The concept of brand positioning for the professional services industry is just as important as the business itself, because today’s professional services marketplace is more crowded than ever. Buyers have a bewildering array of firms to choose from, and with the rise of the Internet, local firms are contending with companies across the nation, if not the world.

Certain questions that arise are: What can a firm do? How can they compete when there is barely any room to breathe? That is where brand positioning comes into play. Aaron Branding’s professional services brand consultancy can help your firm carve out a place in the minds of potential customers through effective brand positioning and strategy.

5 Types of Brand Positioning Strategy

Our brand consulting firm in London utilises positioning strategies that take many forms, but not all are appropriate for professional services firms. Below are five strategies that are most relevant to positioning a professional services firm like yours:

1. Cost-driven positioning. The message is, “We offer everything those other firms do, but we cost less.” This is a very challenging strategy unless you have an inherent cost advantage. Technology can be your tool if you are using it more effectively than your competitors or your worst enemy if you are behind others in a cost-driven strategy.
2. Niche service specialisation. In this approach, you focus on offering a service that is not widely offered by your competitors. You offer specialised expertise that, presumably, the average practitioner would not have. This approach can work well unless the service begins to generate strong demand and new competitors emerge to dilute your “uniqueness”
3. Industry specialisation. This is a popular and often effective way to position a professional services firm. It is another form of specialised expertise, and it allows you to tightly focus your marketing and evolve your services as your market changes. The implication of industry specialisation is that your firm has deep experience working with similar businesses. This approach comes with risks, however. If your industry experiences an economic decline, your fortunes may follow.
4. Role-focused specialisation. A message like, “We help CEOs succeed” is an example of role-focussed positioning — targeting a particular function in the organisation. Instead of specialising in a particular industry or service, you target a niche group of people. These buyers will perceive you as more tuned in to their needs and expectations that you offer specific knowledge or expertise that will make their job easier.
5. Quality of service positioning. This is one of the most utilised strategies implemented by professional services firms, and more often than not, it is one of the least effective. Messages like, “Nobody’s more committed to quality,” “we deliver the best service” and similar messages are so ubiquitous in the marketplace that they consistently fail to impress buyers.

Conclusion

Our brand consulting from in London has encountered a plethora of  professional services firms that are poorly positioned in the marketplace. They typically believe that they can get more clients by opening their arms wide to everyone — the broader their reach, the more business will float into their embrace. But that is rarely ever the case. Spanning all the way to our extension branding agency in Dubai, we have consistently observed that  when buyers look around and see awkwardly splayed arms everywhere, they have nowhere to gravitate.

That’s why we stress the importance of having a great brand positioning strategy. It gives your prospects something to get interested in — and will ultimately convince them to buy from you. If your firm isn’t positioned to consistently attract premium clients, just remember. You’re not alone. Any firm can sharpen its positioning and build an enviable competitive advantage. All it takes is a little courage to take the first step.

If every organisation is claiming that they are innovative, what does that really say? These days innovation is pervasive, it is hard to get beyond the word and stay ahead of its definition. If you are the leader of an organisation, you are at length responsible for setting the stage and tone for creative thinking. There are a multitude of ways to nurture creativity within your organisation, but certain strategies have proven more effective than others.

Innovation Requires Time

The big question is, how much time does it require? Our branding agency in Dubai has seen different companies do it in different ways. One way is the 15% culture, where employees dedicate 15% of their time to innovative thinking. From this strategy, the company 3M came up with the Post-It note.

Taking it further, Google allocates 20% of an employee’s time to be dedicated to innovation, and as a result, their employees have successfully established Gmail and Google Earth.

Innovation Requires Space

Our brand and design consultancy in London has observed that a culture of innovation often stems from people being comfortable in their own workspaces. Providing such spaces for thinking outside of the box effectively encourages innovation amongst your workforce. Companies like Zappos have optimised its campus for innovation by giving employees various workspace options like a rooftop patio, a miniature golf course, and perhaps most importantly, a nap room.

Innovation Required Recognition

Leadership is vital to innovation because if they want innovation to play a key role in their organisations, elevating it has to be among their top priorities. This means that they have to go beyond talking about it, and openly reward those that are doing it. Our financial services brand consultancy has witnessed some companies offer compensation and gifts for those who demonstrate progressive ideas, and doing so acknowledges the importance of innovation throughout their organisations.

Innovation Requires Interaction

In order to innovate at an organisational level, leaders must make a conscious effort to inspire it at a personal level too. As a professional services brand consultancy, we have acknowledged that dialogue is important because innovation can be inspired by conversation. Rather than challenging ideas, leaders should allow people to openly share them and leaders should actively listen without judgment.

In Conclusion.

Finally, remember that innovation doesn’t happen; it must be led. The right leadership teams can ensure that innovation thrives by giving it the time, space, recognition, and interaction it deserves to permeate throughout the organisation and truly drive change.

If your company has been around for more than a couple of years, chances are your website is hosting heaps of published content. Chances are much of that content no longer helps your audience and your brand due to it being outdated or irrelevant. In the event that your company is based in the Middle East and you are working in tandem with a brand design agency in Abu Dhabi, you will definitely want to confer with them and take action after reading this blog.

The question really is, does it hurt anything? According to the SEO experts in our brand design agency in London, the answer to this is YES! Old content can definitely have a negative impact on your content’s search rankings and visitors’ experience. One example of this might be that your published content may link to articles, research reports, or other useful web pages that may now be offline. Clicking on any of those links may lead to non functioning pages, which will in turn hurt your search performance, because Google frowns on it and real readers won’t appreciate them either.

Another thing to consider when it comes to old content is that the topics may no longer fit your current content or business strategy and you would be better off not having any of those turn up in a search.

Still, many brands out there are hesitant when it comes to deleting old content, but the results are often surprisingly positive. For instance, HubSpot deleted over 3000 outdated content pieces and in a matter of months, the company saw an improvement in its SEO results.

Here are a few direct steps put together by Aeron’s branding design agency in Riyadh that will help you fix outdated content and boost your search scores:

1. Start with a content audit.
2. Update and republish good but old content.
3. Delete references to outdated stats in the content you’re keeping.
4. Weave in new SEO keywords and links.

Wrap Up

Cleaning up old content and making it relevant to your target audience once again takes a bit of work and time, but it is well worth the effort. Getting rid of content that no longer works and updating what does can do wonders for your content marketing strategy.

It is a chance for you to improve organic traffic to your site without investing in fresh content, and you’ll better serve your audience’s needs. Try these strategies for yourself and see the results or contact our Branding Agency Dubai and we will be happy to assist you in boosting your search scores!

E-A-T is an acronym for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, and and E-A-T score for a website has a direct effect on how high its pages rank on result pages in google searches. Yes, it has a lot to do with SEO.

Our brand consulting firm in London has conducted in-depth research on the matter, and we can confidently tell you that a low E-A-T score is a common barrier that keeps sites from appearing on Google searches. Basically, the algorithm is always changing because it is trying to improve. Google highly values its users and does not want to refer them to disreputable websites. One thing that you may not be aware of is Google’s search quality raters are human, and every time a human makes a determination, Google algorithms get better and can apply the logic to tens of thousands of other sites.

For those operating out of the Middle East, our branding agency Dubai, and our Brand Design Agency Abu Dhabi utilise only the most up to date methods, backed by in-house research to arrive at the most effective approaches for each of our valued clients. We have assisted more than a handful of reputable companies that have established themselves as household names to boost their E-A-T score, and a lot of that brings us back to the About Page.

Your About Page allows you to establish yourself as an authority — the Page demonstrates that you know what you’re talking about and can be trusted.

Here are some tips for writing an About Page that will perform well based on E-A-T:

1. Include Staff Names and Bios
2. Show Off Your Personality
3. Find Your Buzzwords
4. Focus on Personal Branding
5. Explain Your Process
6. Use Strong Words
7. Explain Jargon

If you are looking for a strong example where all these elements are present, we invite you to visit our About Page.

E-A-T Shows You How to Help Users

If you agree with us that it is valuable to your business to tap into Google’s desire for pages that meet E-A-T standards, you can start by focusing on your About Page and improve the rest of your site from there. In order to convey the right message, your website needs to exude purpose and starting at the about page allows you to explore ways that you offer assistance and convenience to your future users. Your About Page sets the tone for the rest of your website and working with Aeron’s Professional Services Brand Consultancy, will ensure that your company consistently conveys Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, wherever your brand is present.

Luxury brands have the pressure of needing to stay ahead of the curve and jump through hoops to bring customers in. Luckily, there are various ways to achieve this, but it takes a dedicated effort to diversity their marketing strategies.

Aeron’s luxury brand and design consultancy approaches every campaign with several elements in consideration, including potential audiences, buyer personas, and photography that can all help massively. In our guide, we will help you comprehend how to get the most out of content marketing as a luxury brand.

There are five factors that clearly define a luxury brand:

Price

Quality

Design

Meaning

Rarity

Service

How can luxury brands use content marketing?

Content marketing heavily focusses on industry topics as opposed to selling a specific brand or service. Working alongside our professional service brand consultancy opens up more possibilities for the types of content you can create. Here are some of the best options for luxury brands:

Video Marketing

Video marketing is a major part of what Aeron’s brand design consultancy in London utilizes for modern marketing of luxury brands, and it would be vital to add this to your strategy. Our research statistics reveal that over 85% of internet users in the United Kingdom regularly watch video content on their devices. Videos are an excellent medium for attracting people to your luxury brand.

Influencer Content

In today’s digital world where instant fame is a possibility for anyone, influencers hold more sway than ever before with some of the more popular ones having an instant audience in the millions from their followers. People pay close attention to every detail of their online presence and tend to recall the products or brands that they frequently use or endorse.

Social Media

The use of social media in marketing a luxury brand is an art that needs to be mastered in order to maximise reach and engage potential consumers. The type of content you choose to publish is something that you need to make the most of by making your content as engaging and valuable as possible. Our marketing consultancy in Dubai has conducted research that revealed that 71% of consumers who enjoy positive social media experiences with a brand are likely to recommend that brand.

SEO

Search Engine Optimisation is vital for improving your luxury brand’s online visibility, which will bring in conversions by driving users to your business. This involves having a strong presence on search engine results for relevant keywords and topics related to your luxury brand. The goal here is to improve your rankings as much as possible and make it to the top of page 1 in a google search.

Partnering with Aeron

At Aaron, we bring together a highly collaborative and insightful team including brand strategists, architects, 2D & 3D designers, digital specialists, writers and AV Producers.

We have helped brands of all capacities tell their stories, engaging diverse audiences through apt and effective channels. We ensure all our projects have a fact-based foundation, are creatively executed and are practically applied through meaningful engagement programmes.

It would be a mistake to undermine your knowledge of the industry that you are in, which means that technically you don’t need a professional services brand consultancy to know the ins and outs of the service you provide. When partnering with a branding agency Dubai, you can always advise them on a certain topic when necessary, but what you actually need is branding partner that a can solve your biggest challenges, objectives like needing to engage new consumers and capture new markets, or drive top line growth, or even the need to refresh your brand to better communicate what you stand for. These important growth objectives require experienced problem solvers—issue-driven professionals with outstanding analytical skills who can also translate the rational into the emotional in order to connect high-level ideas with the people you’re trying to engage.

Aeron’s brand design agency London has experienced in-house marketing experts that approach your objectives through rigorous research so you can make fact-based decisions with certainty.

Big challenges don’t limit themselves to industry—and neither should you. Making the choice of working with our branding agency that has seen these challenges across a broader scope of industries means bigger thinking that translates into bigger results.

Do you think that you have a great SEO process in place for your business? If you have to think about it, the answer is definitely no. Companies that have a well executed SEO process know it because they consistently hit their targets. This is because they know what they are doing right and have it down to a process.

Search engine optimization is more important today than it ever has been because we live in the age of technology where your potential customers are turning to google to find the products and services that they need. A great SEO process means that your company makes it to the first page of google’s search results.  The brutal reality is, a lot of brands think that they know the basics of SEO, only have a rough plan in place. Working alongside Aeron’s financial services brand consultancy means that you will never have to improvise your SEO strategy as you go along. Our brand design agency London will walk you through what a great SEO process should look like.

Conduct Competitive Research

Before you get started on SEO for your business, you need to do your due diligence in the form of researching your biggest competitors and what others are doing in your industry. With this information you will get an idea of what Google likes and how you can draw from their strengths and avoid their weaknesses. This can be an arduous task especially if your main focus is to run your business. This is why brands that want to level up their SEO game turn to Aeron’s professional services brand consultancy.

Know Your Own Goals

Developing the right SEO strategy won’t work out properly unless you have defined your goals. For some companies doing SEO, their aim is to bring more traffic to their website, while for others it could be having the number 1 spot on the Google results page. Have clear and tangible goals that you want to work towards over the course of six months to a year. This is going to help you have direction and know the best way to move forward.

Review Your Website

If you are implementing an SEO strategy that brings traffic to your website, you need to take a good honest look at your website. Analyse what works well and what isn’t and make the necessary changes.

Analyse the Results

It is an important step in the SEO process to monitor and analyse your results. Keep in mind that the achievements from SEO do not happen overnight, it can take weeks to months to see any movement in website traffic, sales, and other elements of your website. Being patient and designating a time for analysis will allow you to learn what you have achieved and what is working.

 SEO with Aeron Branding

If you want to take the next step in SEO with guaranteed results, contact Aeron’s brand design agency London. We bring together a highly collaborative and insightful team including brand strategists, architects, 2D & 3D designers, digital specialists, writers and AV Producers.

We help brands tell their stories, engaging diverse audiences through apt and effective channels. We ensure all our projects have a fact-based foundation, are creatively executed and are practically applied through meaningful engagement programmes.

Due diligence through deep research is a leverage tool that our brand design agency in London relies on when it comes to the task of brand building. It is one of the key attributes that drives business growth for our clients, as a strong brand performs better financially, consistently beating their competitors year after year. As a branding agency London, we have proven that our brand building services help companies achieve their strategic, financial, and growth goals, and provide more opportunities for their employees.

Despite all these advantages a strong brand offers to a company, we still see many companies that avoid the commitment that’s required to build a relevant, compelling, and well-differentiated brand. The reason is because they think that working with a brand design agency Abu Dhabi will be costly or take too long, which neither are necessarily true if you are working with the right partner. Oftentimes companies are close-minded to doing deep research because they are confident that they know their market and customers well.

Our marketing consultancy in Dubai has proven successful in strengthening brands because of conducting deep, rigorous, quantitative research that often dispels long held beliefs. It allows companies a new perspective and access to a solid foundation for fact-based decision making and brand building. Research helps your company understand what matters most to your current customers and those you are trying to attract. To determine what matters most, it’s crucial to identify the market’s critical drivers, delighters, and table stakes in decision making. Through a combination of asking and empirically derived importance, your organisation will understand what truly matters most in decision making, and the potential differentiators on which to stake a claim.

Our deep research gives your company the edge because what customers think matters and they do not make decisions only rationally. Deep research that can uncover both the emotional and the rational, and then allow your company to understand the best way to convey a reputation that will matter to your audiences. It is a modern solution that can definitely spell the difference in revenue.

Purpose driven branding is still proving to be a brand buzzword, every brand seems to wants to be it, whether they are truly purpose-driven or not, because it is profitable. So, how do you know if being purpose-driven is the right approach for your brand?

The short answer to this is our in-depth research in our brand design agency London can tell you. Branding is about building a reputation—it’s about what you say you do—and also about what you really do. How you position yourself in the marketplace should be a balance of grounded, reach and stretch. Aeron’s brand design agency Abu Dhabi’s research can tell you how much permission you have to be purpose-driven. Because if it turns our to be too much stretch for you to be believable as a purpose-driven brand, then you shouldn’t go there—at least until you can change things within your company to make you more authentic.

Our marketing consultancy Dubai has conducted recent research that indicates that today’s consumers are becoming experts in recognizing insincere brands. So unless you are grounded and committed enough, you might want to reconsider your purpose-driven branding ideas—also because those who try to become purpose-driven are either a huge success—or a horrible failure. It’s not worth risking cynicism, boycotting, or backlash if you can’t back up what you say you stand for with what you do throughout your corporation.

When you’re successful at being purpose driven, you can almost guarantee you’ll be successful financially. Because according to our financial services brand consultancy research, nearly 63% of surveyed global consumers prefer to purchase products and services from companies that stand for something that reflects their own values and beliefs, and according to that same research, 62% of consumers want companies to take a stand on the social, cultural, environmental and political issues that they care most about. Before you flaunt your purpose-driven prowess, it’s smart to do research to ensure you have the market’s permission

About Aeron

We are Aeron, a digitally inspired London design agency that specialises in business transformation, brand strategy and design. Our purpose as a London branding agency is helping ambitious businesses grow and thrive in today’s market dynamic and disruptive market place.

Based on fundamental insights, our London creative design agency experts help organisations define their brand purpose; a clear, relevant, ownable and defendable territory – which delivers genuine value to customers.

Banking Beyond Covid

4 trends reshaping the future of retail banking beyond Covid-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed the most serious challenge to financial institutions for nearly a century.

As Mckinsey reports the COVID-19 health crisis has reshaped the global economy and society. Retail banks, like most companies, face an urgent imperative to reimagine themselves, with COVID-19 accelerating consumer behaviour shifts and causing significant earnings challenges given the tough macroeconomic context and extensive risk of financial distress for both consumers and businesses. We see four trends that could be of particular relevance to NCB moving forward.

Consumers’ banking preferences are rapidly evolving

As we move towards a cashless society, and Mckinsey predicting up to 25% fewer branches in the post Covid era, and recording a recent preference for handling everyday transactions digitally (as high as about 60 to 85 percent across Western European markets, even for customers 65 years of age or older) Digital Transformation is set to be the leading opportunity in the immediate to mid term.

Redefining a future fit physical banking environment

Whist the way people bank has changed, it might not yet be permanent, thus you can’t assume customers won’t revert to their previous channel preferences. If you want behaviours to stick, even in the current environment, it will be necessary to invest in marketing, to build awareness of the options open to customers, to share the successful experiences of new digital customers, as well as to support vulnerable customers or those that still do not feel at ease using digital channels.

Customer demand for greater flexibility and security

In a recent EY survey 27% of consumers agree that banks will be more flexible in the next 1-2 years – with Banks having a role in helping customers become better prepared, through savings, investments, insurance and income smoothing products.

In fact, this crisis may accelerate the adoption of some subscription- based models for financial services, with a quarter of individuals saying they would be willing to pay a premium for products that promote well-being, the link between health and wealth may emerge stronger than ever.

Responsible banking is more important than ever

More than half of the respondents of a recent EY survey indicate that their future purchasing decisions will be impacted by banks actively supporting the community, being transparent in all they do, and ensuring they are doing good for society.

These four trends suggest that those with a mantra of customer centricity and responsible banking are likely to emerge as strong as ever.

About Aeron

We are Aeron, a digitally inspired London design agency that specialises in business transformation, brand strategy and design. Our purpose as a London branding agency is helping ambitious businesses grow and thrive in today’s market dynamic and disruptive market place.

Based on fundamental insights, our London creative design agency experts help organisations define their brand purpose; a clear, relevant, ownable and defendable territory – which delivers genuine value to customers.

With a reputation for linking brand strategy and innovative design with clear financial outcomes, our London brand design agency combines intelligent data, imaginative insight with inspiring creativity and transformative digital technology plus skill in implementation to deliver enduring growth.

Our London brand consultancy team helps ambitious clients businesses grow and thrive in today’s dynamic and disruptive marketplace.

As a London creative design agency we are a results-driven, digitally-powered, creatively-inspired consulting firm which helps our clients unlock growth. Our core London brand consultancy services include brand research, brand measurement, brand evaluation, brand strategy, brand architecture, brand naming, brand design, brand communications and brand management.

About Aeron

We are Aeron, a London brand design consultancy that specialises in business transformation, brand strategy and design. Our purpose is set on helping ambitious businesses thrive in today’s market place.

Based on fundamental insights, our London brand design consultancy is expert in helping organisations define their brand purpose; a clear, relevant, ownable and defendable territory – which delivers genuine value to customers.

With a reputation for linking brand strategy and innovative design with clear financial outcomes, our London branding agency combines intelligent data, imaginative insight with inspiring creativity and transformative digital technology to deliver enduring growth.