Consistent brand messaging communicates your business’s values and purpose to consumers. It also helps shape your corporate culture and the product development cycle. Branding can also be a way to help you successfully share your business’s story. But the question for many business owners that keeps them from moving forward on hiring a brand consultant is, “How much do branding services cost?”. This article will discuss the average cost of various branding services. But, it’s essential to note that these numbers might not apply to every business, so be sure to ask for a clear price estimate when you go through your list of questions to ask a branding agency, while on the hunt for the perfect one.
Pre-Seed Startups and Bootstrappers
For many startups, the goal is to establish a proof of concept to showcase where their product will fit into the market, in hopes of bringing in investors’ money. Pre-seed startups might only need a website, logo, and some simple brand positioning.
Brand Positioning and Strategy
Brand positioning entails understanding who you are as a business, and it’s also where you show how your product or service fits into the market. Communicating your business’s value is the most crucial piece of the branding puzzle, which is why it’s key that you understand your values, as this can give you a clear basis for conveying your identity to a branding specialist, who can then take your vision further.
Visual Identity and Logo
Your branding can be seen as a relationship between your company and your customers, and you must make sure that every interaction with your audience conveys your message. That’s why you’ll need to hire a skilled brand consultant to develop an appealing logo and visual identity – while you may have a self-designed logo you started out with, once your company is up and going, you can get better results by hiring professional branding experts to create a more polished visual identity and logo, which costs anywhere from $100 to $3,000.
Website
It’s crucial for businesses in the early stages to avoid spending their limited dollars on building a website from scratch. Pre-built and templated sites can help you get up and running at a low cost. Customizations at this stage will be minimal, which can help with the price.
The cost of creating a website using pre-built and templated sites ranges between $5 and $40 per month, plus $20 per year for a domain name.
Funded and Early-Stage Startups
If you’re seeking experienced help, finding a good fit with the right branding experts is essential. Trust is the most crucial factor in a working relationship, as branding and design ultimately involve a lot of collaboration. So take your time to find a branding specialist or agency that makes you feel comfortable.
Alternatively, if you have a strong branding expert in-house, set aside time for them to focus on your brand positioning. Going this route will cost less, and they already have in-depth knowledge of your audience and business values.
Most branding specialists will charge per project; however, if you opt to pay by the hour, expect to pay $100 to $200 per hour for an experienced brand consultant and $200 to $700 per hour for a branding agency, depending on its size and location.
Brand Positioning and Strategy
For early-stage and funded startups, brand positioning and strategy are a driving factor behind many business decisions. That’s why it’s important to take your time to get it right. With a smaller marketing budget, branding specialists may spend a few days with your company management, figuring out your business’s values and how to communicate them to your audience. If you have a larger budget, expect branding experts to conduct in-depth research and competitive analysis, resulting in clear deliverables, such as a communication strategy for your marketing team, which would provide voice and tone guidelines for any content they may produce.
More costly branding projects may include training to ensure your employees consistently and correctly execute your branding. Here, the price typically depends on the complexity of your deliverables and the number of people working on your branding project.
The cost of brand positioning and strategy for early-stage and funded startups ranges between $5,000 and $15,000 for freelance brand consultants and small branding firms and $40,000 to $80,000 for larger branding agencies.
Visual Identity and Logo
Your company’s visual identity can come as a result of rounds of feedback and iteration from a focus group, along with going through a series of visual mood boarding, after which you’ll get a logo, color, typeface, design elements, and visual brand attributes. Pricing depends on the number of logo variations you need, the level of detail you require in your visual guidance, and the number of brands you have.
Visual identity and logo for early-stage and funded startups cost approximately $5,000 to $20,000 for small branding agencies and freelance brand consultants and $20,000 to $80,000 for larger branding firms.
Website
This branding service has the most significant variation in cost. That’s because website projects become more expensive as they grow in size, since bigger projects require more user research, content creation, engineering work, and prototyping. Website pricing largely depends on the number of iterations you need and the complexity of the engineering.
Small branding agencies and freelance brand consultants charge approximately $2,000 to $25,000 for a fully custom designed website, while larger branding firms charge roughly $30,000 to $200,000.
Final Thoughts
You may opt to hire one of the many freelance branding experts we have here on Guru, or you might have an experienced friend or family member who can give you an incredible deal on their services.
But regardless of whom you opt to work with or how much you’re willing to spend, branding is a crucial part of any business because it will help you understand and communicate your identity to the world, so be sure to do your due diligence before hiring on someone to take on the role of building out your brand.
