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What Is A Branding Agency

 A branding agency helps to clarify, consolidate, create, communicate and cultivate your brand internally and to your external stakeholders.

This involves surveying and polling internal and external stakeholders, creating brand strategies, brand identities, brand design, brand voice and brand positioning.

Many brand agencies specialise in brand repurposing, refreshing and activation.

What’s Branding?

Branding has little to do with what can be seen, and everything to do with what can be perceived. It goes far beyond the superficial collection of images, colours, and sounds, to the first thing that comes to mind whenever someone mentions your brand name.

So, what exactly is a brand?

A brand is what a business, firm, organisation, institution, or products and services, stand for in the minds and hearts of its target audience. It can also be defined as a set of expectations, stories, and memories that, when taken together, are the main reason a consumer may choose one product or service over another.

What’s Brand Identity

Brand identity can be defined as the face of your brand. It’s the visual representation of your brand, and it includes things such as colours, logo, typography, messaging, and packaging.

It’s meant to attract customers to your business, while also making them feel at home. It’s both outward and inward-facing.

How to Create a Brand Identity

To create a brand identity that’s attractive, strong, and consistent, you need to work on the following seven key elements:

Determine Your Brand Purpose and Brand Positioning

The first step to creating a solid brand identity is defining your brand purpose. Brand purpose can be looked at as the main reason your business exists in the first place. Brand positioning defines your target audience and a list of all the things that make your products or services better than any other option on the market.

Thorough Market Research

Market research is what informs your brand’s purpose and mission. It’s by understanding your target market that you’ll be able to refine your purpose and position your brand better. Market research is usually conducted through interviews, face-to-face interaction with potential customers, surveys, and so on. 

Likeable Brand Personality

Think of your brand as a person. What personality does it have? It’s what defines the tone and voice you use to communicate your marketing message. An established brand personality means your customers will have an easy time connecting with your brand. Otherwise, you’ll be sending them mixed messages, which often leaves them confused.

Memorable Logo

A logo should match, enhance, and compliment your brand. This makes it an integral piece of your brand identity, one which the people that interact with your brand are exposed to the most. Your logo should be in synch with the rest of the visual elements that represent your brand, besides communicating the visual appeal of your brand. 

Attractive Colour Palette

Closely connected to your logo is the colour palette that you choose for your brand. It suggested that you at most use 3 colour palettes. Even more important, you want to understand the emotions conveyed by each colour you choose to make sure you’re sending the right message out there.

Professional Typography

Professional typography isn’t just about finding unique fonts but finding one that works in harmony with your colour palette and logo. Don’t be too pedantic, though.

Here are a few pointers to observe when deciding on the right typography:

• Avoid using fancy fonts, unless you’re an advanced graphic designer who understands the art and science behind fonts pretty well.
• Avoid using default fonts. The reason being they’re not a good way to stand out since they lack the unique factor.
• Never mix two or more font families at once. Stick to one, and if you must use them both, make sure it’s for two entirely different purposes.
• Avoid mixing contrasting fonts.
• It’s never a great idea to use all-calls to draw attention or emphasise your text
• Avoid using hyphenation. But that can be justified when the line text consists of more than 60 characters.

On-brand Supporting Graphics

The final step to creating a solid brand identity is working on the extended visual language of your brand, including photos, icons, and design assets.

Google has some interesting visual assets guidelines on icon designs. Here’s their take on everything:

• Use a reductive or flat approach when designing the icons
• Icons should face the front
• Standard background colours
• Straight hard shows, not curved and soft ones
• If you have to choose, go for geometric shapes
• Padding should be done according to the icon’s shape

Choosing a Branding Agency in Singapore

At its core, branding shouldn’t be outsourced. But there are core aspects of it that should be handled by a professional.

One example of a company that witnessed unprecedented success after rebranding is Netflix. Before that they were just a small company that was struggling to find its footing, and then they rebranded and were transformed into a hundred billion-dollar company.

Keep in mind that not every company that outsources its branding services to an agency has a success story to tell. You have to make sure that you’re working with the right branding agency, and one way to go about it is by answering the following key questions:

How many Agencies should you interview before you find the right one?

There’s no ordinate number of agencies that you should interview before you find the right one. But simple logic demands that you interview as many of them as you possibly can. Don’t rush to choose any agency, not until you’ve interviewed at least ten of them.

How Big Should the Agency Be?

One of the reasons companies rebrand is to take advantage of the international market. This is a reserve of well-established agencies that smaller branding firms always struggle with. The point is to always go with a large branding firm that’s handled a similar task before.

What Clients has the Agency worked with

It helps to dig through the company’s portfolio to find out what types of clients they have had the opportunity of working with in the past. Are they from the same industry as you? Digging into a company’s portfolio to find out what type of clients they have served in the past will open your eyes to what the company is actually capable of doing.

What’s their Process?

Data analysis is the driving force of every successful business strategy. You have to figure out what your clients want and position your business accordingly. Speaking of which, a good branding agency is one that’s big on using a data-driven branding approach. Do their past clients feel like they invested a great deal of time researching?

What’s Their Reputation?

Branding is one aspect of your business that requires total transparency. There’s no room to second-guess any of the decisions you’re making. So how about you find out from their past clients how the agency handles their business. Check out the testimonials on their website and the quotes they’re getting from past clients. Is their reputation solid enough or can you spot some holes?

Branding Services to Expect from an Agency

Finding an agency that offers branding services in Singapore is ridiculously easy.

Just Google it, and you’ll be presented with a long list of branding agencies in the country to choose from.

The only hurdle maybe your budget. But there are ways to go around it, and that’s part of what we’ll be exploring in this section of the post.

Here goes the list:

The Discovery Session

The most important part of branding your business is making sure that it can be found. You have to start by figuring out how to make it discoverable.

So, in a sense, every business needs a discovery session. Your business should be right there, in front of your target customers, where you can make sales.

Marketplace Research

Before you run with branding, you have to understand the marketplace. This demands that you begin by taking a comprehensive view of the market.

This has to be conducted on two levels:

The first one is by looking at the industry as a whole. What’s the general state of the industry you’re in? How big is the market? What’s trending at that particular point?

The second one is narrowing down to your specific geographical location.

Competitor Research

Part of the branding process is understanding the forces surrounding you. It’s through understanding the people you’re competing with that you’ll be able to carve your own niche.

At the end of the research process, your agency must be able to answer the following questions:

• What’s the list of businesses you’re competing with?
• What does each one of them excel at?
• What exactly are they doing wrong? Or which area are they performing poorly?
• Are you impressed by their look? What’s there to emulate about them?
• Which one of their offers rivals yours?
• What makes you unique? Why would any customer choose you over any one of them?

Remember, branding runs deeper than the visuals on your website. It runs deeper than your colour scheme and logo.

Brand Naming

People will remember your business by name. So, you need to be really strategical about how you choose a name for your business.

A new business needs a name; an existing one needs to look into the possibility of changing its name.

There’s no limit as to how you can name your business. You can even name it after yourself, or one of the ingredients in your products.

Website Design and Development

Website design and development are also part of branding services.

Remember, your website is an online representation of your business. It’s, therefore, important that you would want it to be consistent with your overall brand identity.

You’re not just setting up a website for the sake of it. You want the website to carry everything that you represent as a brand.

Partnership and Relationship

You must establish a relationship with your branding agency.

A good agency is like an extension to your business. They’re like your second eye, a trusted resource partner you can count on in your time of need.

It’s a relationship you want to nurture. So, give yourself time to learn and understand each other, and eventually, you’ll be joined at the hip.

Branding Deliverables

The agency you hire to help you brand your business will be responsible for creating branding deliverables.

This refers to all the items that you’ll be taking home with you to help you out with marketing your business.

Here goes the list of branding deliverables that your agency must be able to facilitate.

Brand Strategy

This is where branding starts. Think of your branding strategy as the foundation of everything the agency will be doing.

If the strategy doesn’t feel right, you can be sure nothing will work.

Your agency shouldn’t keep you in the dark about their game plan or the intended course of action

Brand Identity Design

This should be the next item in your list of deliverables. It refers to all the things that customers will be using to identify you.

Brand identity design consists of brand name, brand logo, brand guidelines, colour scheme, typography, and logo usage.

You need a budget for this. You can come up with your business name, but you need a professional to help you out with your logo and the rest.

Stationary Branding and Design

Your branding activities aren’t restricted to online. You need to brand everything you’ll be working with, including stationary.

You can go all in and get the following items designed at once:

• Business cards
• Compliment slips
• Letterheads
• Invoices
• Contracts
• Receipt books
• Quotes
• Proposals

You can also hire an agency to do all this for you. You need all the items on the list, all designed to match your brand.

Marketing Materials

Marketing means putting your business or brand in front of potential customers. Not an easy feat for small businesses.

Your marketing budget could easily hit the roof. So, you need to be really smart with the decisions that you make on this one.

Printing Services

You need quality printing and not the cheapest option you stumble across.

Pick a company that does embossed edge paint printing for your cards. These companies are not cheap – typically, most of them tend to charge about $400 for 500 cards.

But you can bet your cards will look more professional.

Using Branding and Marketing Grants in Singapore

Singapore is a tech powerhouse in the Asia-pacific region, and that’s mostly because it enjoys the support of the government. This support comes in various converging forms. Among them are low tax rates on small businesses, a robust regulatory regime, a well-developed IT infrastructure, and, of course, grants.

And luckily for you, we just happen to know of a government grant for branding that you might want to take advantage of today.

EDG: Strategic Branding and Marketing

Interested in refreshing the image of your company? Or maybe you’re looking for a way to generate more engagements.

Enterprise Development Grant for Brand and Marketing Development may be the right project for you.

Any project that involves creating or redefining its brand values qualifies for the EDG.

Any new business is looking for a marketing strategy that it’ll be using to communicate its offering better and differentiate itself from the competition. The EDG project is a good start if you’re strapped for cash.

It’s even better because it also supports partnerships, overseas market research, and product diversification studies.

Eligibility

Companies that wish to apply for the EDG are required to meet the following criteria:

• Must be registered, in addition to operating in Singapore.
• Have at least 30% shares in the business.
• Be in a financial position to start and run the business.

Benefits

• For SME’s, the grant will be supporting up to 70% of the qualified branding cost.
• For non-SME’s, the project will be supporting up to 50 of the qualified branding cost.

Follow this link to apply

The Application rules and the procedure:

• Before you apply for the grant, you’re advised first to approach the SME centre to find out if your project qualifies. Your project will be evaluated for eligibility.
• The application you submit will be assessed and approved by Enterprise Singapore (ESG). Those assessing it will look at the scope of the project, projected outcomes, and the competency levels of those behind it.

The Application Process

To apply for the grant, you have to begin by signing up to the Singapore’s Business Grant Portal (BGP) with CorpPass (LINK: https://www.businessgrants.gov.sg/).

After that, you have to wait for 8 to 10 weeks for your application to be processed.

In case of anything, you’ll be contacted via the BGP to submit additional information or make necessary adjustments to your application.

Approval

Once your application has been approved, your company will be presented with a LOF (Letter of Offer).

Here’s what will be indicated in the letter:

• The conditions that come with the support
• The amount of grant your company has been awarded

You’ll be required to accept the conditions in the LOF within the specified timeline, and that’s it.

Frequently Asked Questions about Online Brand Awareness

What Is Online Brand Awareness?

Online brand awareness is a digital marketing term that describes the degree of customer recognition of your product/service by its name. Online brand awareness is a crucial step in promoting new products and services and reviving old brands. 

With the increasing competition in the digital space, it is becoming much harder to execute effective online brand awareness campaigns. For this reason, you need to define the qualities and values that distinguish your business from your competitors.

In an era where modern consumers are presented with a variety of choices, they are more likely to choose a brand they know than unfamiliar ones. For example, Coca-Cola and Pepsi have invested in brand awareness to become synonymous with the soft drink industry.

At the centre of online brand awareness campaigns is the consumer who, after getting a positive experience, will share it on their social media pages. On the other hand, consumers with a negative brand experience will also share their views on social media, which will hurt your brand. In such an instance, you will need to have an online reputation management strategy at hand.

What Are The Benefits Of An Online Brand Awareness Campaign?

When creating your online branding strategy plans, you must consider the potential benefits it will hold for your business or company. While the general benefit is to increase brand recognition, you need to understand what the campaign will yield for your company.

Your brand strategy ought to ensure that it gets these benefits for the business:

• Increased customer recognition
• Foster customer loyalty to the brand
• Stir up excitement for current and new products/services

You will get these essential benefits from engaging in an effective online brand awareness campaign. On the other hand, the brand recognition followed by the online brand awareness campaign is to ensure that you have the content to follow up the traction gained from the brand awareness campaign.

Which Should I Pick; an Online Branding Agency or an Online Branding Freelancer?

Online brand awareness is already difficult enough for most digital marketers, let alone new entrepreneurs in the digital space. For this reason, you must consider enlisting the help of an online branding agency. However, getting one is not easy, and you must go through a lengthy selection process to identify the best online branding agency for your venture.

Working with an agency is better than working with an individual since you will benefit from a collaborative effort. An individual will most likely develop fatigue and will not offer much for your online brand awareness since they do not have someone to share ideas.

The agency will be more expensive, but it will be worth the effort. However, some experienced online branding experts work alone and better handle your online branding awareness campaign. However, two heads are better than one, so it is better to work with an online branding agency.

How Experienced Are You In Online Brand Awareness Campaigns?

Experience is arguably the most important factor when choosing a service provider. This shows how conversant they are with brand awareness space. You should test their ease of integrating with other brands to ensure that they get the job done.

Unlike traditional brand awareness campaigns, the service provider needs to be tech and social media savvy. Moreover, you will need to have some technical skills to express what you want from the service provider. For online brand awareness campaigns, you also need to show the agency or the freelancer brand manager the social media channels you want to run the campaign. 

What Skills Do I Need To Excel At Online Branding?

Much goes into online branding to ensure that your target audience understands and cherishes your brand. Remember that your goal is to ensure that your customers and potential users recognize your brand and that they will consider it whenever they need anything in your market segment.

You will need to have some or all of the following skills:

• Analytics to assess the effectiveness of your branding campaigns
• Search Engine Optimization to make your web content more appealing
• Website development and design to create visually appealing ads, coupons
• Content creation to ensure that you have engaging content

These and more skills will help you improve the brand awareness of your venture and get it in front of your intended audiences. However, you will need to ensure that you create buyer personas to avoid wasting time and resources on trivial activities.

What is the role of Social Media in a Branding Strategy?

Social media is a great equalizer in marketing. Startups can compete on a level playing field with established companies without spending huge resources on marketing. Social media also plays a significant role in ensuring that companies make meaningful connections with their online audiences.

Leveraging social media in your brand strategy allows you to develop loyal followers and generate leads. You will also be in a position to reduce marketing costs, establish business partnerships, and increase sales. Social media will also provide you with market insight to help improve your brand.

Social media also humanizes brands by responding to customer comments, feedback and solving their problems. For this reason, you will need to improve your social media marketing skills to boost your brand strategy.

Is Traditional Media Necessary For Brand Awareness Today?

Traditional media, which include TV, print, and radio, offer companies a variety of advantages compared to companies that focus solely on social media marketing. For starters, traditional media marketing involves the creation and execution of a campaign that is relatively more tangible, and this can boost the marketing campaigns you are running on social media. Moreover, it would be a misconception to think that social media reaches all audiences.

For this reason, it is prudent that you leverage both traditional and social medial marketing strategies in your brand strategy. While the costs for traditional media marketing will be higher, when done right, this double-pronged campaign will ensure that you get a better return on investment (ROI).

However, the perfect mix of the two media will vary depending on the type of your business. This means identifying goals specific to your business model. For example, the media mix for a B2C company will be different from that of a B2B. The budget, among other factors, will also affect your media mix.

How Do I Build A Brand Strategy?

The success of your online brand awareness campaign is dependent on the structure of your brand strategy. A properly structured brand strategy will help organize the many facets of information to guide your marketing team and the customers through online brand awareness campaigns.

With the following questions, you will be able to build a robust brand strategy for your company:

• What are your goals and objectives for your brand strategy?
• What is your current competitive situation?
• How will you achieve the set goals and objectives with your marketing campaigns?
• What are the priority marketing tactics for each plan in your strategy?
• What are your marketing strategies to achieve the set objectives?
• How will you measure the success against your objectives?

With that said, the journey to a successful online brand awareness campaign is rigged with many challenges. You will find that the direction changes along the way while you execute the plan. For this reason, you must remain flexible in the execution.

In that regard, here are some brand awareness strategies for your business:

• Go into partnerships with established brands, and this will help you inherit the reputation and image of the brand
• Leverage on referrals by ensuring that your suitable customer relationships will lead them to recommend the brand to their friends, colleagues, and family
• Launch new products/services as a closed beta version. This will create exclusivity, and it will evoke customer interest and thus ease the onboarding process
• Engage your audience with video content
• Offer a freemium service, which is a sign that you are willing to give value to your users at no cost

These online brand awareness strategies will increase brand recognition and foster customer loyalty. However, it will take rigorous reputation management to avoid losing ground lost due to negative customer feedback.  

How Do I Know It Is Time To Review My Brand?

The internet is changing the market, and no day is similar to the next. For this reason, you cannot set your brand strategy and forget. It would be best to treat your corporate brand as a living thing closely tied to your capabilities, reputation, and opportunities that change over time.

However, reviewing the brand is a balancing act since you do not want to change it too early or too late. Here are six questions you should ask yourself before reviewing your brand:

• Is your company/business poised for growth?
• Is there increased competition in your brand’s territory?
• What are your competitors doing, and is it affecting the market?
• Do you perceive a discord between what the brand projects and how it is perceived?
• Are the brand and company headed in the same direction?
• Have you communicated your brand strategy to your agencies and teams?
• Have you translated your brand strategy into an action plan?
• Is the brand strategy execution plan going as planned?

When reviewing your corporate brand, you must take into consideration the sentiments of your current customers. This way, you will get the necessary feedback, and it will tell you when and how you need to review the brand.

How Much Does Online Branding Awareness Campaign Cost?

The amount spent on online branding awareness campaigns differs from one company to the next. Moreover, the agency or individual you choose will have a rate that will determine the overall cost. For this reason, you must convene a meeting with your team, contemplate the goals and objectives, and set the budget you are willing to spend on the campaign.

You will also need to consider the media mix to ensure the furthest reach of your online branding awareness campaign. Most companies fail to consider the money you need to spend on your digital marketing campaigns.

In most cases, we have seen that the more expensive the agency or individual, the better and more experience they have in running online brand awareness campaigns. However, be sure to get quotes from various service providers and pick the best option.

How Do You Track The Effectiveness Of The Online Branding Awareness Campaigns?

Measuring and evaluating the effectiveness of your online branding awareness is not easy. It involves taking into account several variables. This involves tracking how people came across your brand, and this will give insight into the value of your online presence and more.

To measure the effectiveness of your online brand awareness, you will need data from three sources:

• Google Analytics
• Ad accounts such as Google Ads or Facebook Ads
• Web and social media monitoring tool that collects data

From here, you can then compare the results of your analysis against the objectives and goals you had set up earlier. The process can feel complicated. For this reason, you could hire an online branding agency to track the right metrics and get a comprehensive report on the way forward.

What Is The Role Of The Customer In Online Brand Awareness Campaigns?

Businesses are liable for steering their online brand awareness campaigns. This involves the sourcing of branding agencies, the content, graphic design, and so much more. These will be executed in line with the expected objectives and goals, where the identified business metrics will be measured and results compared against the expected results.

However, one of the most underrated aspects of online brand awareness campaigns is the role of the consumer. Since they are the recipients of the campaigns, you must involve some of your targeted consumers in beta testing the campaign before rolling it out to the masses.

This way, you will have an aspect of customer-generated content that will resonate with your larger cohort of consumers. This will be a humbling process for most brand managers, but it is the only way of putting out an authentic and relatable online brand awareness campaign.

How Do I Carry Out Online Reputation Management?

It is virtually impossible to please each consumer, while some will give negative reviews about the brand out of malice. Your competitors could also conspire to bring you down, leaving you with a negative brand image.

You will need to have an active online reputation management campaign to salvage your image for this and more ways. This might range from dealing with disgruntled consumers privately as well as rolling out a massive campaign.

However, you will need to monitor your online reputation and not wait until the problem escalates. Online reputation management strategies vary for different companies, but it is necessary that you actively monitor your reputation and mitigate the inherent risks before they negatively affect your brand.

What Is The Difference Between Brand Recognition And Aided Awareness?

Brand recognition is the consumer association of a brand’s tagline, logo, advertising campaign, and packaging of a product/service. However, recognition is not as immediate as brand recall since consumers cannot associate the brand to a particular category. However, for aided awareness, consumers are presented with an image of the logo or its products to recognize the brand.

When embarking on your online brand awareness campaign, you need to determine whether your target audience can recognize your brand when they see it. Ensure to sit down with your team and branding agency to take the necessary steps to ensure aided awareness as you move towards brand recognition.

Do I Need A Brand Awareness Survey?

Increasing competition in the modern business sector has contributed to the deteriorating brand retention among consumers. Unless you are an established business, you have much to worry about consumers moving on to the next hip brand in your market.

For this reason, you need to carry out frequent brand awareness surveys. The survey will help you measure your business’ presence in the market. From the survey, you will learn how to strengthen your marketing plan and the strategies to increase brand recognition. Other benefits of conducting brand awareness surveys are:

• You will get an insight into what your audience thinks about your business and the brand it represents via honest and immediate responses
• It will help you calculate the return on investment over time for better resource allocation
• It avoids dishonesty associated with face-to-face surveys
• You will easily tell the opportunities in your market by comparing the trends and data

Brand awareness surveys are an integral part of online brand awareness campaigns. It not only gives you better insight into where you stand amongst the competition, but it also shows you where you need to put more emphasis on promoting your brand.

How Is Brand Equity Related To Brand Awareness?

Brand equity and brand awareness are directly correlated. Brand equity goes beyond the tangible assets owned by a company. It also takes into account the brand’s reputation. This means that increased positive associations will raise your brand equity.

For this reason, high brand equity relates to better brand awareness. For example, there are hundreds or thousands of IM apps, but WhatsApp has higher brand equity, reflecting that it has better brand recognition.

What Are The Brand Awareness Measurements Should I Consider?

There is so much data that you will gather from your brand awareness campaign survey and from reviewing your current brand recognition. However, you will need to be particular in measuring to ensure that you get the necessary insights from your review. It would be best if you looked into:

• Brand Recall – this is where consumers can remember your brand. For example, your brand name should come up when asked about a product category
• Brand recognition – this is aided brand awareness where customers are reminded of your brand when they see your logo or packaging
• Brand identity – this is how consumers identify what the business is about and if they have formed an emotional connection with your products/services
• Brand image – it will help you see if your intended audience perceives your brand
• Brand trust – in the survey, you can use a scale ranging from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’ to measure how the audience trusts your brand
• Brand loyalty – brand trust and loyalty are directly correlated, and to measure it, ask about their satisfaction if they will continue to buy from you and if they can recommend your brand to their associates

These measurements are necessary to be undertaken periodically as seen fit. The insights will help you assess the market trends and the competition. All this data can be sourced from analytics tools such as Google Analytics. An experienced digital marketer can help you understand the relationships between the data and perceived brand awareness. You will also learn what you should improve to increase brand recognition.

What Is The Role Of Content Marketing In Online Brand Awareness Campaigns?

The content on your website and social media pages should show the audience what your business is all about. It also communicates what the brand represents. Brand awareness goes beyond the target audience’s name, but it shows how well they understand the qualities and values the brand represents.

Your content will tell the intended audience what your brand represents and create the distinction between you and your competitors. For this reason, you need SEO experts who understand the intricacies of content marketing.

 This is how to use content marketing to boost your online brand awareness campaigns:

• Create buyer personas to understand your target audience better
• Create and refine your content marketing strategy
• Leverage your blog as a tool for enhancing the brand awareness campaign
• Participate in online communities
• Send out newsletters via email
• Leverage on social media

By having a robust content creation schedule, you will be able to add content depending on your online brand awareness survey results. Moreover, you can use diverse content marketing strategies to move ahead of the competition.

This will keep your audience interested in what you have to offer. More so, it is a way to communicate your brand’s values that will lead to increased brand recognition, trust, and loyalty.

Top Branding Agencies in Singapore