Although many new business people believe that marketing and branding are the same thing, sophisticated and established business people understand the subtle nuances. Having a successful branding effort over the long term is a great way to reduce your expenditures across the board, leaving more of your revenues available to put towards expansion as well as product research and development.

Brand guidance is your one-stop shop to long-term viability. Strategic brand guidance must be practiced alongside your other marketing efforts in order to be most effective, and the best strategic brand guidance agencies will offer a hybrid program that will create a full campaign for you. Here are just a few of the most important things that you should know about your strategic brand guidance.

– What exactly is strategic brand guidance?

Strategic brand guidance can be defined as a long term strategy that is geared towards solidifying the presence of a business among the people of its target market. The best example of any strategic brand guidance is the “verbing” of a noun as in the case of Xerox. Although Xerox is the name of a corporation, the word “xerox” means “make a copy” to the average person on the street. The brand Xerox is so inculcated into daily society that the company name has become a verb in the general lexicon. This virtually ensures the continued presence of the brand in the market no matter who else tries to enter.

Not all great brands will become a verb. For instance, Nike simply does not lend itself to becoming a word of that sort. However, Nike is another example of great strategic brand guidance – its “swoosh” logo has been associated with achievement for the past few decades. Its close resemblance to the checkmark notwithstanding, the average person on the street has been known to say that the swoosh means “getting things done” in past marketing studies.

Strategic guidance of your brand means immediate recognition of your product, logo, business name or slogan with a positive feeling that will drive a purchase. An agency that specializes in strategic brand guidance will be the liaison between your company and the technologies and industry taste makers that will help to make this happen for your business.

– How can my company improve its branding?

Improvements in branding come over time and with consistent marketing practices. The first improvement in branding will come from creating a message that can stand the test of time. Many companies are not able to create a brand for themselves because the marketing message is dated and will become irrelevant after a few business seasons. Strategic brand guidance will give your efforts more of a timeless quality, allowing you to create a marketing campaign that can last for a few decades rather than a few quarters.

Branding improvements also come as you improve the separate parts of your campaign. Everything down to the individual assets on your website has the ability to affect your branding in a positive or a negative way. Learning about meta tags, schema standards and keyword structure can work marvels in your overall branding, but only if it is connected to a larger strategy that permeates your entire marketing campaign. It can be quite difficult to see the forest and the trees at the same time, but this is exactly what a strategic plan guidance agency is there to help you do.

Finally, the branding efforts of most companies can be improved by connecting online efforts to off-line efforts. Too often, new business owners present a completely different portrait of themselves to their online and off-line audiences. For that matter, business owners present a completely different portion of their business in the mobile environment in some cases. These aspects of your marketing campaign must be incorporated together in order to create a brand that will stick in the minds of your target market over a long period of time.

– What can a strategic brand guidance agency do for me?

A strategic brand guidance agency will help your in-house marketing staff see both the forest and the trees at the same time. Providing long-term branding assistance through a detailed effort to create the most value out of each and every asset that you have on your website is a full-time job, to be sure. Combine this with the effort that must be put forward to solidify the look of all the assets, and you have a job that must be handled by a professional. However, we have been able to accomplish this for many of our clients, and we can do the same thing for you.

Give our strategic brand guidance agency a call as soon as possible. We look forward to helping you to create the online and off-line brand that will stick in the minds of your customers for years to come.