In business, your brand is what propels growth. When you invest money and time back into your brand, it allows your business to grow by becoming more noticeable and by reaching more potential customers. With competition becoming increasingly tough (and not just for new customers, but new talent as well), it’s no longer optional to find ways to make your company stand out. Well-seasoned and established companies have a deep understanding and appreciation of why this is valuable. Small startups usually get this too because they know that in order to survive and grow, they have to be agile and disruptive. But what about the businesses that fall in the middle of startup and well-established? Do they understand that in order to remain relevant in the eyes of consumers that they have to continuously push forward and innovate?
Some get it, some don’t. That’s just the nature of doing business and you can’t make people hear things they aren’t ready to hear. But there are so many intangible things that you can’t attach to ROI because it just doesn’t fit on an Excel spreadsheet as a line item.
But if you’re ready to hear how investing back into your brand can give you a major competitive advantage and grow your business, here are some valuable hidden ROI incentives:
1.) Attract and retain the best employees and talent
A well-established and social brand can keep you at the forefront of future candidates. And if you are targeting millennials for your next hire, you need to be sure that your culture and brand perception fits their ideals. No one wants to work for the outdated, old-fashioned business that remain stagnant and years behind the rest of us. But it’s not just reaching new talent either. It’s also giving some love to those already on your payroll. When you invest in your current employees, the heart and soul of your brand, your internal culture shines. Employees aren’t just working for money. They are working for empowerment, recognition and challenges. When you give employees the opportunity for growth by providing them outlets for training and business development, you send the message that they are worth more to you than just the cost of doing business. If they feel valued it will show in their performance, how they interact with customers on your behalf, and their overall efficiency.
2.) Higher perceived value
When potential customers are familiar with your brand, and you have positioned yourself as the best in your industry, you can charge more for your products and services. Why? Because potential customers will perceive you as being better and having more value than your competition. On the flip side, a weak brand with rock-bottom pricing may actually drive customers away, which leads to lower profit margins and marginal services.
3.) Work with the best clients
Wouldn’t it be great to pick and choose whom you work with because they are a good fit for your brand and employees as opposed to taking any client that comes your way? We’ve all had our nightmare clients that we hide from when they come knocking or get a pit in our stomach as the phone rings and flashes with their number. When you begin to invest into your brand by figuring out what you do best, who you work best with and where to find and market to these potential customers, you can start becoming selective on who you work with because you aren’t wasting precious time and resources on the wrong clients. And we all know the worst clients are the ones that pay the least but require the most amount of effort and work.
4.) Improved marketing opportunities
Once you begin to define your ideal customer, you can start improving on your marketing strategies by investing in the ways that you reach that particular demographic. You can hone in on their buying cycles and how to best communicate with them. This leads to shorter sales cycles because you are filtering out unqualified prospects and reaching those that really can benefit from your products or services.
5.) Scale and Grow
If you only look at design as a way of making things look pretty at the end of your business and strategic planning, you will never utilize and realize the full potential of design and grow your business the way powerhouse brands such as Apple, Nike and Coca-Cola have. This is because your business is a system, and when you start designing your business solutions as a system, you can start solving many connected problems throughout your business. Good design solves problems in a way that makes things feel simpler, easier, and less complicated. By using design as the lead, you can eliminate all ambiguity, clutter and excess. In short, you can reach your customers faster.
When you begin thinking about marketing, branding and design as a way to add value to your business, you need to look at more than just aesthetics and hard ROI. Just because you can’t attach a hard dollar amount to each of these items, doesn’t mean they don’t add to your bottom line. Because they do. All of them. In ways that you can’t see because you have yet to go under the surface to really understand how all things, invisible and visible, are all connected to the growth and success of your business.
Want more insights into your next business strategy and how to add value to your brand? Let’s talk!
