How to Hire Brand Strategists: Building Brands That Resonate and Endure

How to Hire Brand Strategists: Building Brands That Resonate and Endure

• Asynchronous tools: Slack or Microsoft Teams for quick messages and team discussions; Asana, Trello, or ClickUp for project management and task tracking; Google Drive or Dropbox for document sharing and collaboration.
• Synchronous tools: Zoom or Google Meet for video calls, workshops, and weekly check-ins.
• Scheduled meetings: Regular, concise meetings are crucial. Establish a consistent cadence for check-ins (e.g., a weekly 30-minute video call), ensuring all relevant stakeholders are present. Be mindful of time zones when scheduling, especially if your team is globally distributed, like a team in Buenos Aires and another in Tokyo.
• Documentation: Encourage thorough documentation of decisions, strategies, and guidelines. This ensures that information is accessible to all team members, regardless of when or where they are working. Clearly communicate your preferred channels and expectations for response times. Proactive and transparent communication helps the strategist feel connected and informed, preventing isolation common in remote settings. ### Facilitating Collaboration and Feedback Loops A brand strategist needs to collaborate with various departments, often remotely, to gather insights and ensure buy-in. Facilitate this by:
• Introducing them to key stakeholders: Ensure they have direct access to relevant team members (e.g., marketing lead, product manager, sales director).
• Scheduling dedicated workshops: Even remotely, interactive workshops can be held via video conferencing to brainstorm ideas, gather feedback, and align on strategic directions. Use digital whiteboards or collaboration tools like Miro or Mural.
• Establishing clear feedback loops: Define how and when feedback will be provided, ensuring it's constructive, specific, and actionable. Avoid scattered feedback; centralize it through your project management tool or designated documents. Regular stakeholder reviews at key project milestones are essential to keep everyone aligned.
• Encouraging open dialogue: Foster an environment where the strategist feels comfortable challenging assumptions and offering honest insights, and where your team feels comfortable asking questions and providing input. Remote team building activities, even small ones, can help create a more collaborative atmosphere. Find more ideas in our remote culture guide. ### Onboarding and Providing Necessary Resources A smooth onboarding process is crucial. Provide the brand strategist with all the necessary resources and access they need to do their job effectively. This includes:
• Access to relevant internal documents (e.g., business plan, market research, existing marketing materials, past brand audits).
• Access to your brand assets (logos, style guides, photography libraries).
• Access to your analytics platforms (e.g., Google Analytics, CRM data, social media insights).
• Introductions to the company's tech stack and preferred communication tools.
• A clear understanding of your company's history, values, and mission.
• An introduction to the current brand perception, including any challenges or pain points you've identified. Treat your brand strategist as an integral part of your team, even if they are a contractor or agency. The more informed and supported they feel, the more effective they will be in building a brand that truly resonates with your audience and endures over time. ## Measuring the Impact of Your Brand Strategy Hiring a brand strategist is an investment, and like any investment, it's crucial to measure its return. While some brand-building effects are intangible, many aspects can and should be quantified. Measuring impact helps you understand the effectiveness of the strategy and justify your investment. It also allows for continuous improvement, ensuring your brand remains relevant and strong. ### Defining Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) Before embarking on any brand strategy project, work with your strategist to define clear and measurable Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These KPIs should align directly with your brand objectives. Examples include:
• Brand Awareness: Metrics like website traffic, social media reach/impressions, brand mentions (monitored via listening tools), search volume for your brand name, and survey data on brand recognition.
• Brand Perception/Sentiment: Social media sentiment analysis, customer reviews and testimonials, brand recall (through surveys), media coverage quality, and employee feedback on employer brand.
• Customer Loyalty/Advocacy: Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer retention rates, repeat purchase rates, customer lifetime value (CLTV), and referrals.
• Market Share: Increase in your share of your target market.
• Conversion Rates: How effectively your brand attracts and converts leads into customers (e.g., website conversion rates, lead-to-customer conversion).
• Pricing Power: The ability to command higher prices due to the perceived value of your brand.
• Talent Acquisition: Reduction in time-to-hire, increase in qualified applicants, and employee satisfaction rates if employer branding was a goal. It's important to establish baseline metrics before implementing the new strategy so you have a clear point of comparison. For a remote business, this might involve tracking unique visitors to your company's about us page or monitoring engagement on your platform's community forum. ### Conducting Brand Audits and Surveys Regular brand audits are a systematic way to assess the health of your brand. This involves reviewing all brand touchpoints – from your website and social media profiles to customer service interactions and product packaging – to ensure consistency and adherence to brand guidelines. A brand strategist can often lead or guide this audit process. In parallel, brand surveys are invaluable for gathering direct feedback from your target audience. These surveys can gauge awareness, perception, preference, and emotional connection to your brand. Questions might include: "When you think of [your product/service category], what brands come to mind?" or "How would you describe [Your Company] in three words?" Running these surveys periodically allows you to track changes in perception over time and identify areas for improvement. This might include surveying your remote workers to assess their perception of the internal employer brand, which can significantly impact retention and productivity. ### Analyzing Website and Digital Analytics Your website and digital channels provide a wealth of data to measure brand impact.
• Google Analytics (or similar tools): Track metrics like direct traffic (people who type your URL directly, indicating recall), referral traffic (from partner sites, indicating brand mentions), engagement metrics (time on site, bounce rate), and conversion paths. Look for positive trends after brand strategy implementation.
• Social Media Analytics: Monitor follower growth, engagement rates (likes, comments, shares), reach, and sentiment analysis. An increase in positive sentiment and shares suggests your brand messaging is resonating.
• SEO Performance: Increases in branded search queries (e.g., people searching "Your Company's Name" rather than generic keywords) indicate growing brand awareness and recall. A strong brand strategy often indirectly improves SEO by making your content more shareable and authoritative. Our guide on SEO for remote businesses explains how these elements connect. By systematically tracking these digital indicators, you can gain objective insights into your brand's performance and make data-driven adjustments to your strategy. ### Gathering Qualitative Feedback and Anecdotes While quantitative data is crucial, don't underestimate the power of qualitative feedback and anecdotes.
• Customer testimonials and case studies: Gather stories from satisfied customers about how your brand made a difference for them. These provide powerful social proof.
• Sales team feedback: Your sales team is on the front lines. They can provide invaluable insights into how prospective clients perceive your brand, what messaging resonates, and what objections they face.
• Customer service interactions: Analyze customer support tickets and conversations for recurring themes or brand perception issues.
• Internal team feedback: Especially for remote teams, gauge how well employees understand and embody the brand values. Are they brand ambassadors? Do they feel connected to the company's mission? These qualitative insights add depth to your quantitative data, helping you understand the "why" behind the numbers. They can uncover nuanced perceptions that metrics alone might miss and help you refine your brand strategy for even greater impact. Combining both quantitative and qualitative methods provides a view of your brand's health and effectiveness. ## Common Pitfalls to Avoid When Hiring a Brand Strategist Hiring a brand strategist, especially in a remote context, isn't without its challenges. Being aware of common pitfalls can help you navigate the process more smoothly and ensure a successful outcome. Avoiding these mistakes will save you time, money, and potential frustration down the line. ### Focusing Solely on Design Over Strategy One of the most frequent mistakes is confusing branding with design. While a beautiful logo and visually appealing website are important, they are outputs of a strong brand strategy, not the strategy itself. Hiring a brand strategist who is primarily a designer, or an agency that emphasizes visual aesthetics over foundational strategy, can lead to a brand that looks good but lacks depth, purpose, and differentiation. The pitfall: You end up with a superficial facelift instead of a strategic foundation. How to avoid: Ensure your potential strategist has a proven track record in strategic thinking, market research, and messaging development, not just creative execution. Their portfolio should highlight why design decisions were made, based on strategic objectives. Ask them to articulate their strategic process clearly and prioritize strategists who can demonstrate how their work impacts business outcomes beyond visual appeal. ### Undervaluing Collaboration and Communication In a remote setting, the lack of in-person interaction can exacerbate communication issues if not actively managed. Hiring a strategist who isn't a proactive communicator or who struggles with remote collaboration can quickly derail your project. The pitfall: Misunderstandings, missed deadlines, frustration, and a product that doesn't truly reflect your brand vision because of communication gaps. How to avoid: During the vetting process, heavily emphasize communication and collaboration skills. Ask about their preferred tools, methods for asynchronous communication, and how they ensure mutual understanding across different time zones. Look for strategists who ask insightful questions, actively listen, and are comfortable providing regular, clear updates without prompting. Set clear communication expectations from the start, and use project management tools to keep everyone aligned and accountable. Read our insights on effective remote team management for more practical advice. ### Failing to Define Clear Objectives and Scope Going into a brand strategy project without clearly defined objectives and a precise scope of work is a recipe for disaster. This often leads to scope creep, budget overruns, and a final deliverable that doesn't meet unarticulated expectations. The pitfall: A project that drags on indefinitely, exceeds budget, and produces outputs that don't effectively address your core brand challenges because the targets were moving. How to avoid: Before engaging a strategist, take the time to thoroughly define your business goals and specific brand challenges. Work collaboratively with the strategist to co-create a detailed statement of work (SOW) that outlines deliverables, timelines, expected outcomes, and budget. This SOW should be a living document that can be referenced throughout the project. Be specific: "We want to increase brand awareness by 20% in the European market within 12 months," rather than "We need a stronger brand." ### Forgetting About Internal Alignment A brand strategy can't succeed if your internal team doesn't understand, believe in, and embody it. Neglecting internal alignment, especially with a remote team spread across different locations, means your external brand message will be undermined by internal inconsistencies. The pitfall: Your employees don't live the brand, leading to a disconnect between what you promise and what you deliver, ultimately damaging customer trust and retention. How to avoid: Ensure your brand strategist considers internal branding as part of their strategy. Involve key stakeholders from across your remote organization (marketing, sales, product, HR) in the process to foster buy-in. Once the strategy is developed, invest in internal communication and training to ensure every team member understands the new brand identity, values, and messaging. Equip them with the tools and knowledge to be brand ambassadors. This is particularly important for remote sales teams in places like Dubai or London, who are often direct brand representatives. Ultimately, your team is your first and most important audience for your brand. ## Long-Term Brand Management and Evolution A brand strategy is not a one-time project; it's an ongoing commitment. The market evolves, consumer preferences shift, and your business grows. Therefore, continuous brand management and the flexibility to evolve are critical for long-term success. Your relationship with a brand strategist needn't end once the initial strategy is delivered; it can adapt to become a guiding force for sustained brand health. ### Establishing Brand Guidelines and Governance One of the most crucial outputs of a brand strategy project should be detailed brand guidelines. These are documents that dictate how your brand should be presented visually, verbally, and experientially. They cover everything from logo usage, color palettes, typography, imagery style, tone of voice, and messaging hierarchies. For remote teams, these guidelines are indispensable because they provide a centralized reference point, ensuring consistency regardless of who is creating content or where they are located. Think of a remote content writer based in Seoul needing to draft a blog post, or a remote graphic designer in Cape Town creating social media assets. Without clear guidelines, inconsistencies will inevitably creep in, diluting your brand identity. Beyond guidelines, establishing a brand governance framework ensures that there are clear processes for approving new brand assets, managing brand-related decisions, and maintaining brand integrity over time. This might involve setting up a brand committee or designating specific individuals responsible for brand oversight. ### Ongoing Brand Monitoring and Audits The digital is constantly changing, making continuous brand monitoring essential. This involves regularly tracking your brand's performance against the KPIs you established earlier. Utilize tools for social listening to monitor mentions, sentiment, and trends related to your brand and industry. Keep an eye on competitor activities and market shifts. Periodically, conduct smaller-scale brand audits (perhaps annually or bi-annually) to assess how well your brand is adhering to its guidelines and resonating with its audience. These audits can identify areas where your brand might be slipping or where new opportunities are emerging. They also highlight potential inconsistencies that need to be addressed before they become detrimental. Your brand strategist, or an internal marketing lead, can oversee this process, ensuring your brand remains agile and responsive to market dynamics. This proactive approach helps prevent brand erosion and keeps your image fresh and relevant. ### Adapting and Refreshing Your Brand (When Necessary) While consistency is key, rigidity can be detrimental. A strong brand strategy provides a foundation, but it's not set in stone forever. There will come a time when your brand needs to adapt or refresh to remain relevant. This could be due to:
• Significant market changes: A new disruptive technology or a shift in consumer values.
• Business evolution: Expanding into new target markets, launching completely new product lines, or a major change in your mission or vision.
• Competitive pressures: If competitors are rapidly innovating their branding.
• Outdated perception: If your brand starts to feel old-fashioned or no longer accurately reflects who you are. A brand refresh is about refining elements while retaining the core essence, whereas a rebrand might involve a more fundamental shift in identity. A brand strategist can help you determine the appropriate course of action, guiding you through the process of evolving your brand without alienating your existing audience or losing your established equity. They can ensure that any changes are strategic, purposeful, and aligned with your long-term vision, ensuring your brand continues to resonate and endure for decades to come, positioning your remote business for sustained success. ## The Future of Remote Branding: Trends and Predictions The world of remote work and digital nomadism is not static; it's constantly evolving, and with it, the demands and opportunities for brand building. Understanding these emerging trends can help you make more strategic decisions when hiring a brand strategist and developing your long-term brand vision. The future of remote branding is exciting and presents new ways to connect and engage. ### Authenticity and Transparency as Core Brand Values In an increasingly skeptical world, authenticity and transparency are no longer just buzzwords; they are non-negotiable for consumers, especially those who interact primarily online. Remote businesses, by their very nature, often have an advantage here as they can authentically share glimpses into their distributed work culture, the diverse locations of their team members (e.g., from Medellín to Kyoto), and the faces behind the screens. The future demands brands that are open about their values, their processes, their supply chains (for product-based businesses), and even their shortcomings. Brand strategists will be increasingly focused on helping companies weave these values into their narrative and operations, ensuring that the brand promise aligns with the brand experience. This means brands will need to move beyond curated perfection to embrace genuine connection. Expect strategies that emphasize behind-the-scenes content, user-generated content, and clear communication about social and environmental impact. ### Hyper-Personalization and Community Building Generic messaging is becoming obsolete. The future of remote