5 branding tips for accounting firms and outsource payroll providers

What comes to mind when you think of your accounting, bookkeeping practice or outsource payroll provider you’re in? Chances are, it’s all the core tasks that make up your services such as tax planning, payroll, or audit, with brand towards the bottom of the list.

But with such a competitive market space in the professional services industry, branding can have a great influence on how much you stand out to your potential clients – and why your existing clients choose you.

We unpack what branding is, and steps you can take to boost your branding and measure how well it’s doing.

What is branding?

Your name, designs, logo and any other features that are unique to your company’s personality are all part of your brand.

Think of the famous golden arches that people associate with McDonalds or Nike’s famous ‘Just do it’ tagline. It’s not about the ‘what’ or the ‘how, but it’s about the ‘why’, giving clients emotional cues and a reason to favour you over others.

Why is branding important?

Chances are if your future client is looking for your type of services – branding can easily help you stand out by making you memorable. In such a crowded market, being front of mind can be extremely influential.

But branding is more than just a logo. It influences how clear your messaging is from the tone of voice you use to your customer’s experience and dictates whether or not your company looks modern or outdated.

This means that you can easily stand out from your competitors simply with the look and feel of your brand.

4 tips for boosting your brand

Whether you are refreshing your brand, or building one from scratch. Here are some of our top tips for you to get started.

1. Gather inspiration from brands you love and trust

Starting with inspiration is key to understanding what it is about a brand you like.

As you gather inspiration, we suggest looking into your biggest competitors – and also what your favourite brands are doing outside the industry you’re in.

Don’t forget to keep track of the things you like by building a mood board that shows what it is about those brands you love. This way, when you work with designers, you’ll have something to share to keep them on track. You can easily do so by using Miro, or Google Slides.

Our top tip? Don’t fall into the trap of throwing in everything you looked at – keep everything on the mood board for the best of the best that you come across.

2. Keep your messaging clear

All too often we miss out when we try to be clever with our words while trying to make our website stand out.

It never works out well. Instead, it complicates things for our potential clients as they try and work out exactly what it is your product or service does.

The solution? Try focusing on a few things including:

• What pain points you’re trying to solve for your client e.g. saving them admin time;
• Testimonials that can back up your claim e.g. a quote from a happy client and a brief line about what their company does and industry;
• Expand these testimonials into case studies which detail more about the problems your product or service helped to solve;
• Don’t forget to make room to show off any awards you’ve worked hard to earn.

3. Create brand guidelines

The key to building a brand is consistency in order to avoid any confusion internally, and externally with your clients.

Make sure that you keep any logos, colour palettes, tone of voice guidelines and more housed in a document which you can easily share with your internal team. This can serve as your brand guideline so it must be easily accessible.

You may also want to build an internal brand library where you can house any illustrations or logos in an easy to access place too, in order to avoid anyone accidentally uploading a low quality image.

4. Measure the success of your brand

You can’t improve or plan for what you’re not measuring. Especially when it comes to branding.

Make sure you create a brand measurement program that can help you keep track of the objectives you want to measure, and how you go about doing so.

Effective brand measurement doesn’t rely on search engine traffic estimates, or social media engagement. Instead, it involves identifying metrics you should keep track of that you think represent the performance of your brand.

Think along the lines of things such as appeal, association, awareness, personality, recall, trust, usage, loyalty and more. The metrics that you should consider for your brand depends on the type of product, company and industry you are in.

Once you’ve identified these metrics, you can build a brand measurement dashboard using platforms such as Google Data Studio to keep track of them over time.

5. Build your credibility by working with a trusted partner

We hope these tips help you boost your brand. Part of your branding is who your brand associates with. This can help you build credibility in a crowded industry.

If you’ve been looking for a trustworthy payroll and workforce management software that simplifies processes, learn more about Employment Hero Payroll and what we can offer your clients worldwide from Australia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Singapore and Malaysia.