When you’re just starting out, investing in branding can seem like an unnecessary expense—a cost that falls into the ‘luxury’ category. However, this is far from the truth. Investing in your brand from the outset can make all the difference to the overall success of your business—and it can actually save you thousands of dollars in the long run.

Let’s look at the three reasons why.

1. Investing in branding helps you to attract more of your preferred target audience

We live in a highly competitive world of authenticity and transparency, where quality connection actually matters. If you want to attract your target market—and lots of them—it makes sense to align your brand with the most important element of your business: your customer.

Develop your brand, get clear on your values and your mission. Dive deep, understand why you exist, how you add value to you customers and most importantly how to communicate this effectively… without even saying a word. This is what investing in branding is all about. There is so much that goes into creating an effective brand—much more than just developing a logo—and unless it’s your area of expertise, you’re likely to fall short. And that’s okay! Just because you’re starting a business doesn’t mean you’re supposed to be able to hold and create every aspect of that business. You’re allowed to lean on other people and businesses for support.

Fact: 59% of global consumers prefer to buy new products from brands familiar to them.

This means that you’ve got work to do to even attract someone’s attention away from brands they may already be familiar with. It also says that investing in online brand awareness is an integral part of your business strategy. For more on this, see our quick guide to building brand awareness on social media.

2. A strong brand will help you to attract talent and team members… the right ones

Yes, investing in branding is about attracting more quality customers, but what about building a great team? The cost of a bad hire for any business is about 30% of their annual salary. With any hire—good or bad—there’s a significant amount of training required to get them up to speed. It is months before you’ll see real profit. But you also have to consider the cultural fit and how they will integrate with the rest of the team. One bad hire can do emotional as well as physical damage to your business and team.

Investing in branding from the outset means that your brand is aligned with your culture, mission, purpose and values. This will be the benchmark for not only attracting some great talent, but also retaining them—whilst also saving you thousands of dollars and possibly any negative fallout from your team.

Fact: A bad hire goes way beyond the financial ramifications.

There is lost productivity, lost time to recruit and train another worker (and the expense of it), the negative impact on staff morale, and the flow on effect to your customers.

3. Working with a branding agency allows you to leverage the knowledge of experts

Branding agencies like ours have the unique ability to work across multiple industries and disciplines. From builders, medical and small business to technology companies. From start-ups to multi-million dollar established businesses. We have the advantage to be able to see what each industry is doing as well as their approach and strategy to marketing. We see what works, what doesn’t work and we use this to guide our clients to help them make the best decisions for their brands. So when you invest in your branding by partnering up with a branding agency, you have access to all of this expertise. Quite frankly, if you don’t work with a branding agency, you’re missing out on business-changing advice.

Fact: it takes 10 seconds for someone to form a first impression

You only get one chance. Make it count by investing in your branding from the outset.

[elementor-template id=”4459″]