What's up brand builders! Stephen Houraghan here of BrandMasterAcademy.com and
in this video you're gonna learn how to get paid for brand strategy so you can
raise your expert profile as a brand specialist increase your fees and of
course your revenue.
Now when I began charging for brand strategy I was
fumbling around in the dark a bit I didn't really know what I was doing I
didn't have any structure I didn't know if I should charge a flat fee or an
ongoing fee I didn't know if I should be charging a retainer or if this should
come as part of an overall package I really didn't know how to go about
charging for strategy and it really took me a while to get into the flow of
things and a lot of it has got to do with trial and error I tried out some
things they didn't work I tried out other things and they did work and over time I
built my own system as to how I charged for brand strategy and I want to dive
into the different ways that you can charge for brand strategy but before I
do I just want to frame the scenario a little bit now if you want to charge for
brand strategy as a brand strategist then essentially you want to be paid for
your thinking and if that's what you want then it's all about your
positioning how you position yourself in the market how you speak with your
clients the copy that you put on your website you really need to separate your
execution services and your labor from your thinking now if you've been
building brands up until this point whether as a designer or a copywriter
well then you were getting paid for your execution skills or your labor and going
forward as you develop strategies as you charge for brand strategy you'll be
asking your clients to pay you for your thinking so it's really really critical
to separate those two and understand the difference between the two and you
really need to rise above that execution and start to look at yourself in a
different way as a strategist you're looking at the entire scenario including
what the business does the challenges that it has and you're mapping out a
plan for that business for that brand to grow and then of course there are
execution services involved with bringing that brand to life but before
you get to that part the thinking is the critical part so you really need to step
back from your previous role as an executioner whether that's a designer or
a copywriter and look at the broader spectrum look at
the broader picture in your role as a brand strategist and that's how you'll be
separated in the eyes of your audience in the eyes of your prospects from being
just a labor for hire to a strategic thinker so coming back to the original
question how do you get paid for brand strategy well it all comes down to
structure and there are five different ways that you can structure how you get
paid for that strategy and that's what we're gonna dive into right now
number one diagnosis now I like to use the analogy of a mechanic because we can
all relate we all got cars we all take them into our mechanic and for the most
part most of us don't know what we're talking about and we rely on them now if
you heard a noise coming from your car and you assumed that you knew what was
wrong with it let's say you thought it was a fan belt and you sent that into
your mechanic and you told him to go and fix that fan belt and he fixed that fan
belt and you got your car back and driving down the road the engine blew up
now who would you blame in that scenario well of course you would blame the
mechanic because you you sent a car in to get fixed and then it blew up halfway
down the road but you told that mechanic what was wrong with your car essentially
you self-diagnosed your car and that's what he did he went
and fixed that but what a mechanic actually does he takes the time to look
under the hood of your car and understand what is going on he diagnoses
the problem long before he ever starts to work on fixing that problem so
diagnosis needs to be part of your strategic services because you need to
understand the problem before you go ahead and start providing a solution so
you need to itemise that diagnosis now you can do this through a flat fee and
you can also use a marketing strategy here to provide this fee as a lead loss
now what does that mean what's a lead loss well you could provide that at a
very very low cost to get them in the door and to get them working with you
and a great example of this now I'll probably show my age here but back in
the 80s they used to sell the these different collections and you know you
might have a collection of you know dinosaurs or collection
of football series whatever it was my example that I looked back on was the
1990 Italia World Cup and essentially there was a collection coming out every
single week during that series and the very first edition was 99 pence now this
came with a beautiful folder it was well presented and you could tell that it was
worth a hell of a lot more than 99 cents but what they did was they got you in
the door the following releases were a lot more expensive there or something
like $2.99 each and in total there was around about 20 of them now if they were
$2.99 upfront I probably wouldn't have bought one I probably wouldn't have been
able to convince my parents to buy one for me but because it was 99 pence I did
and that led me into buying every single one after so that's what you can do with
your diagnosis you can drop the price on that diagnosis and use it as a lead loss
to get those clients through to get those initial prospects through and if
you do a good job in this diagnosis phase well then they will be compelled
to continue on paying for your next level of service number two strategy now
this is where the strategic brand is born and where the bulk of your revenue
as a strategist is made now what you're providing for your client here is not
something that they're going to get from a logo designer or a brand designer this
is your bread and butter as a strategist and what you want to do here is to map
out that plan for them you want to really dig out who that audience is to
understand the market conditions the competitors and then you want to plan
out a position for that brand you really want to position that brand effectively
so it looks compelling to that audience and that leads into then developing out
a personality a human brand persona a messaging framework a story framework
and what you're providing to your client here is a strategy and a plan for them
to go out and communicate their brand in the marketplace now this might also
include a marketing plan in terms of where that audience is and how the brand
is going to engage that audience but whether you provide just the brand plan
or the and the marketing plan you can charge a
flat fee and the flat fee is what you should be charging at this stage so work
out what it is that you're providing the value of what you're providing and then
work at the flat fee that you're going to charge your prospects number three
brand asset deliverables now if you were providing branding services before this
and you weren't including strategy then this is probably where you were earning
the bulk of your revenue so you might have been providing designs or you might
have been providing copywriting services but this is something that you can
continue to earn revenue on as a brand strategist then you can continue to
provide those services but I would suggest that over time the more you
delve into strategy and the more you go down the strategic consultancy role the
more you take a step back from those execution roles now this is where you
can bring people in to help you you can outsource this work you can bring in
partners but the more you go down the road of strategy and the more that
you're consulting with clients on their strategy the more you should be taking
your hands off those execution services and bringing people in to help you with
those but when you're starting out with strategies certainly this is what I did
I continue to provide the services that I could provide and where I needed help
or where I thought my time was better served elsewhere I brought somebody in
to help me but this is certainly an area that you can continue to generate
revenue through your strategies number four marketing execution now if you do
take the time to put together a marketing plan for your client and you
lay out where they should be going whether it's Facebook ads or SEO or
content marketing whatever it is whatever plan you have mapped out you
don't necessarily need to provide those execution services you don't need to be
a Facebook expert you don't need to be an SEO expert or a content writer you
have just mapped out the plan and provided them with the direction that
they need to go with their brand but you can of course partner up with somebody
you can bring somebody in to help you and continue to provide those services
for your clients it's certainly an extra revenue stream for your business but
again you really need to think about the big picture of your own brand and your
own positioning and what services that you want to provide long term if you do
want to get involved in those marketing execution services of course it's going
to provide a really valuable revenue stream for you but it
might dilute your speciality so you really need to think about your own
positioning there and number five consultancy now when you provide a brand
strategy to your client you've effectively given them a tool to be able
to manage their brand ongoing whether that's through social posts or content
marketing or SEO whatever it is that they're doing they have a guide now and
a plan that they know what their tone of voice is for their brand they know the
language they should use the stories they should tell the messages they
should send out they know their position in the market but they might not want to
manage their brand ongoing they or they might need somebody to hold their hand
along the way and that's where you can come in as a consultant you can set up a
weekly meeting a monthly meeting and sit down with them and look at what they're
doing with their brand and they will pay you for your thinking so it's really
important here that you distinguish this as a separate line item or discuss this
early on that these are services that you offer ongoing so they feel that you
are there in the background and you will be there to help them once you pass over
those deliverables to them but it is a way to really bring in extra revenue
ongoing and it can be very profitable as well if you go through quite a few
clients and provide a lot of brand strategies for your clients and you tee
up these weekly or monthly calls for this recurring revenue then it can be
very very profitable these calls might take you an hour or two hours but the
rates that you can charge for those calls are very very high so really think
about how you would set those consultancy services up and how you
would talk to your clients about those consultancy services early on now if you
do want to go down the road of brand strategy and you do want to start
charging for your thinking then it's really important that your prospects see
you differently so that all comes down to your positioning in the marketplace
how you position yourself in the marketplace how you have conversations
with your clients what you put on your website but before you even get to that
point it's important that you start to look at yourself differently so this is
a psychological shift that you need to have in terms of how you present
yourself out there how you look at yourself in the marketplace and shift
from looking at yourself as an executioner to a thinker somebody who
will get paid for their thinking for their strategies that they develop and I
found that a very good way to do this to help you with this psychological shift
is to start looking at the services that you provide on the whole and start
asking yourself as a business owner how much of these services going to cost my
business if I was to do none of these services so if I was to bring in
designer if I was to bring in a developer if I was to bring in a
copywriter if I was to bring in a strategist how much would these
individual services cost me to my business and then you can separate those
individual roles so it's really important that you separate the individual
roles so you can start to look at yourself as a strategist and not an
executioner and that psychological shift will be really really important in how
you portray yourself to your clients and then ultimately how they see you but I
would very much love to hear from you in terms of your journey where are you
going where are you coming from and where are you up to at this point in
terms of your transition are you coming from more of an executioner role
whether that's a designer role or a copywriter role and how far along down
the road are you in terms of strategy have you started to provide those
strategic services to your clients have you separated and structured how you
would charge for your strategies I'd love to hear your experiences and if you
have any challenges at all I'd love to hear from you as well let me know in the
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