The case for hiring a brand strategy consultant: How the trajectory of your tech business can be transformed in 4 simple steps

Brand strategy is often an afterthought for many tech businesses. With the focus on getting your solution to market as quickly as possible, there isn’t time to waste when customers should be able to benefit from your solution as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, if you don’t take the time to consider your audience, your competitors, your messaging and where your solution fits in the market, your piece of tech won’t have the chance to make a difference. Instead, it will be lost in a sea of other tech solutions that try to speak to everyone, yet fail to resonate with anyone.

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Want to avoid that fate? Then it pays to engage an experienced brand strategy consultant - especially one who knows how to speak tech and tailor your messaging to your target audience.

How to get the most from your brand process

Step 1: Business alignment - understanding your organisational goals, your current messaging and what you need from the brand/website redesign process.

Step 2: Brand strategy - harnessing data and research to identify your market position and your ideal audience to craft an effective customer-centric narrative.

Step 3: Brand design - discovering your visual identity and creating brand elements to capture the essence of your business and communicate your value to customers.

Step 4: Website creation - developing a modern responsive website which educates and demonstrates your solution to drive traffic and conversions.

Step 5: Go-to-market support - providing ongoing targeted support to maintain your website, leverage your updated assets and create additional resources.

What does a brand strategy consultant do?

A brand strategy consultant takes an objective look at your business to see how your brand is resonating in the market. To get a complete picture, this requires both internal and external research to understand how your people and your customers view your brand.

Looking outwards, a brand strategy consultant will chat directly with clients, or the sales team, to understand what customers are saying. They will also consult with the marketing department to review promotional material and the business’ existing messaging to see:

• how this is being received by customers

• whether it aligns with the business’s overall mission.

Internally, a brand strategy consultant will talk to different people within the business to better understand:

• what they think the business is selling 

• what they do, who they do it for and why it matters.

Brand strategy also looks at visual brand assets, like your logo, to see if they are up-to-date, align with your business and resonate with customers. At the end of this step, your brand strategy consultant will have all the information they need to begin the ‘sexy’ part of your brand and website project - the design phase. 

How a brand strategy consultant can re-energise your tech brand in 4 simple steps

Step 1: Audit

A brand audit looks at where you are right now to uncover any issues or areas of improvement. Depending on your organisation, there are many ways to conduct a brand audit and multiple levels you can focus on during the process.

Ideally, you’ll want to go out into the marketplace and talk to your target audience to understand their level of brand recognition through surveys or interviews. However, this can be costly, often limiting this to larger organisations and big tech companies.

For smaller businesses, the best way to approach a brand audit is for a brand strategy consultant to lead the leadership team through a series of workshops to uncover:

• mission & values

• details about the product or service

• benefits for customers

• ideal target audience. 

The next step is to talk to the sales team to get feedback on what messages are working, what isn't working and what feedback they're getting from customers. The customer service team can also shed light on other things promised by the sales team but not delivered, as well as other issues being raised by customers about your product or service.

If possible, talking to existing customers gives you a direct window into their thought process. What made them sign up with you? What has been their experience so far? If you can’t do this, it’s still possible to draw data from other sources, such as online forms, ad insights, web analytics, FAQs and client reviews to see where your brand stands.

Ultimately, the brand audit process should tell you:

• where you currently sit in terms of brand recognition, 

• whether your current brand aligns with your values, product and/or service,

• if your offering matches what your audience wants, and

• if your branding is targeting the right audience.

Step 2: Research

The research step is three-fold and involves:

• reviewing your existing documentation and messaging,

• analysing what your competitors offer and your point of differentiation, and

• looking at the customer journey to identify threats and opportunities.

Leveraging the information obtained during the audit, a brand strategy consultant undertakes further research to piece together your current messaging and how it’s being received by your audience. This step will reveal any inconsistencies, highlight the best performing material and verify if the messaging matches the client experience.

Competitor research reveals what other companies are doing in your marketplace, the messaging they are using and whether you are just another carbon copy. By looking at their website, trawling forums and reviewing their ad activity, a brand consultant can get a good idea of how you compare and identify your point of difference.

When it comes to the customer journey, talking to existing customers is always the best option but your sales and customer service teams can also shed light on what’s going on. They can often tell you what sealed the deal for customers, how clients are finding you and the questions being asked to uncover the big pain points of your target market.

A note on mapping the customer journey

Mapping out the customer journey is often more complex than you imagine as most visitor journeys are not trackable. Take the following example.

Someone might see your ad, go on your website, get distracted and forget about you. Then someone else mentions something to trigger their memory, so they head back to have a look. They may download a brochure or leave your site open in a tab for later.

When they come back, they might not get to your tab straight away. Perhaps an email from you reminds them they were looking into your offering. They find your brochure again, share it with someone else and then finally head to your website to book a call. 

As you can see, most of those interactions are not trackable.

The best way to understand the typical user journey is by adding a question to your contact form to ask how they found you. Over time you’ll begin to see trends and will be able to tweak customer interactions across the end-to-end journey to improve conversion.

you may even be able to send out a short questionnaire to existing customers asking questions such as; (with multiple chose answers)

- what product did you purchase

- How many times did you come across company before booking a call

- How long did you know about us before making your first booking  / purchase

- What was the last message you saw from company that made you book a call? e.g. Google ads, email from company, facebook ads

- what was the first time you heard about company?

- did you consider any other companies before signing up with us?

- which ones?

-What ultimately made you choose us over a competitor.

Step 3: Positioning

This is all about becoming the only business in the marketplace who can deliver a specific solution to a customer problem. Now that you’ve undertaken competitor research and have more insight into the customer journey, you can harness this information to see where you can add the most value in the market.

Positioning should always start with your unique selling proposition (USP). You want to make it crystal clear who you're talking to and who makes up your target market. More importantly, everyone in your business should be able to explain how you are different, why people choose you and tie this back to the results and value you deliver.

Finding a point of difference can be tricky but you don't want to be a carbon copy of your competition. For one, you can’t charge higher rates if your target market doesn’t believe you offer more value than the rest. You also head into dangerous territory if cost is the only differentiator between you and your nearest competitor (a literal race to the bottom).

There are many ways to differentiate your business from the rest of the market, including:

• product/service quality

• your target audience

• use cases

• industry experience

• customer service

• ongoing support.

The goal is to position yourself as the only option in the marketplace, so the only choice available for your prospect, is moving ahead with you or doing nothing. This can either be real (e.g. new technology) or imagined (e.g. better marketing) uniqueness. This is where it pays to work with a brand strategy consultant who can guide you through this process to help nail your positioning and attract more of your target audience. 

Step 4: Messaging

Story frameworks and narrative messaging allow for effective messaging that aligns with your brand and resonates more deeply with your target audience. Humans are hardwired to respond to stories - this makes it easier to attract attention and communicate your offering.

Using stories in your messaging helps you become more relatable to your audience. It also sets your tech business up as the trusted advisor in your customer’s own hero journey (yes, their hero story, not yours.)

Developing messaging that centres the customer and emphasises how you can help them overcome their struggles is marketing gold. But it comes down to the personality of your business and how you see your role in their journey.

A good place to start is to identify which brand archetype best matches your business. A brand strategy consultant can guide you through the 12 main archetypes to find which ones reflects your brand personality:

• Innocent

• Everyman

• Hero

• Rebel

• Explorer

• Jester

• Creator 

• Ruler

• Magician

• Lover

• Caregiver

• Sage

When you understand your role in your customer’s journey (your archetype) it’s much easier to create messaging that brings everything together for them. You can ensure your USP talks directly to your customer to:

• address their biggest worries and fears

• demonstrate that you understand them

• show that you have a solution that has worked before

• tells them the next step to take to make it happen. 

When you can clearly talk to your audience and they can see how you can help them, you will gain more traction in the marketplace and build a stronger profile and brand.

Are you ready to elevate your brand strategy?

Multiverse are experts in transforming intricate tech concepts into clear, enticing messages, paired with compelling branding and web design. If your technology business is ready to take the next step, we’re here to guide the way.

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