When many business owners think about overhauling their existing brand or ensuring their current brand sends the right message, their mind automatically jumps to their marketing. While marketing consulting services do play an important role in how your products and services are perceived, it’s best to hone your brand’s identity from the inside out.
Approximately 89% of marketers say that brand awareness is their top goal. But you’ll need to do some internal work before hiring marketing consulting services. What’s more, you’ll need to prioritize ongoing internal efforts to ensure every aspect of your business is aligned with your brand positioning. After all, your business can’t possibly reach its branding goals if your team isn’t totally on board.
So what should you do to ensure your brand is internally aligned? Here are just three surprising ways you can build your brand by starting from within.
- Hold Brand Strategy Workshops With Your Leadership Team: If you’re trying to prioritize internal brand alignment, it’s often best to get your organization’s leaders involved from the start. When executive members of the company are directly involved in developing your brand strategy, they’ll be more invested in the outcome — and will encourage other employees to follow suit. Brand strategy consultants will often host workshops with an organization’s leadership team to ensure these valued team members have a role in creating and defining the purpose, values, mission, essence, and personality of the business. This allows company leaders to fully understand and feel connected to the concepts discussed in these brand strategy consulting workshops. That, in turn, will help other team members relate to your brand and ensure your brand strategy is the main priority across the board.
- Celebrate Cultural Wins That Strengthen Your Brand: It’s essential to reward employees for their hard work and to recognize when your culture has grown in a way that supports your brand goals. Whether this is accomplished through celebratory lunches, company retreats, or one-on-one feedback, you’ll want to ensure this positive behavior is reinforced in a profound way. Not only can this keep stellar employees invested in their work and your brand beliefs, but it can also inspire other team members to make adjustments in order to support your brand positioning. By fostering a strong team that feels valued for their contributions, you’ll create an unshakeable cultural foundation to support your marketing efforts.
- Ensure Hiring Practices Align With Your Identity: What many business owners fail to realize is that they shouldn’t wait until an employee is brought on-board to learn about your organization’s brand strategy. You’ll actually want to make sure that your brand strategy is a prevalent part of your job listings, interview processes, and hiring criteria. That may involve changing your mindset from a hard skills evaluation to one that focuses on the on-brand behaviors you want to see from a new hire. Brand strategy consultants can help you define your values, which can be used to inform your hiring practices, along with the kinds of soft skills and experience candidates should have to support your brand identity.
As experienced brand strategy consultants will tell you, developing a strong identity and purpose for your business is an inside job. By getting your employees to buy into your brand, you’ll ensure your customers will, too.