There’s growth. And then there’s growth.
Like most companies, we’re focused on growth. But the core of Formada’s long-term strategy isn’t just about growth for growth’s sake — it’s building something sustainable.
We feel that building a successful, sustainable business is centered on delivering an impeccable experience to our clients as much as we possibly can. Let’s create something that people need, do great work in service of that ideal, and be considerate about the new services we roll out along the way.
A standard transactional client-agency dynamic just isn’t an option for us. We’re aiming for more of a “We can’t imagine not partnering with Formada”-type relationship from our partners.
We know that we don’t want to feel like a vendor. We want our clients to feel like we’re on the team, that we really understand their goals, that we’ll act in support of those goals, and that we’ll hold each other accountable in those moments where it really matters, because we’re partners.
This approach has worked really well for us so far, supported by the fact that much of our work over the last nearly five years has been referral-based, which is incredible.
Why we invested in a Brand Strategist
Word-of-mouth evangelism is something that any business is lucky to have. We’re incredibly grateful for it, but while we’ve been steadily bootstrapping this organization, we’ve also been carefully plotting the next five-to-ten years of growth, and we know that if we’re going to hit our goals, we need to augment our approach.
This is where our brand strategy — and our need for a full-time Brand Strategist — comes into play.
Having a person in a Brand Strategist seat means that we finally have someone dedicated to taking all of the things we’ve developed over the years — the personalization of our client interactions, the tidiness of our operational structure, and the caliber of our services — and present them to a world in a compelling way that doesn’t yet know how much they want to work with us.
How a Brand Strategist puts us in a better position to achieve our growth goals
The term “storytelling” has been used over and over again in the marketing world for so many years now it can feel — much like Garrett’s deep dive into the word “optimize” — like a meaningless placeholder for a lot of different things.
But all jargon aside: Brands do tell stories. (Even when they’re not trying to.)
We’re making the choice to be in control of how that story is shaped by having a team member dedicated solely to Formada’s brand to ensure that our mission, vision, and values are aligned with our operations, services delivery, and client support.
This, of course, is to help us continue to attract the sort of client partners we’re best-suited to support, but it’s also so that we can continue to attract the best possible talent. We want to work with great people, people who can enhance the already-great culture we’re building so that we can do more great things for more great businesses.
The only way to do any of this is to have someone who can help us be consistent in the way we communicate about Formada, and who has a deep enough understanding of the marketplace that they know what makes us special and why potential partners and team members would care about those things.
This is about messaging. It’s about the distribution of that messaging. It’s about the consistency of the distribution of that messaging. This role is about a lot of things, some of which you might not expect.
Our long-term vision for our Brand Strategist role
Naturally, this role is a marketing-centric position, but our vision for brand strategy is, in many ways, one that’s also focused on new business development.
For a lot of businesses, when they envision building a salesforce, it’s a sales-driven team, with sales-centric leadership, who occasionally pulls in marketing support when they 1) Want marketing assets, or 2) Want to complain about their leads not being good enough.
There’s a natural, understandable push and pull dynamic between any Sales and Marketing team. Sales wants warmer leads, and plenty more of them. Marketing wants Sales to use the marketing tools they’ve been given to push the leads deeper into the funnel. That’s the nature of the beast.
What our long-term intent is is for our New Business Development team and our Brand Marketing teams to be led by Brand Strategy, so that the core of what we do — our mission, vision, and values — are foundational to our sales approach from a brand perspective.
It’s not about bringing in every possible partnership. It’s about bringing in those partners who we can truly solve problems for, those businesses that want an agency relationship that goes a lot deeper than what the competition offers.
So why a Brand Strategist, you ask? Because we’re intent on being true to our mission as an agency, to hold ourselves accountable to those ideals, to pull the best talent into our orbit and give them the space to do their best work, and show our client partnerships genuine value in their experiences with us.
Are we all individually responsible for these things? Of course! But having a person dedicated to the Formada brand will help us focus our efforts on how we can each contribute to creating the best version of what we are.