Across this blog, I frequently write about the importance of branding your own business, but there’s something else that a great brand strategist can offer – partnership. To partner with a brand strategist is to open up a world of opportunity for yourself and your clients, that doesn’t just end at your visual identity.
A great brand strategist will be able to look at all aspects of your business through the lens of your customer, and adding this strength to your own services can help propel your offering to new heights.
What can a brand strategist do for your clients?
Partnering with a brand strategist brings a host of benefits to your business and your clients. As brand becomes increasingly important to consumers, being able to make decisions for your clients that are on brand is crucial to success.
A brand strategist can help your clients research their market and add value to their propositions, making it easier for you to weave your services into their offering. This means better results and an increased chance of repeat and continued business. With their ability to understand a brand’s unique offering, a brand strategist can also help your clients to differentiate themselves in the market. Again, this can help ensure that they are being heard by their ideal customers, increasing the potential for success.
What a brand strategist brings to your offering is mainly about insights. This makes it easier for you to show how your actions will positively affect your clients.
In addition, brand strategists can be excellent for bringing extra business your way. They will often create strategic partnerships and give work to trusted partners. As they work closely with understanding a brand’s needs, they are often in a prime position to suggest improvements and strategies that may require your services – and are trusted to bring in the right talent. By partnering with a brand strategist, you put yourself in a great position to be thought of first when your services are required.
Who can benefit from partnering with a brand strategist?
There’s a range of businesses that can gain loads from partnering up with a brand strategist. Here’s just a couple of examples:
Business coaches/strategists
A pretty obvious one to begin with, business coaches and strategists can get some great value for their clients out of partnering with a brand strategist. Brand can be a particularly murky science (which is why it looks like sorcery to the uninitiated), and having someone who can dispel the myths on hand can help your clients achieve the results they’re after. You can use a brand strategist’s skills to help your client find their ideal market, position themselves better and work on perfecting their messaging, leaving you to focus on the nuts and bolts of refining their business. Brand strategists will often need help with improving all aspects of a business, and will pass on clients who require business development.
Marketers/Social Media
While there is some crossover with services, it’s not often that marketers work purely with brand, and vice versa. Having a brand strategist on hand can help marketers to bring their clients clarity on their identity, and align this to their ideal clients and messaging. A brand strategist can help marketers through workshopping with clients, getting to the core mission and values that the marketer can use to better reach a client’s audience.
Designers/Creatives
Brand strategists can be a great help to designers and creatives – especially if a client doesn’t have a clear idea of who they are or what they want! A brand strategist’s ability to find what a brand is and who it should be resonating with can make it easier to create briefs and design with the target in mind.
Brand strategists ALWAYS need creatives to help implement their creative ideas, so will often pass work on to graphic designers, videographers, photographers etc, making them a great source of incoming work. You can also guarantee that a brand strategist will have thought about the client’s needs before bringing you in, making your job less stressful as a good plan and brief should already be in place.
Lifestyle & Wellness
A slightly more obscure partnership opportunity, but one that can be great for all parties. Life coaches and therapists working with business owners can get some help from brand strategists working with personal brands. The strategist can align brand values to personal values to assist in creating a happier work/life balance.
Other businesses who can create meaningful partnerships include wealth managers and financial advisers,
How to partner with a brand strategist
So now you know why it’s so great to partner with a brand strategist, how do you go about doing it? Fortunately, brand strategists tend to see the inherent value in partnerships and are pretty open to building them. So get to know one and see if you can work well together.
The one big piece of advice I can give is to partner with a strategist that compliments your values. Take the time to get to know the strategist, their way of working and personality, and make sure that your values are aligned. This not only makes for a better relationship, but also makes sure you’re giving mutual clients complimenting advice and services. You can be damn sure that your brand strategist will be doing this, so make sure the partnership works both ways!
Creating a partnership with a brand strategist can be mutually beneficial, creating bigger and better opportunities for both parties. It’s something you’ll want to take time to nurture, but has the potential to grow into a fruitful arrangement that helps you and your clients.
Are you ready to partner up? Book in for a free discussion here and see if we’re a good match.
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