What Is a Brand Proposal?
Branding is an essential component of every company and organization. A company’s brand is its identity and it is what helps people easily recognize them. A successful brand equals a successful business. So, it is rather unfortunate that a lot of businessmen tend to forget this and end up with a company that barely attracts customers.
Successful brands are the result of good advertising, and there are a lot of businesses out there that are trying to promote their brands so that customers will immediately become familiar with them. So, companies come up with brand proposals wherein the decision-makers of a particular organization can discuss the kind of brand they want to establish in order to gain more success.
Using proposal templates for branding projects
Businesses will not give you the chance to develop their brand if you are not able to promote yourself effectively with your proposals.
There are a lot of branding experts who struggle with this. Many of them end up submitting bland, generic proposals that do not grab the attention of clients. Proposal templates will help you avoid this situation. With these templates, you will be able to command attention, showcase what you have to offer, and win over customers.
How do you achieve this? Here are some pointers:
Identify the needs of the company
A company needs to gain a lot of exposure as well as customer recognition for its brand. In addition, it needs to fine-tune its marketing approach to make it unique against the rest of its competitors. However, a lack of consistency and disjointed marketing efforts can easily slow the progress in achieving these goals.
When you update your company’s brand, you should be able to:
- Build recognition with new customers
- Coordinate marketing as well as communication and public relations efforts to ensure better consistency for the company’s branding efforts
- Differentiate the company’s brand from the rest of its competitors to establish a loyal customer base
Without doing proper marketing research or a consistent use of a branding strategy, the company is going to risk losing a lot of customers as well as potential sales to its competitors who are actually working to effectively promote their brands. This is why you have to build a strong brand that is fundamental to a company’s growth as well as its relevancy in its chosen industry.
Creating a solution
Here are some things you should do to deliver a proposal that will help your client manage their brand in a way that strengthens customer loyalty:
- Analyze the company’s current brand performance. If a company does not have a benchmark that will help it understand how well its brand is performing, then your proposal should help the company create an improved branding strategy. You have to be able to get to the heart of the matter and gather as much information as you can regarding the company’s current marketing plan as well as its PR efforts, and how they are being incorporated in the brand. Then do some research on the company’s existing customer base to get a clear understanding of how the brand is being perceived and how it is faring within the industry compared to its competitors. These are all vital pieces of information that should tell you where the company stands and how you are going to improve the company’s brand in order to gain many new customers while retaining existing customers.
- Develop a custom branding strategy that will build customer loyalty and improve competitiveness. A company’s branding strategy plays a very important role as the brand has more value and longevity than any product that a company can offer to its customers. However, you have to make sure that the branding strategy has to be consistent across all channels. Based on the research analysis that was gathered by studying the company’s brand performance, you will be able to develop a better strategy that can target the company’s weak spots, strengthen the loyalty of existing customers, and expand brand reach to new target markets. Your proposal should be able to show how the company can keep using the promotion of their brand consistent across all of the different marketing and sales efforts, as well as show the client why this is important in building customer recognition as well as gaining loyalty.
- Implement the new branding campaign. The most important part of any branding campaign is putting it into action. This includes everything such as the company’s website and logo, style guides, social media posts, and even business cards. You should be able to present how the company’s branding campaign is going to remain consistent and how the new brand is going to be implemented efficiently and systematically so that the company will be visible to both existing and new customers without any loss of brand recognition. Simply put, your proposal should try to ensure that the company’s brand stays in the minds of the target audience as well as others who may happen to notice it, all while retaining the patronage of those who already love the brand.
Delivering results
Show the client that working with you and your company will result in being able to analyze brand performance and capitalize on the company’s strengths while covering its weak spots through a coordinated marketing approach. If ever you get hired to come up with a brand proposal, then the project will be broken down to the following areas:
Research and analysis
Start by showing that you are able to gather information about the company’s marketing efforts and how it is able to present its brand to customers. After that is done, you have to provide a series of steps that will help you gauge the brand’s performance, particularly with the company’s current customers. This can be done through a series of methods such as customer surveys or focus groups.
The next step is to do some customer analysis to determine the company brand’s position within the industry. This will basically investigate how customers view the brand, and whether or not competitor brands have an advantage or not over it. Finally, you have to wrap everything up with a full audit of the company’s current brand and analyze its perceived promise, personality, value, and history. The brand audit will include a complete SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis that can help create an efficient branding strategy which will be incorporated into the company’s marketing, communications, and public relations.
Your proposal should also state the advantages of taking these steps. It should be able to provide benchmarks for measuring improved conversions and customer loyalty as the new branding strategy is implemented.
Development of a custom branding strategy
Based on the results you gathered during the research analysis phase, you should then be able to create a long-term branding strategy. This can help address all of the brand’s weaknesses as well as make use of its strengths to open up different opportunities. The strategy will be incorporated into the client’s overall marketing plan to coordinate branding goals with the other marketing objectives.
Systematic implementation of branding
Once there is a branding strategy has been put in place, you have to create the guidelines for branding the company’s website, blog, social media, email campaigns, presentations, logo animations, and other activities or materials that will help promote the company’s brand to its customers.
In addition, this should help the company incorporate the new strategy into printed stationery and ephemera, and even office templates or the company’s business cards. The guidelines will help the company showcase its brand during events, event materials, and advertising.
Why a strong brand is important for your business
A good brand will increase a company’s value in the market, provide employees both motivation and direction, and help attract new customers. When all of the different parts of a business are working well, that means that the brand is healthy and has the potential to remain relevant in the market for a long time. So, here are the important reasons why a strong brand is able to impact your business:
Branding will help improve recognition
One of the important parts of your brand is how the logo is designed as well as presented. A good logo will help customers immediately recognize who is associated with it. A professional logo should be simple enough to be memorable, but visually striking enough to make a lasting impression on customers.
Branding creates trust
A professional appearance will help a company gain both credibility and trust from its customers. So, think of your brand as something akin to the clothes that you wear. When you wear a neatly pressed outfit, you come off as someone neat or organized and respectable. The same principle applies to a company’s brand.
Branding helps with advertising
Advertising is one of the main components of your company’s brand. Both the method of advertising as well as the targeted demographic will help you build the brand for your company. Having too narrow of an advertising focus would mean the company risks losing its ability to be able to expand to new markets. If the focus is too broad, then the company will not be able to create a well-defined impression in the minds of both potential and existing customers.
Branding inspires employees
Employees do not want to just work—they want to achieve goals. When employees understand the company’s mission and the purpose of its goals, they are more likely to work harder to achieve these goals and ensure the company’s success.
Branding generates new customers
With the help of a good brand, your company will be able to acquire referral business. Let us say that there is a product that your friend is particularly fond of. You know the product, but you cannot associate it with anything that will tell you what company makes it. This is the reason why a company needs to have a good brand. Customers will then be able to recognize which company is providing them with a wonderful experience in terms of products and services. These same customers will, in turn, help promote your brand when they refer you to their friends, family members, or even to complete strangers.
If you would like to know more about brand proposals or anything related to the topic, be sure to go through our other articles.