How important is your brand?
What is branding anyway?
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, famously said, “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
But, what exactly is a brand? It’s a common misconception that a brand is your company’s name and logo only. In truth, a brand is so much more than this. It’s any aspect of your visual identity including symbols, fonts, designs and colours. It’s your values and aspirations. It’s your philosophy and personality. It’s your voice, tonality and tagline. It’s the experience of your clients at every touchpoint. Echoing Jeff’s sentiments, it’s the images, thoughts and feelings evoked in people when they hear, think or talk about your business.
Brand equity is the measurable totality of a brand’s worth and reflects your branding success (or failure!). The higher the level of brand equity, the stronger the brand.
Benefits of branding: What you need to know
So, to answer our self-posed question in the main title, your brand is crucial. Arguably, it’s your most-valuable asset, which is what we’ll set about illustrating here, with some of the advantages of branding being:
Differentiate from your competitors: Having unique characteristics allow you to stand out in a saturated marketplace.
Gain brand-loyal customers: Clients are more likely to instruct a trusted brand rather than risk choosing a lesser-known alternative.
Shorten decision-making processes: By knowing and recognising a brand, the time taken to make purchasing decisions is dramatically reduced.
Secure revenue streams: With consumer loyalty comes repeat instructions across your specialisms to positively impact your bottom line.
Position pricing higher: Brands are perceived as deserving higher value, permitting you to charge more for your services.
Strengthen client retention: Retaining clients costs less than acquiring new ones, so save money on your sales and marketing functions.
Earn more fees: Leverage from existing clients with cross-sell and up-sell opportunities to keep your fee earners busy.
Attain external investment: With a brand having a financial value and viewed as an asset, external investors are enthusiastic to get behind you.
Turn employees into brand ambassadors: Staff buying into your brand transforms employees into the ‘face’ of your company who advocate you always.
Delight clients: Revolutionise the brand experience as clients have improved interactions with your business at every stage of their journey.
Increase staff engagement: Job satisfaction leads to a happy workforce, making it easier to acquire accreditations such as Best Companies and Investors in People.
Attract new talent: Not only do current employees want to stay with you for longer, new applicants will flock to your organisation in droves.
Build your brand from the ground up
The bad news is: creating a strong brand is difficult and doesn’t happen overnight. The good news is: Integrated Office Solutions can help.
You see, as a law firm, delivering your services is heavily dependent upon the written word. Branding begins with consistently presented and professionally formatted communications. Our customisation services introduce branding to your Microsoft 365 environment across Word, Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams and SharePoint, from recommending fonts and colours, to templating according to your exact specifications and brand guidelines. In return, you can produce on-brand documents, correspondence and presentations within a few mouse clicks.
Even better, combine customisation with our training services to convert your staff into Microsoft 365 super users, invest in their ongoing development and totally embed branding procedures into your culture.
For further information on branding, access our earlier blogs titled ‘Three benefits of brand-consistent documents’, ‘Legal documents with superpowers’ and ‘What does your font say about your brand?’
Read all about our customisation and training services, see what clients say about us and get in touch to kick start your branding project today.