Knowing how bad it can be if you don't ask the right questions, this article will provide background information on branding questionnaires and demonstrate which questions are vital for a project. Before you finish reading, you will understand each question's significance, and you will be able to easily curate your own to match the specifications of the task at hand.
You'll also understand how important it is to act professionally and know what you're doing throughout the process. These factors affect how a client sees you and the brand you represent as a whole. It will impact your present work relationship and determine future interactions.
What is branding?
Branding is taking strategic steps to change what a client base thinks about your product or service. It employs the company's logo, visual identity, and mission statement in its marketing campaigns. That, in turn, dictates how your product or service sticks in the minds of your customers.
Even though branding might seem like a simple idea, it is a changing and evolving topic that we can't explain in a single, clear sentence. Why? We can't quantify it because it's based on feelings and opinions (perceptions).
Why is branding important?
A great brand can affect your bottom line by making your business stand out from the competition, enabling you to attract customers for less money. A well-known brand name can drive traffic and sales in the ever-changing world of e-commerce, where many new businesses pop up daily.
Your company is a brand, whether you put effort into developing it or not. But that interpretation might have nothing to do with your expectations. By carefully crafting your brand through stories, relationships, marketing messages, and visual assets, you can shape your customers' expectations and build relationships beyond just doing business.
Branding requires a more strategic approach than marketing, which is primarily a tactical process. Once you know the big picture and what your brand stands for, you can start working on a marketing plan to help you reach your goals.
What is a branding questionnaire?
Using a branding questionnaire, a business can learn much about its target market and how to best position its brand. It's the practice of pinpointing the essence of a brand, or the "brand DNA," that sets it apart from competitors.
Using a branding questionnaire can help you narrow in on the exact message you want to convey about your company to employees, clients, and partners in the branding and marketing process.
There are several essential components of a brand identity questionnaire that you must provide, including:
- Company name and description
- The usefulness of your products
- Competition
- Story
- Team
- Customers
- Other information that you feel is important, includes your role, the participants, and clients’ expectations.
Clients will trust you more if you use a brand identity questionnaire as a standard operating procedure. As a result, they will see that you are an experienced and trustworthy partner who can help them reach their goals.
What’s the importance of a branding questionnaire?
From global icons like Nike and Apple to fast food giants like McDonald's and Burger King, brands are everywhere. A customer base exists for any brand, regardless of its widespread reach. Consumers must decide which local window cleaning business to hire as often as they have to decide which major athletic apparel brand to buy.
Brand identities summarize the ideals, character, and "brand voice" of a company. A brand's voice represents it in the market and tells potential buyers the company's promises and what it stands for. It also guides the company's actions and decisions, ensuring that the brand's overall strategy aligns with its core values.
A distinct brand identity gives a company an advantage in an overcrowded marketplace. Identity development for a new brand is just as important as identity renewal for an old brand. Take the time to look closely at a brand's roots to see if they can strengthen your company's core values.
What are the benefits of a branding questionnaire for freelancers?
With the help of branding questionnaires, freelancers can quickly and easily get all the vital data they need from customers. It's a good way to ensure that the brand you're building fits your long-term goals. With the questionnaire's organized database, you may review your responses.
Even though many of these questions are appropriate for a kickoff meeting, it is more efficient to address them in advance. You also ensure that you won't accidentally overlook any vital points.
Think about the best way to incorporate questionnaires into your current client onboarding procedure. Before you start working with a client, create an online form and send it to them via email. This practice will help ensure you have all the information needed.
When is it appropriate to use a branding questionnaire?
When starting a new branding project or developing a brand strategy, questionnaires can be helpful. A branding questionnaire can be useful in the following distinct ways:
To learn the goals of the top leadership
Note that branding questionnaires aren't exclusive to firms and freelancers. These forms could also help the company's internal marketing and branding teams understand the vision of the company's top management.
Designers, marketers, and copywriters benefit when they are on the same page with leadership or other key stakeholders. That can also help find ways to re-energize or grow a brand that aligns with the organization's overall goals.
When beginning work with a new client
Whether as part of an onboarding process or a specific project, when freelancing or working for an agency, a branding questionnaire is an important part of getting new clients. Before beginning a project, it's helpful to acquire a feel for who the client is and what they stand for as a brand.
If you're creating content for an established company, you should get the lowdown on their brand's visual identity to create assets that mesh with their current aesthetic. Your job is to determine what the company needs in terms of branding. That includes finding out about the company's current brand identity and the details of its fonts, typography, color palette, and logo.
When starting from scratch, it's important to ask questions that go to the essence of the brand's personality. You can go beyond the usual questions about demographics, the industry, and competitors by asking about things like brand personas.
It can be useful before the rebranding process
As part of the rebranding work, an agency or freelancer may also use a branding questionnaire. To get all the facts at your disposal before starting your brand's marketing strategy, you'll need to ask many of the same questions as those about a new brand. Still, you might find it helpful to ask a few more questions specific to their request for a revamp or rebrand.
For example:
- To what extent do they wish to change their current brand image?
- Where do you feel they've failed to effectively convey their brand's values?
Features of a brand identity questionnaire
A good questionnaire will be thorough and should prompt you to describe your brand's tone, personality, and core beliefs. It will have a pre-made survey with the most common and helpful questions about brand identity.
An online survey platform is the most time-effective method for developing a questionnaire. Its survey builder also lets you create a questionnaire tailored to your needs by dragging and dropping questions.
You can add more consumer research to determine if the impressions people have of your brand match the ones you were trying to make. Do market research to determine which of your ideas are most important to the people you want to reach.
This includes testing different logo designs, conducting a brand awareness study, tracking your brand's performance, or even trying out new ideas through concept testing.
10 questions that freelancers should ask in their client's branding questionnaire
In order to research your client’s brand, you need to create a branding questionnaire that they can send to their customers. Here are the appropriate questions to ask your clients to get the most useful information.
1. Have you used our product/service before?
Before using the client's responses in your analysis, you must screen all of their leads. Knowing their target demographic is essential for effective engagement. If you're researching estate planning, do you want to include a fifteen-year-old in your test group despite the age restrictions? Probably not.
2. How do you perceive this brand? Does it have a strong brand identity?
What do the most loyal new clients say when interacting with their sales or management teams? You can learn a surprising amount about how they’re making their consumers feel by engaging their newest, most satisfied fans.
Did they convey:
- Vigor?
- Relief?
- Inspiration?
To establish a good brand voice and solid brand identity for their business, you need to know people's emotional reactions when they think of their brand. Use this feedback from their branding questionnaire to guide your selection of visual identity elements, such as color palette and typeface.
3. How do you relate to this brand?
Branding and advertising are nothing without a good brand story. Stories are the heart of any brand's offer and the key to getting people interested in what the brand has to offer. Tell both the brand's literal story—how the company or product came to be, its origin, how it has evolved, and what led to it becoming a brand—and the story you want to tell consumers.
Share some words that best represent your client’s brand. Why does this brand exist? What benefits does it provide the client and investors?
The end goal of a brand's backstory is to make the customer feel like a hero. In order to create a backstory for your client’s brand, you can draw off your client’s personal stories—a childhood memory, a place, or past experience—that can subliminally build a relationship and change how the customers perceive their brand.
This poignant tale can be the foundation for their company's persona and promotional materials.
4. Who is the brand's ideal client?
This is the place to begin if your client’s company has not yet created buyer persona profiles or detailed profiles of potential consumers. Buyer personas should shape every facet of a brand's identity. Research what their target customer base cares most about in a brand.
Do they care more about efficiency or excellence? Is it more important for them to have good working relationships with their suppliers or to build strong relationships with them? Finding out what their biggest problems are and what worries them the most will empower you to develop a brand that speaks to their target market.
More factors than age and income level define their ideal customer. Questioning this will let you know what customers like, their mentality, and their expectations of your client’s product or service.
5. How different is this brand from its competitors?
Compared to the competition, what special benefits does their brand provide? How will you convey this in their brand's visual identity?
Keep in mind that being unique isn't enough. It stresses the need to take the initiative to make a difference. To find a niche, you must work toward a goal and always take advantage of their specialization.
Whole Foods isn't in the business of undercutting the competition on price, as any customer can attest. They can't compete on price because they want to keep selling fresh, local, and specialty foods. After all, that's its brand identity.
6. Would you recommend us to a friend?
When a customer tells a friend or family member about a business, you can be sure that they are a dedicated customer. What a customer feels is just as important as what they think. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a valuable indicator of customer satisfaction.
According to Tom Smith in his article "Insights from Analytics," this question provides a window into the relationship between the business and the client. A "detractor" is a customer who has a problem with your product or service and complains about it, even if you do everything you can to make things right.
What can you do to turn a "passive" into a "promoter," and what can you do to let them revert to a "detractor"? One thing you want from a "promoter" is a positive review, a recommendation, or social media mentions.
7. How can you describe our brand to a friend?
A brand's definition on paper is useful, but asking customers for their input is the only way to find out if it resonates with them in practice. You could be taken aback by the way they describe you. This is a crucial question for any consumer opinion survey of a brand.
As a follow-up to the NPS, this is a fantastic inquiry to make. Learn what people remember most about your client’s brand by asking them to describe it in their own words, and assess whether their priorities line up with your client’s.
You will know a lot about how people interact with your client’s brand by asking them to describe it. It will also show what customers care most about regarding their products or services. That can range from features, prices, and availability, or they may want to discuss your client’s values and goals.
8. Does our brand make a difference and fulfill its purpose?
So many brands have entered the market believing that their offerings are indistinguishable. If you know what consumers think about a brand's purpose when deciding what to buy, you might be able to avoid a price war. If your client’s goal aligns with what their target audience believes, you may significantly increase the chances that they will make purchases.
Be sure to provide extra background information for these observations. Ask customers to describe your client’s goal so you can compare their answers to what you hope to find out. If the way people see your client’s brand seems to be different from what the client wants, rethink your marketing plan.
9. What pain points does our brand solve?
Customers don’t contact companies when they have everything they need. Most likely, your client offers a product or service that benefits them.
A company's visual identity should convey how it addresses customer pain points. Can customers have confidence in your client? Their brand's identity should lean on its ability to help clients solve problems.
10. How can we improve our products/services?
What would keep customers coming back or encourage new ones to make a purchase? Promote them to the Chief Executive Officer, in their heads. Moreover, your client’s customers are the best source of information about their desires.
They always have ideas for improving a brand, from changing the wording of a product description to starting over from scratch. They will rank and tell you what they consider most important if you ask them what they would change first.
Some aspects of your client’s brand may have served clients well in the past, but no longer do. They may no longer connect with customers because the competitive landscape has changed or that time has passed. Again, getting their feedback before cutting off features that are crucial to them is important.
How to create your branding questionnaire from scratch
How can someone create a good branding questionnaire for their client’s business? With form-maker tools, you can make custom forms from scratch or based on a pre-made template.
Some of the best choices that we have used are:
1. Indy's Form tool
Indy's Form tools have come in handy, enabling you to create your branding questionnaire templates from scratch. To be clear, you can create a contact form for any purpose.
If you need an easier way to gather information for your studies, business, or project, there's no better option than this tool. It lets you gather all the information you need and keep it organized. It will help you with every step, from capturing data to receiving the final feedback. Give it a try.
2. JotForm
Famous for its adaptability, JotForm is a popular choice for creating online forms. It allows users to work on their projects from any location, online or offline. The editor is intuitive and allows you to make and alter surveys from anywhere you happen to be.
JotForm's offline data collection feature allows you to collect information even if you don't have Internet access. JotForm is well-known for its collaboration features, which make it simple for a group to finish a project together.
3. HubSpot
With HubSpot's plugin, you can use your website to build surveys and collect information from your clients. Then, you can put the data collected via your survey in your HubSpot CRM.
It's a simple drag-and-drop editor that makes form generation simple for non-technical users. HubSpot gives you the same great experience as Marketing Hub, even if you build your forms on WordPress.
HubSpot also prioritizes automation. Your surveys are linked to your contact database and marketing automation systems, thus saving time.
Conclusion
While the questions can be countless, you don't need to ask hundreds of them to get business-critical information. The answers to these ten questions can give you a good idea of how you're doing compared to your competitors and how you can build a solid brand identity.
Indy’s Forms tool makes it easy for you to create forms for anything, including branding questionnaires. Get started today for free!
