What exactly is your time worth? The perils and pitfalls of doing branding, design and professional communications when not your core skill set.

When people have great products or services that they’re keen to get in front of potential customers, and their marketing budget never seems to stretch far enough, they tend to think of ways to scale back spend — and branding, design and professional communications are often first to go. 

Does this happen with you?
If so, it's understandable. After all, anyone can copy a competitor's wording and knock something up. It's safe to be a 'me too'. And does a professional layout really matter? People are bound to be interested in the content being broadcast at them — surely?  It's also easy to delegate your website to someone junior –after all, it lifts the burden from the busy senior management team shoulders. And the people you’ve tasked with these jobs? Well, they will intuitively know the deep insights and strategy of your business and will ensure this and the customer journey work to fully engage audiences through each stage of the buying cycle. Right? These people will be smart of course, because they’ll find the cheapest contractors to build the website, who often don't understand your business either. And ads... well, they’ll just knock them up in Word and away you go? Well, no, not really. And here’s why: 

“If you build it, they will come"
Kevin Costner might have had the good fortune to be told this, and his field of dreams came true, but just having a good product or service doesn’t guarantee sales. You’ll need to get your message out there, loud and clear, and in front of the right people who will want to buy from you in a way that resonates. And the words you use and way you talk to your audience is critical in setting out your positioning proposition and getting across why your customers should buy from you and not another competitor brand. 

Talking to people in your network, getting on social media and emailing potential contacts is a good place to start, but if you’ve been doing this already, you’ll know it takes time – lots of it. And it's getting noisier out there. Besides, everyone is a writer nowadays, or a designer, a web expert, a marketing strategist.  So the question is...

What is your time worth? 
If you’re a service company, you will already know what your charge-out per hour is, and if you’re product based you should still have an understanding of what your time is worth.

Consider this: you have a new product, you don’t know what to call it so you think about it… and think about it… and before you know it, you’re seven weeks down the line having spent weeks of your valuable time thinking and talking about a name. But you're still not sure about it. It all adds up to time and money you’ll not get back.

Time and money that could’ve been spent getting a branding expert to do it much quicker, and potentially cheaper.

When branding, positioning, naming are not your core skill set, why would you spend the time doing it? Would you build a car yourself without knowing how? 

Also, if you’re a marketer, how can you demonstrate return on investment to your boss when he has paid your salary for seven weeks to come up with a name that may have taken an branding agency two weeks to settle on?

So, what is our time worth? 
It’s challenging in a blog to fully explain everything we do… but if…

— You want effective brand strategy?
Our 20+ years of working with brands in multiple industries - from Cloud tech and FinTech brands, heritage, charities and second-phase start-ups, means that we've honed our strategy to get the most out of the process. We make it our mission to fully understand your company, your clients, your products and/or services, and then lead on how you communicate and roll your brand out.

– You want good looking design that puts a professional face to your organisation?
Great, we’ve got a superb collection of designers with skills across branding, logos, typographic artists, illustrators, Photoshop retouchers, photographers with expertise across both digital and traditional print. Our team are experienced and hand picked by us, so you don’t have to spend time trawling the depths of one-man bands in the hope that they can knock something together for you.

(One of our clients tried this and chuckled when he told us… “Never again” he said, “I’ve learned my lesson”). We love him and he shall remain nameless!

– You want things done without having to liaise with multiple designers, printers and candlestick makers (oh, and you want top quality too)?
Ah, yes, that’ll be where our Project Management skills come in. Clients often struggle with the value of Project Management. But watch any episode of Grand Designs and you’ll know what we’re on about. These mysteries of the brand agency world are the organisational oil that helps you to make the marketing run smoothly, and gets you to where you want to be with the quality and success of a Formula 1 team. They thrive on the occasional pat on the back, and serve to please. Your success is valued as their success!

– You want a web presence that is more than a shop window, enabling people to buy from you?
Our web team is skilled and experienced in User Experience (UX) design and a whole host of coding languages that gives you greater flexibility, access to the latest technology, and makes your site accessible, up-to-date and easy to use. We build on scalable platforms so it's never a problem to add to your offer – because it's all future-planned during customer experience mapping and put in place at wireframe stage. Don’t put obstacles in your customer’s way. Demand nothing less than the best.

As a marketer, that is what you should be striving to deliver, hence it’s what we strive to deliver. 

 A good spend of your budget? 
Your marketing budget sits before you, and whether you’re a Managing Director, Chief Marketing Officer, or Marketing Executive, may we offer you our skills in helping you figure out what is the best way to spend it to reach your goals? We’re not here to spend your money with no thought to the outcome.

Not only do we want to help you demonstrate your brilliance and high return on investment to your boss. We also want each pound you spend on marketing to make you more in return...

...by successfully communicating with your customer, pressing the right buttons and bringing in sales, creating the success you’re looking for. 

If any of this resonates or you want to find out a bit more, do get in touch.