Here’s the thing: No matter your level of expertise on the Australian tax systems or how reliable your services are, if prospective clients do not see your business that way, your BAS business will lose out on clients, revenue and profits.
When asked about branding, logos, fonts, and slogans come to mind first for many people. But that’s not all there is to it. Nowadays, professional services firms - even those in niche markets like BAS agents - should allocate time, resources, and energy to developing a brand supported by strong digital marketing strategies.
This article will provide you with an overview of branding and its role in the growth and stability of your BAS business. You will find here several strategies on how to build a solid brand in a world where customers respond to what they can find online more than ever. As further guidance, we will also share a selection of success stories of industry leaders who best demonstrate the advantages of establishing a brand for their respective organisations.
What is Branding?
Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room. - Jeff Bezos
In a nutshell, a brand refers to how others recognise a particular person or business. It’s a part of your identity based on other people’s feelings and expectations, along with various factors, such as the names, colours, and even words associated with you or your business. Those tangible and intangible elements combine to form your existence from someone else’s perspective.
A professional services firm’s brand does not define its vision or mission. Neither does it sets the overall direction or targets. Instead, it influences the perception and visibility your company has, not only to your target market groups but to anyone who comes across your business, including suppliers and vendors, industry peers, government bodies, and the workforce, may they be past, current, or future members of your team.
Therefore, building a brand for your BAS business focuses on two aspects: shaping your desired reputation and employing the right marketing strategies to promote your brand consistently.
As you may have noticed, the process is not limited to the earlier phases of setting up your firm. You establish a brand during those early days, embody it wherever possible, and review it regularly to ensure it is still aligned with your business goals.
Why is Branding Important?
Branding can make or break an entire organisation. It largely determines how others regard your identity and value.
When done well, branding can help your company become more appealing in the eyes of customers, investors and other stakeholders. On the other hand, failure to establish and maintain your brand can confuse others about what you are trying to offer and achieve, thus inadvertently driving them away for good.
A brand may also increase your business value in many ways. By leveraging your expertise and influence in the industry, your brand becomes an intangible asset for your business, for it enhances your ability to:
- Generate leads and convert them into actual paying customers;
- Foster a positive and engaging community with your desired client demographic groups;
- Provide a fulfilling working environment for employees who feel proud to be part of your team; and
- Stay relevant in the market despite the introduction of other players and alternatives.
So, while it’s easy to understand why some people reduce branding to its flashier elements, entrepreneurs should refrain from making the same mistakes. After all, the far-reaching advantages of effective brand building outweigh the costs and risk it poses to your business.
Personal vs Corporate Branding: What is the Difference?
As the terms suggest, their primary difference between ‘personal and ‘corporate’ branding lies in their respective scope. While the two are not mutually exclusive, both are critical to your success in the professional services industry, especially when others can feel the organic connection between your personal and corporate branding.
In businesses, a personal brand refers to what people think of an individual - typically, the organisation’s leader or owner - based on different attributes, such as:
- Educational background
- Skills and talent
- Awards and formal recognitions received
- Known attitudes, beliefs, and interests
Your business’s credibility can receive a hefty boost depending on how well you have crafted your personal brand. If potential customers can recognise your qualifications as a BAS expert, they will likely feel encouraged to get in touch and learn more about your services. Ultimately, it establishes and nourishes the seeds of trust and confidence, which are essential in this line of business.
A corporate brand pertains to how your business presents itself. Building it is more complex than personal branding because your organisation must cooperate in developing, implementing and protecting the brand.
Corporate branding efforts must consider the following aspects of a business:
- What types of products or services will be offered
- Who your ideal customers are
- Where your position will be in the market
- How you intend to stand out from your competitors
The principles behind a solid corporate brand bear similarities with a personal brand. The vision and mission of your company should serve as its foundation. It should tell a story of how the business came to be while reflecting its core competencies and passions. Those who have excelled at this have also found ways to showcase their internal culture and business personality, thus providing a holistic experience to the customers.
As mentioned earlier, your personal branding and corporate branding must exist in harmony together. Its importance goes double for those providing professional services.
Several firms have gone to great lengths to be more relatable to their target audience. A few have also attained the status of thought leaders, which helped strengthen the authority of their companies in their chosen niche.
Why Branding is Essential for a Successful BAS Business
Many BAS agents and professional services firms are sceptical towards branding and marketing.
Some BAS firms believe that traditional marketing methods work best for B2B service providers like them. From their perspective, branding is just an expensive marketing technique that serves big companies more than anybody else.
However, as we have pointed out earlier, this limited point of view will keep you from generating good word of mouth and encouraging others to trust you for their BAS needs. You can run ads all day, every day. But if the market cannot grasp who you are and what you can do for them, you’ll waste your time, money, and effort.
Conversely, building a brand can lead to the success of your BAS business in the following ways:
Makes you stand out from the crowd
Good branding will help you cut through the noise of an incredibly competitive profession.
The lower barrier of entry offered by most digital marketing strategies has prompted several professional service companies to go online and make themselves more visible and accessible than ever.
This trend gives prospective customers access to more options with just a few clicks of their fingers. Unfortunately for businesses, though, this tightens the competition even more.
If your firm does not have a recognisable brand, chances are, you will be overlooked or ignored entirely. Since brand building involves highlighting the best aspects of your business identity, you can show why potential customers should pick you, even when compared to larger, more established rivals.
Boosts lead generation
A brand reflects your proposition to the target audience of your business. It helps set their expectations on what kind of services you can provide them. Without branding, other people would have to dig deeper to know more, but there is no guarantee that they would do so, especially if you are a relatively unknown player in the industry.
It should be noted that your branding initiatives should appear relatable to your desired clientele. It must also match your actual business practices and attitudes. Suppose your brand highlights your personal approach towards customers. In that case, prospective customers might be turned off if all they can find about your business are general information about BAS services and procedures.
Helps in closing deals more effectively
Though a brand does not automatically convert leads to sales, it can make your business feel more credible and trustworthy. Solid and consistent branding tells others you genuinely know what you are doing. It also proves that you can commit to the ideals they initially found attractive when they first encountered your business.
Without trust, B2B firms will find it hard to convince potential customers that they have the right solutions. And while some businesses manage to secure accounts without relying on a strong brand, they usually face more hurdles to achieve the same results as their peers with powerful brands.
Transforms familiarity into loyalty
A recent study on consumer behaviour indicates that nearly half of the respondents would pay more for products and services offered by the brands they trusted. This shows us that efforts to create and nurture long-lasting customer relationships will yield compounding rewards for businesses.
Familiarity due to regular exposure can only take you so far, especially in the professional services industry. You must strive for customer loyalty to ensure the longevity and profitability of your business. With this, you can retain more clients for a longer period. Amassing loyal customers will also help convince more people that you are worth their time and money.
Consistent branding can foster a sense of belongingness within your clientele. Over time, your efforts will increase their loyalty to the company, leading to its growth and further development.
Anchors your team
When presented with a choice, many prefer to work with people sharing similar values. By embodying a brand, you can clearly lay out your position in relevant issues and causes before them. And if they find you agreeable, they can find more effective ways to assist your business in achieving its vision and objectives.
Like customers, staying true to your brand will make employees feel loyal to the company. In an industry where the workforce is one of the critical assets, keeping your team members motivated and engaged will take your firm to greater heights.
How to Build a Brand for a BAS Business
Brand building doesn’t produce results overnight. Instead, defining and integrating the brand with your overall marketing strategies requires a step-by-step process.
Here’s a rundown of how to do it properly:
Step 1: Assess the current situation
Whether you intend to start from scratch or perform a rebrand, you should look carefully at the present status of your BAS business. Evaluate how you are performing in terms of achieving your high-level goals. Check how well or poorly you are doing compared to your competitors.
Pay extra attention to your current appeal in the market. Are you connecting with your target demographics? Do you have repeat or long-term customers? Write everything down since the results of these assessments serve as the starting point of your brand-building efforts.
Step 2: Identify your target audience
“If you market to everyone, you’ll sell to no one”.
Marketing rarely works when you are aiming at everyone. The most effective strategies demand your concentration on a particular group, thereby allowing better resource management and performance tracking.
Your target audience can be determined through market research. Create a shortlist and then narrow it down by considering how aligned they are with your business goals related to growth and profitability.
For example, many startup BAS firms go for other small businesses in the area. You can take a step further by focusing only on other professional service providers without the workforce or expertise to handle their respective taxes or produce financial reports.
Step 3: Create a buyer persona
A buyer persona is a branding tool used to define the target audience’s characteristics. In most cases, it involves creating an individual possessing the traits typical of an existing or prospective customer. This technique also calls for a list of the individual’s needs, preferences, motivations, goals and regular day-to-day activities.
For example, you may create a buyer persona named Greg. He owns a security agency that provides security personnel for events held in the local venues. Aside from this group of employees, his professional team consists only of him and an HR officer specialising in hiring and recruitment.
Based on Greg’s limited resources and the demanding nature of his clients, your BAS firm can offer various solutions to his agency - for example, bookkeeping, payroll processing, and GST calculations, to name a few.
Step 4: Determine your market positioning and messaging strategy
When you truly understand your target audience, you should consolidate your insights into statements highlighting your unique value propositions to your prospective clients.
Such positioning statements for a BAS firm can take different forms. For instance, some professional services companies focus on niche requirements since there is an apparent demand, but no other existing firms can handle them well. Others take a cost-driven approach by offering the same services as others at a significantly lower rate.
Does your BAS agency do something cheaper than others? Are you able to offer a particular service that nobody else can, or can you do it better in some way?
Try to limit yourself to a maximum of five statements. Make sure you can carry out such promises later, but don’t settle for anything that doesn’t challenge you.
Each statement should also come with its messaging strategy dedicated to every target audience of your company. To do this, you must determine your key messages, raise probable objections your audience might have, and craft your responses supported with proof points, such as client testimonials, case studies or statistics.
Step 5: Select the right marketing strategies
For professional services companies, the most recommended strategies include but are not limited to:
- Content marketing
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing
- SEO
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads
These online marketing strategies work best in increasing your brand’s visibility and reinforcing your authority in BAS services. You don’t have to employ every method, though. Review the pros and cons of each option and determine which ones fit your marketing objectives and budget.
You can also combine marketing strategies. For instance, creating a website will provide you with a channel to draw attention to your business through SEO and strengthen your credibility by adding a blog section where you will post free or premium content regularly. The website may also have a page where visitors can sign up for your email newsletters.
Regardless of your choices, we highly recommend developing a brand style using logos, colour schemes, and taglines, among other visual elements. This will help your audience form the connections between your branding and marketing efforts, thus making your BAS company more recognisable and memorable.
Step 6: Launch with a marketing toolkit
When satisfied with your plans, you must gear up for the launch. A marketing toolkit is essential in implementing your selected strategies. It varies depending on how you want to present the new branding for your BAS business.
A toolkit can be as simple as a one-page illustrated profile or a short video containing critical details about your company. This may include a brief description of your firm, the team behind it, your services offered and your contact information. We suggest creating these in digital forms so you can post them on your website, social media pages, and online communities frequented by your desired audience.
Step 7: Track and review
Building a brand doesn’t end with its launch. You must also monitor how it affects your business using key metrics, such as website traffic volume or the number of leads generated. Compare the reported figures versus your targets to adjust your plan or methods accordingly.
Case Studies of Professional Services Firms with Powerful Brands
The importance of brand-driven business strategies has been widely recognised by several companies in the professional services industry.
Ogilvy
One prominent example is the so-called “organisational re-founding” of the advertising titan Ogilvy, formerly Ogilvy & Mather. The primary goal of this rebranding project is to reflect the significant modernisation of the company brought about by the age of data-heavy digital marketing approaches.
To achieve this, Ogilvy CEO John Seifert implemented the following changes:
- Consolidation of their various services to form an “integrated enterprise agenda”
- Renaming the company name to simply “Ogilvy”
- Adopting a new tagline: “Making brands matter”
- Launching a slicker website with minimalist aesthetics
- Publishing a video depicting the transitions that the company has undergone over the years and where they plan to go next
You can read more here: Ogilvy ditches founder’s signature as part of ‘re-founding’
While you might think that the choice to focus on branding is a no-brainer for advertising companies like Ogilvy, the same can be said for the likes of Deloitte, one of the largest professional services companies in the world.
Deloitte
Deloitte specialises in accounting, finance, tax, and risk management. When its leadership recognised the need to keep up with the changing times, it engaged in an enterprise-wide transformation to prove to its target audience that it would always be one step ahead of the game.
Case in point, the company’s arm in Australia launched the “Look Again” marketing campaign in 2016, which aimed to reintroduce the Deloitte brand. Deloitte also went ahead with another large-scale marketing effort in Europe to demonstrate their positive impacts on the company’s clientele.
Deloitte did not engage in a complete brand overhaul like Ogilvy did. Nevertheless, their efforts to build their branding allowed them to regularly remind their internal and external audiences of their unique brand identity and the significant value of its professional services.
The Bottom Line
Branding for your BAS business is a question of when - not if. There is no doubt that professional services firms benefit significantly from having a powerful brand. From generating leads to closing deals, from boosting your visibility to gaining customer loyalty, embracing branding strategies as part of your business’s core will help you achieve your goals as an expert and provider of accounting, taxes, and financial services.
So rather than wondering if establishing a brand is the right call for your BAS firm, start building your brand today. The process will take a lot of resources and hard work, so it’s best to begin planning and preparing your branding strategy now.