Revising your organisational goals and ensuring business alignment is the first step in any brand or website project. Here’s why.

Does thinking about a brand revamp or website redesign conjure images of sexy logos and flashy web pages for you? We get it. Marketing is often portrayed as a world inhabited by cool creative types who spend all day coming up with catchy taglines between copious cups of coffee and multiple meetings.

The thing is, marketing is far more practical and pragmatic than that (even if the amount of coffee consumed or meetings held isn’t all that far off the mark). At its core, marketing is rooted in the science of human psychology. It’s about knowing how to present information to someone to inspire action, harnessing the senses to create emotion.

Just think about when you go to buy a pair of Nike from the shops. You don’t buy them because of what the sales person says. You want to buy them because Nike’s marketing messages and imagery have made you feel good about yourself and who you can become.

Branding and web design are highly creative processes. But they are rooted in deep research and hard data. Before designing a logo or creating a new website, marketing agencies follow a detailed process to understand your business, your organisational goals and what you need from the project. 

It’s far from the typical picture of marketing - but it’s essential for any successful project. Because, once you’ve got your marketing aligned with your customers it can be the number one revenue generator in your business. 

The typical 5-step brand process

Step 1: Business alignment - understanding your organisational goals, your current messaging and what you need from the brand/website redesign process.

Step 2: Brand strategy - harnessing data and research to identify your market position and your ideal audience to craft an effective customer-centric narrative.

Step 3: Brand design - discovering your visual identity and creating brand elements to capture the essence of your business and communicate your value to customers.

Step 4: Website creation - developing a modern responsive website which educates and demonstrates your solution to drive traffic and conversions.

Step 5: Go-to-market support - providing ongoing targeted support to maintain your website, leverage your updated assets and create additional resources.

Why business alignment is key to brand success

So, why does a ‘simple’ branding or website process need to dig so deep into your business? It comes down to ensuring every level of your business is aligned with your organisational goals - including people, culture and Business As Usual (BAU) processes.

Several studies link strategic alignment to improved organisational performance. In one, the level of strategic alignment accounted for up to 80% of the difference in performance between organisations. In another, 51% of the difference was explained by strategic alignment, with another 38% linked to staff consensus and buy-in.  

Business alignment not only drives business performance - it’s also crucial to any successful brand and website project. Ensuring a strong link between your business, brand and organisational goals makes it easier for marketing agencies to:

• identify your target audience

• understand your point of difference

• know how you deliver value

• see where you fit in the market.

Reviewing business alignment with your organisational goals is no quick research project based on a single interview. It’s an organic process where tough questions are asked to gain clarity - not only to benefit the agency but to provide crucial insights for your business too.

Anything less? Well frankly, you’ll be wasting your investment. 

The risk of skipping this step in your brand process

Being the CEO or owner of a business means the buck stops with you. While you may have people in the business who help you with long-term strategies, you are often the voice of reason with no one else to answer to. This can sometimes stop you from identifying potential steps that could benefit your business or new opportunities for growth.

The other big risk of rushing past business alignment is not having all your people on the same page. If your sales team, other key staff and leadership team have different views about the direction of the business, it’s impossible to create cohesive messaging or secure their buy-in to a rebrand or re-design process. 

With no preconceptions or any stake in the business, getting a marketing agency onboard to review your current state of strategic alignment can be a powerful move. Unlike you and your team, they are free to ask the tough questions, dig into the logic, and use hard data to analyse what’s going on, often resulting in fresh thinking and new opportunities.

It’s all in the questions

This stage isn’t about finding all the answers - it’s about asking all the right questions by asking customer-facing & management teams their thoughts on what the company stands for, why customers buy and stay with them and about the future direction of the business. 

While you might discover your people have a very different view to your management team, you may also uncover insights to spark internal discussion and drive innovation. Even if your business is in alignment, this is a valuable exercise to re-confirm your strategic direction.

Obviously, if your business is not aligned with your organisational goals or if your people are not on the same page, there’s no point moving further in the branding process until you sort this out. 

Who should be involved in this stage?

Your leadership team (C-suite) will ultimately steer the process but it helps to get input from as many people in the organisation as possible. This doesn’t mean having everyone in the one meeting room (causing mass confusion). Internal surveys can be a good way to take the pulse of your business and gain insight to how your people see themselves.

Something else to consider - who will your point person be? Ideally this should be the CEO, but that’s not always possible. If you need to delegate this position, nominate someone who lives and breathes your company, not a new hire. In working with the agency, they will need to independently make decisions that will affect the future direction of your business.

5 key questions to assess business alignment

Have you revised your organisational goals? 

When was the last time you took the time to review your organisational goals? An effective branding/website project can only succeed if everyone shares the same organisational goals and is actively working towards them. This feeds into the essence of your brand - without clarity, how do you even know what you stand for or how you help the market?

Have you reviewed your sales figures? 

Can you identify your high-performing products or services? Are you aware of any issues? Hard data provides a solid foundation for the entire process - and you need to be okay sharing your sales data with your agency as this highlights what is (and what isn’t) resonating with your market. If your agency is not asking for sales data, you’re working with the wrong team because guesswork won’t help you understand your current position, tell you where you need to be or guide the way forward.

Are your current strategies working? 

If not, which ones are misfiring? Are people finding your website but not sticking around? Is your LinkedIn outreach attracting zero leads? Are you even reaching your target audience? This question often uncovers core branding issues that you may not even know exist. For instance, visitors may struggle to understand your offering or fail to see what sets your business apart from your competitors. 

Are there any new market opportunities? 

This comes back to a fundamental question - how do you fit in the market? What sets you apart from the competition? What’s your value proposition? A fresh set of eyes can help you see a new approach and identify opportunities to adapt your offering to meet the changing needs of consumers that still align with your overall organisational goals.

Do you need staff buy-in to the project? 

This is one of the most important (yet underrated) questions around business alignment. Who needs a seat at the table and who are the main stakeholders? Identifying and including these people from the beginning results in a better result as you’re not just relying on the input of management - you’re drawing on the expertise of your entire team.

The benefits of getting this stage right

The most obvious benefit is to your business. With the big questions on the table, you gain more insight to drive future growth. It’s also a great way to understand the challenges facing each team and how you can work together to address them.

For your chosen marketing agency, this process lays the foundations for your brand or website project, uncovering:

• what you do 

• who your customers are

• what you provide your customers

• your history

• your business ethics

• the personal ethics of your leadership team

• who is the face of the business

• who your competitors are

• what industries you work in

• your technology

• and so much more. 

To get the most from this stage of the process, it’s best to choose an agency who can easily understand all of this, without the need to constantly simplify everything for them (especially when it comes to your technology).

How this stage works (including your role)

Each marketing agency will take a slightly different approach to this initial stage of the branding and website process. However, most will follow a similar format.

1. Information gathering - this is when the agency will ask you to supply sales data, website metrics, ad campaign insights and information about your current pipeline (or sales and marketing) process. 

2. Questionnaire - key people in your business will be asked questions to identify organisational goals and measure current business alignment. You may also want to send out a smaller questionnaire to your entire organisation.

3. Workshop(s) - stakeholders will be invited to a guided workshop where the agency will dig deeper into the information already provided.

4. Presentation - the agency will present their findings to the organisation, discuss the reasoning and work through any revisions.

As you’d imagine, data is collected along the way to help the agency develop their findings and recommendations, including:

• SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats).

• List of current target sectors, including basic analysis.

• Examples of existing messaging used by different staff across the organisation.

• Current answers to what, who, why (What do you do? Who do you do that for? Why does what you do matter to them?)

• List of unknowns (questions that don’t yet have an answer and need to be worked through).

Your input in this first stage is vital

Marketing agencies are very clever - but they can’t read minds. The success of your branding and website project relies on how open and active you are in this vital first stage. 

To ensure your agency has all the information they need, ensure you:

• provide all requested information

• be available for meetings and workshops

• allow your people to provide their input

• be prepared to answer some deep questions.

The more information and insights your marketing agency can get, the better the result will be for your brand and website project.

Are you ready to start your branding and website journey?

Multiverse are experts in transforming intricate tech concepts into clear, enticing messages, paired with compelling branding and web design. If your technology business is ready to take the next step, we’re here to guide the way.

LET’S TALK