- Branding
The Value of Branding: How Do You Know If It’s Working?
We once received a question from a prospective client that gets right to the heart of something many business owners wonder about: the value of branding.
Basically: “How will I know it’s working?”
It’s a fair question. When you’re investing in your business, you want to know what you’re getting in return.
The challenge is that the value of branding isn’t always as simple to measure as the return on an ad campaign or the number of sales generated by a promotion. Some results can absolutely be measured. Others show up in how clearly people understand your business, how confidently you communicate what makes you different, and how consistently your brand shows up in the world.
So, how do you know if your branding is working?
You know your brand is working when the right people understand your business more quickly, trust it more readily, and are more likely to choose, remember and recommend it.
And who are the “right people”? Knowing the answer to that is a crucial part of building a strong brand and just as important when measuring its success.
The signs will be different for every business, which is why understanding your audience and what you want your branding to accomplish matters so much.
What is the value of branding for a business?
A strong brand helps shape how people perceive your business. At Steady, we define your brand as how others perceive you. Branding is the work you do to influence that perception, aligning what you want people to think about your business with what they actually think.
A logo, colour palette and typography are all important parts of that, but branding goes much deeper. We dig into this distinction in our article Logo vs. Branding: What Does Your Business Actually Need?
When your branding is working well, it should make your business easier to understand, recognize, trust and remember. It should also make it easier for you to communicate consistently and make decisions about where your business is going.
Over the course of hundreds of client projects, we’ve seen those benefits show up again and again. We tend to group them into what we affectionately call the 5 C’s of branding: clarity, confidence, consistency, connection and credibility.
What are the 5 C’s of strong branding?
Clarity
The process of brand development forces you to think carefully about who you are, what you do, who you serve and what makes your business meaningfully different.
That clarity extends beyond your brand colours or website. A stronger understanding of your mission, vision, values and positioning can help guide everything in your business, from marketing and hiring to new services and bigger business decisions.
Confidence
It’s much easier to talk about your business when you understand exactly what makes it valuable.
We regularly see clients come out of the branding process better equipped to explain what they do, who they do it for and why someone should choose them. That confidence can affect sales conversations, networking, referrals and even the kinds of opportunities a business is willing to pursue.
If you’ve ever frozen up when someone asks what your business does and it’s suddenly time to deliver your “elevator pitch,” working on your brand might help.
If relationships are currency, confidence is the key to the vault.
Consistency
Consistency might be the most powerful of the five C’s. It’s how you build understanding and recognition over time. If your logo, messaging or overall look keeps changing, you make it harder for people to remember who you are.
Strong branding gives everyone involved in your business a shared foundation to work from. Instead of reinventing the wheel every time you create a presentation, social post, advertisement, proposal or new page on your website, you have an established visual and verbal system to work from.
It can also save you money. Your designer doesn’t need to reinvent your visual language every time you need something new. The system already exists. Their job is to apply it well.
That consistency makes your business more recognizable and reassures people that they’re dealing with the same professional organization wherever they encounter you. The value of that cannot be understated.
Connection
Good branding isn’t about appealing to everybody. It’s actually the opposite. Impactful branding creates a stronger connection with the people you genuinely want to reach.
When your brand reflects your values, personality and point of view, the right clients or customers have more reasons to identify with it. And the people who aren’t a good fit will just keep walking. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
A stronger connection with the right audience can influence whether someone signs up, makes a purchase, gets in touch or recommends you to somebody else.
Credibility
People make judgments about businesses quickly, and those judgments aren’t always entirely rational. A disorganized or incoherent brand can lose credibility before you even get the chance to explain yourself.
Branding isn’t the only thing that creates credibility. You still have to deliver a great product or service. But the way your business presents itself can either reinforce that reputation or undermine it.
A thoughtful, professional and consistent brand helps the outside of your business live up to the quality of what’s happening on the inside.
What tangible results can good branding produce?
This is where things get more complicated.
We would love to tell you that every dollar spent on branding produces five dollars in return. It would certainly make branding easier to sell, but that’s not how it works.
There are too many other factors outside our control influencing the performance of a business to make that kind of guarantee. Marketing, pricing, customer service, competition, economic conditions and the quality of your actual product or service all play a role.
What branding can do is create better conditions for growth.
Depending on the goals, that growth might eventually show up as:
- more qualified inquiries or sales
- increased repeat business
- more referrals
- stronger website engagement
- increased branded search
- better social engagement
- improved customer recognition
- more positive unsolicited feedback
- easier sales conversations
a greater ability to attract the kinds of clients, customers or employees you want
The important part is determining which of those outcomes actually matter to your business.
How can you measure whether branding is working?
Start by asking a deceptively simple question:
What problem are we trying to solve?
Maybe your business has changed but your existing brand no longer reflects what you’ve become. Perhaps people don’t understand what you offer, or you’re attracting the wrong type of client. Maybe your business has grown considerably but still looks like the tiny startup you were five years ago. Or maybe your brand is simply inconsistent, with everyone on your team communicating something slightly different.
The clearer you are about the problem at the beginning, the easier it becomes to decide what success should look like.
From there, you can establish relevant benchmarks before launching your new or refreshed brand. Depending on your goals, you might track things like website traffic, inquiries, conversion rates, sales, repeat business, referrals, foot traffic, branded searches, social engagement or media mentions.
There are also useful signs that aren’t quite as easy to put into a spreadsheet. Are better-fit clients approaching you? Are people understanding what you do without needing a five-minute explanation? Is your team finding it easier to create materials that look and sound like they came from the same company? Are existing customers commenting positively on the change? Those signals matter too.
How long does it take for branding to show results?
Some benefits of branding can appear almost immediately. Others take time.
A new identity might instantly give your team more confidence or make your business look more appropriate for the market you’re trying to reach. A redesigned website might make your offer easier to understand from the day it launches. Sales might even increase right away. Nice!
Recognition, reputation, loyalty and referrals are different. Those are built through repeated positive experiences with your brand over months and years.
That’s another reason branding shouldn’t be treated as a one-time cosmetic exercise. The identity is the foundation. Its real value grows as you use it consistently.
Does branding guarantee business growth?
No, and you should be suspicious of anyone who tells you otherwise. Branding can’t rescue a bad product, fix poor customer service or guarantee that people will buy something they don’t actually want.
What it can do is help a good business communicate its value more clearly and consistently. One of the goals of the Steady branding process is to give our clients a much better understanding of their own brand. That means they’re better equipped to recognize what fits, what doesn’t and how to make future decisions without constantly starting from scratch.
It’s a bit like the old saying about teaching someone to fish. We don’t just want to hand you a nice-looking brand that starts to erode the day the project ends. We want you to understand your brand well enough to protect it, use it consistently and build on it over time.
So, is branding worth the investment?
The value of branding comes from a combination of tangible business results and less tangible improvements that compound over time.
More sales or inquiries are certainly valuable. But so are clearer positioning, increased confidence, stronger customer connections, greater consistency and a reputation people recognize and trust.
After working on hundreds of branding and design projects, we’ve seen how powerful that combination can be.
The best branding doesn’t just make a business look better. It helps the business understand itself better, communicate more clearly and show up more confidently for the people it wants to reach.
And remember the prospective client who asked us at the beginning, “How will I know it’s working?”
After we worked together, she sent us this:
Her new branding and website were attracting “a lot more inquiries from the right kind of clients.”
We couldn’t ask for a much better answer to her original question.
Ready to go Steady?
If you’re questioning whether your current brand still reflects your business, or you’re trying to figure out what a stronger brand could help you accomplish, that’s a good place to start.
Our branding process is built around understanding where your business is now, where you want it to go, and what needs to change to help you get there.