Whether your agency is in charge of crafting a complete rebrand for a client’s business, or putting together the design elements for a multichannel marketing campaign, creating content for your partners is a substantial undertaking. One that can occupy your focus for days, weeks or even months.
With so much time and effort invested into these endeavours, the last thing you want is for clients to misunderstand your vision. Being forced into a complete rethink at this stage could mean lengthy delays, soaring client costs and damage to your agency-client relationship.
To ensure your projects succeed with minimal setbacks, it isn’t just important to deliver high-quality graphic design. Your agency needs to master the art of brand presentation.
Making a deliberate effort to immerse your clients in your ideas is essential if you want your clients to walk away fully comprehending exactly what your proposal entails.
It also gives you a valuable opportunity to fully showcase the design elements you’ve created, explain the rationale behind your creative process, and outline the guidelines your clients can use to successfully roll out their rebrand, brand refresh or new campaign.
But how do you make an illuminating first impression? In this helpful guide, we outline the techniques you can use to inform and excite stakeholders during your brand presentation, and explain how brand portals can help at this important stage.
5 techniques to elevate your brand presentation
Between miscommunication, confusion and a lack of clarity, securing client buy-in for your design project can be an uphill battle. Thankfully, with the right strategies and techniques, ensuring you and your partners are on the same wavelength doesn’t have to be a source of stress.
1. Establish a mood board
Getting your clients in the right mindset early on in your brand presentation can immediately dictate how likely they are to understand and embrace your new vision, concept or marketing collateral.
To set the scene, mood boards are a useful tool you can use to showcase the influences that contributed to your design project, from images and themes, to colours, tones of voice and other pieces of content.
2. Showcase prototypes
Another way to get your agency’s vision across at this pivotal early stage is by mocking up or prototyping your concepts.
This could mean producing prototype packaging for your client’s final products, or building a set of social media posts to showcase a new logo design in use.
However you choose to approach this, developing these examples gives your clients something tangible to base their opinions on, which can be effective in helping them visualise your branding.
3. Create a style guide
It’s one thing to share your vision for a client’s new brand identity or marketing campaign. But taking the time to define their brand and showcase exactly how it will be applied is often a fast track to superior understanding and trust.
Acting as a playbook for every conceivable visual element, style guides set specific parameters for your clients’ visual identity, so they can see how your content works and what they need to do to present a consistent brand across every touchpoint.
These not only add another layer of explanation for how your brand concept looks and feels – they also reassure your clients that it will be ready to deploy as soon as they give the green light.
4. Weave a compelling story
Strong storytelling has been at the heart of successful branding for decades, with 55% of consumers saying they are more likely to buy from a brand if they love their story.
So, naturally, it can also be a powerful way of presenting your work to clients and winning over their hearts and minds.
Adding context to design choices made throughout the course of your project by laying out a narrative is a great way to convey meaning and get your partners invested from beginning to end.
To do this, make sure your brand presentation story:
- Aligns with your clients’ core values
- Is clear and concise
- Uses language your clients understand
- Remains genuine and authentic
5. Leverage VR and AR
Finally, to fully immerse your partners in their new brand assets, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are emerging technologies that can place your clients at the heart of your experience.
From showcasing the look of a rebranded store to enabling clients to see how their new marketing materials look up close, taking a more direct approach through technology can bring your ideas to life and inspire an emotional connection towards your client presentation.
The value of a brand portal
As important as the right techniques are, few things trump the importance of medium when it comes to building compelling brand presentations.
What do we mean by medium? Simply put, it’s the method by which you present your ideas to your clients, educate them, and secure their buy-in.
Many design agencies turn to the dependable slideshow to present their brand concepts. And while sometimes you can’t beat a classic, the restrictive, static and non-immersive nature of this medium can be a hurdle to client understanding.
In its place, numerous forward-thinking agencies are turning to smarter technology to better showcase their marketing materials, manage their partners’ brands and secure client buy-in. And among these, brand portals stand out as an ingenious way to help people visualise your ideas.
Demonstrate the full scope of your vision
Digital brand hubs, alongside Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems, are used to store and share on-brand content internally within a company. Being interactive, this technology enables you to store every visual element you have created in a single place.
As well as allowing decision-makers to explore your materials at their own pace, having everything laid out in this dynamic format makes it possible for your clients to see how individual components work together, putting your proposal on the best footing for success.
Completely immerse clients in your work
With the added ability to create and tailor these online brand portals to your clients’ new identity or campaign style, partners can easily immerse themselves in your designs as they explore the compelling marketing materials and strong brand identity you have created.
Compared to the limited interactivity and visual branding of traditional presentation software, these platforms can effortlessly convey what your newly crafted collateral will look and feel like in real life.
Facilitate long-term collaboration
Iteration is an important part of any design process. Not even the world’s best marketing agencies get it all right the first time, so it’s only natural to have some back and forth with your clients on your journey to make the best materials possible.
To ensure you’re getting the highest quality feedback, brand portals give your partners the freedom to examine your brand assets up close.
From how their new brand guidelines are laid out, to the specific design templates they will use, placing your content in your clients’ hands through a brand portal allows for productive input that makes managing their brand more collaborative and less reflexive.
Streamline content sharing
Lastly, if you’re an agency that relies on emails and content-sharing websites, you know that sending over files can be a time-consuming and cumbersome process.
Hosting these materials in a single centralised hub means your design teams no longer have to spend hours setting up file transfers or clarifying which brand asset is the latest through lengthy email chains. This paves the way to better productivity and cost efficiency during the design process.
How brand portals empower your clients beyond delivery
As you know, for any rebrand or campaign to truly succeed, you need buy-in from everyone across your client’s organisation, not just top decision-makers.
However, educating all staff within even a small business can be a daunting prospect for your agency. You don’t have time to brief dozens of stakeholders, and sharing your initial presentation company-wide risks watering down the work your team just spent so long crafting.
That’s why a brand portal is valuable not just during the initial brand presentation, but as a tool that your clients can carry over into the day-to-day delivery of their marketing.
When incorporated within or alongside a wider Digital Asset Management and content creation suite, this gives you the capacity to not only help your clients truly understand your vision, but also efficiently execute and manage the assets and campaigns that will bring this project to fruition.
Enter a new era of agency success
For an agency, few things are as important as brand presentations. They’re how you educate your clients, deliver top-notch content creation, and establish a strong working relationship with your partners.
But getting every client on board with your vision takes more than a simple run-through of your concept, project and ideas.
To help you elevate your brand presentation, we hope this article has given you insight into the techniques and technology you need to cement your clients’ understanding, so you can focus on realising concepts that contribute to their long-term success.
