Tag: branding

corporate-branding

What Does Your Company Brand Stand For?

Posted on | by Agency Partner
Expert Tips For What Does Your Company Brand Stand For?

Defining your corporate identity will provide considerable benefits. This article explores the key steps and strategies that should be considered to achieve this goal.

Businesses understand how to define the products or services that they sell. Take Apple as an example. The tech brand has made a fortune by successfully positioning its products as minimal, stylish, and innovative. Even when they’re not constantly reaching these goals, customers still purchase products based on the assumptions that they have these traits.

In contrast, defining corporate identity can be a far more complex conundrum. Defining corporate identity requires a business to answer two key questions:

“Who are we, and where do we fit in the market?”

It’s not just essential to answer this question for a buying target audience. Other audiences care about this answer, too, including shareholders and employees.

Defining your corporate brand and understanding what your company stands for will provide significant benefits.

It can provide a company with the right competitive advantage. If a business understands what the brand stands for, it will know how well they are positioned against rivals. It provides purpose and direction for that business as a whole.

A corporate identity will also ensure successful levels of growth because businesses will find it easier to recruit new employees. They will understand how to attract the best recruits while ensuring that the business’s reputation as a whole is protected. 

Elements Of A Corporate Identity

Your corporate identity is formed from numerous elements such as:

  • Design – This includes assets that ensure a business is unique and stands out from competitors.  
  • Communication – How information is passed to different stakeholders and employees.  
  • Behavior – How the business reflects the core values, brand promise, and brand philosophy.

Understanding Your Corporate Identity And What Your Brand Stands For

Various models are used to assess the corporate identity and the brand position of the company. One example is the HBR Corporate Identity Matrix. This matrix postulates that there are internal and external elements that shape the corporate identity of a business. Furthermore, some features effectively bridge these two different groups.

Theoretically, using the matrix could allow you to understand whether the business identity is clear and where improvements should be made to ensure that your identity provides the right benefits.

Internal Elements

The main eternal elements of corporate brand identity are the vision and mission of the company and the culture. This also includes the capabilities of the company or what it can bring to the table that separates them from other companies and organizations

External Elements

These elements relate to how the business wants or needs to be perceived by stakeholders outside the company. Factors such as value proposition and the positioning of the business must be considered here.

Bridging Elements

The bridging elements are some of those that we have already discussed, including:

  • How the brand communicates 
  • What it stands for 
  • The values that underlie promises made to the customers

These concepts form the core of the brand identity, and they should be represented by simple phrases that summarise the intentions and the positioning of the business.

How Can The Matrix Help You Understand Your Brand Identity

According to HBR, the Corporate Brand Identity Matrix can be used by an individual or team to reveal whether a company’s identity is correctly integrated.

Overall, there are nine different elements within the matrix. HBR suggests that business teams can start by formulating answers to any of the questions within the matrix, including:

  • What is our intended position in the market?
  • What are our key offerings?
  • What attitudes shape how we work and behave?

The organization claims that if companies provide concise, straightforward, authentic, and timeless answers to the questions within the matrix, they will clearly understand whether their identity is integrated effectively.

Past Successes

HBR suggests that many businesses have already found success by using the Matrix. When Volvo was decentralized in 2016, the organization was left in a difficult and somewhat risky position. The business’s identity was no longer clearly defined, so the people within organizations were unsure how to best provide strategic support to “daughter” brands of the business. This led to issues with describing the brand through both marketings as well as investor communications.

Using the matrix, HBR was able to help Volvo clarify its position, strengthen its brand identity on the market and ensure that it could communicate effectively with all the critical stakeholders of the business.

Other organizations have seen similar successes after taking a deep dive into the stance of their respective brands. For instance, Cargotech, a significant player in the cargo handling industry, was able to use the tool to effectively bring three daughter brands together with a “one company” approach.

A Starting Step

It’s important to note that using a tool like the HBR matrix is only the beginning when improving your brand position and clarifying your corporate identity. Once corporate teams understand the identity, the legitimacy must be tested often with internal surveys. If the validity is confirmed, it’s then essential to ensure that every team member understands the brand identity and is working or communicating within these new guidelines.

Taking these measures will ensure that a business succeeds in achieving cohesiveness. It will ensure that everyone within an organization represents the business in the same way with each interaction. Whether they are interacting with stakeholders, clients, or customers, the corporate identity should be upheld.

The right corporate identity can also provide authority on the market and position your business as a leader within a highly competitive industry. This is possible through the right:

  • Action
  • Communication  
  • Design

The profound benefits of understanding and maintaining your corporate identity should now be clear, and tools such as HBRs Corporate Brand Identity Matrix can be vital to achieving these goals.

To gain a deeper understanding and expert support with the branding of your corporate enterprise, contact Agency Partner today. Our dedicated, experienced team is ready to assist you with your brand goals and help elevate your business in your respected industry.

sm-and-business

Social Media for the Small Business (Toolkit Included)

Posted on | by devops
SOCIAL MEDIA HACKS FOR THE SMALL BUSINESS
A Simple Guide for the Small Guy or Gal

When you think of the internet today, you think of “social media,” don’t you? They weren’t always so interchangeable. One came before the other, but one forced the other to evolve. And with that, so did we.

Current Social Media Platforms in Order of Popularity:

social-network-ranking

As of Jan. 2021, according to a report published by Statista, Facebook alone recorded at least 2,740,000 active users. Not far behind were Youtube and WhatsApp, with Messenger, Instagram, and WeChat trailing behind. Tik Tok ranked seventh.

Where we can now find limited storage online for free due to services like cloud computing, there was a time when intellectual property as we know it, used to be stored somewhere physically, and there were costs associated with that, too. So much has changed since. Our livelihoods and businesses now depend on social media as a tool to keep bread and butter on the table, especially evident after the year that we just had.

This pressure to hop on the bandwagon that is the internet today has only grown since it’s debut, and it’s not stopping anytime soon.

Last it was recorded, about five million people were actively using social media, and that number continues to rise at exponential rates.

DATE NUMBER OF USERS % WORLD

POPULATION

 INFORMATION

SOURCE
December, 1995 16 millions 0.4 % IDC
December, 2000 361 millions 5.8 % Internet World Stats
December, 2005 1,018 millions 15.7 % Internet World Stats
Sept, 2010 1,971 millions 28.8 % Internet World Stats
Dec, 2015 3,366 millions 46.4 % Internet World Stats
Dec, 2020 5,053 millions 64.2 % Internet World Stats

But, fret not. As your friends who keep constant watch over the digital market, we’ve compiled a list of tips, tricks, and tools for making social media work for you. Before we go on to overwhelm you with the facts, allow us to first remind you that everyone, every company, every small business that influences us today, had to start from somewhere.

Where to Begin:

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to be everywhere at once. Start with where you are and with the audience you have today.

Say you’re on Instagram and it’s where you’ve found the most potential thus far, develop that before you branch out and add another network under your management. Professionals will go ahead and secure usernames and URLs in advance to not have to deal with the hassle of obtaining them later on. It’s also good marketing as it shows consistency across platforms.

Some general rules to keep in mind (maybe your bylaws, too):

Do Not: Treat people as leads.

Do: Yes, you want the close, you want the deliverables, the hard sell, but don’t miss out on the social aspect of social media. People hop online to take a break from their day, to find inspiration in a quote, a meme to share with loved ones.

Think: How are we engaging with our followers? What tone do we have online? Is there a big holiday coming up that we can prepare content for in advance, maybe a “Happy #NationalBringYourCatToWork Day?” tweet for the Twitter feed?

Do Not: Leave leads unattended.

Do: Follow through on the conversations you’re having. Socializing is important, but so is the service you’re providing, and studies show that 71% of users are more likely to buy from a company following a positive online experience. The whole appeal behind social media is the instant gratification that it delivers; you don’t have to wait to hear back from your audience. Set up a poll, they’ll tell you exactly how they feel and how they want it. Study those interactions.

Consumer data adds to any company’s intelligence, especially if they can make sense of it.

Think: Are we user-friendly? What’s our response time online? Where are we getting the most impressions for? Where are we seeing the least amount of engagement? Should we be allocating our resources elsewhere?

Do Not: Post to post.

Do: Create S.M.A.R.T. goals.

Social media can feel like a chore to the best of us, especially when we’re scrambling at the last minute for content or guilt-posting for not being active enough. And the smaller you are, the more hats you might find yourself wearing at work. Sales and general business goals are good to keep, but neglect creating a social media strategy and you’ll feel disconnected, unaligned with your goals.

Posting for the sake of posting is like shooting in the dark, but having a SMART outcome in mind will help keep you on track to achieve your desired goal.

Think: Do we have a digital marketing strategy in place? How much time can we afford to put aside for social media use each day? Is there a minimum and maximum we can set for day-to-day interactions? For example, one might choose to devote 15 minutes of their day to like and respond to 10 comments in total, with 5 re-shares spaced throughout. Is there a system here that I’m missing, that I could maybe automate for ease of use in the future? Would templates come in handy here?

These are all great questions to have answers to, especially as resources tend to trim down the smaller a business goes.

Do Not: Ignore search engine optimization (SEO).

Do: Optimize, optimize, optimize!

When was the last time you clicked on ‘Page 2’ of a Google search? Exactly. The web has a variety of algorithms at work, all unique to the browser or search engine you have running, not to mention that those backend formulas are also constantly undergoing updates.

Think: Are we using the right hashtags? Is our meta data clear and concise? Have we claimed our Google My Business (GMB) listing yet? What’s our page download speed looking like? Can we do better?

Next, as promised, the toolkit!

“A big business starts small.”

-Richard Branson

Since small businesses come in different shapes and sizes, each unique to the solution they’re offering, it’s only fair that we offer a few selections for you to explore in case one or even two out of four of our options don’t fit. Frankly, the internet is full of amazing resources just like these ones, but we hope this serves as a place for you to start…

We’re also on standby if you’d like to chat! Okay, here we go:

For Content Inspiration or Social Media Monitoring:

For Managing and Scheduling Posts:

For Graphics:

For Photos:

For Tracking Analytics:

Most of these programs come free or low-of-cost, so they’re perfect for entrepreneurs with a tighter budget, but as your business grows, you might find that these tools no longer deliver due to their limited capabilities. At that point, it might be time to look at marketing ROI instead.

As always, we’ll be here for that conversation. In the meantime, feel free to explore our resource pool here.