it's hard to predict where your business will sit and hard to know what its future will look like.
So when people ask me 'what will happen if I make this investment in my branding?', the greater question in my mind is 'what will happen if you don't?'