How your brand reflects your business
Starting or being in the midst of your entrepreneurial journey, how much attention do you pay to your brand? Or branding your business?
Creating a brand is what not only helps you to sell your business, but it ensures people come back to you! Branding is building trust, creating relationships and showing your ideal customer who you are and why they need you!
As part of a brand, there is more than just the visual aspect. Although that plays a huge role in displaying your business, there are many other factors you need to consider when building a brand!
So, I call on branding expert, Suz Chadwick from The Connection Exchange, to chat all things branding on my recent podcast! You can listen below OR read my interpretation on what we discussed during our chat!
Branding is key, if you haven’t even thought about it, don’t stress, it isn’t too late! But of course, you NEED to start. So, let’s dive in.
Listen below!
Visual Brand
As I mentioned before, a visual brand isn’t the only part of branding you need to think about, but it does play a big role in the “judge a book by its front cover” factor.
When people land on your social media page or your website, does your branding reflect your business?
Do you have colours that represent your brand and who you are?
Would they come to your page and think “wow”?
Of course, when it comes to the visuals of a brand, everyone has a different opinion on what “looks good”, but you need to think about if your brand reflects who you are! Would it attract your aligned client?
Knowing your target audience is key to understanding whether your brand will resonate, so if you have skipped this step, go back to have a think about who your audience is and how your brand will connect with them!
Yes, you can create amazing content on Canva to help you get your brand out there, but do you feel aligned to your branding? Does it look good in your eyes? Not just okay, but wow, amazing, love it?
Often outsourcing the visual brand aspect of your business is a great way to really love your visual brand. This could just look like your logo and some design elements you can carry over to your website and social media, plus you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to get a designer to help with your visual brand.
Brand Values
Ask yourself the questions, what are my brand values? Do these values reflect your brand and your content? If your brand value is to be open and honest, is your content open and honest?
Really be honest with yourself and reflect on your values, maybe even set them again! If you need help with this section on your business, I have a free guide to help you!
Does your audience know what your values are? Have you told them either on your website or in your social media content? Showcasing your values will help an audience understand who you are and then, of course, make the choice whether to buy from you or not.
Forming brand values are so important to help you and your brand stand out above the rest, but you need to live to these values and provide the content that reflects what your values are!
These values also need to reflect in your visual brand. If you say your brand is "fun", but you have a dull visual brand, how are people going to trust and believe you?
Brand Voice
Brand voice goes hand in hand with your values! Your brand voice is all about again, reflecting what you have created as part of your visual brand and brand values.
Do you have the words that reflect your business and what you do? Things like a tagline also help with your branding and allow people to remember your brand based on that tagline.
Think about it, how do you talk about what you do? Like I said, if your brand is, to be honest, do you be vulnerable? Do you open up?
Your brand voice is also about embracing your written and verbal voice. Giving yourself the power to speak out when you feel called to and to use your brand values to voice your opinions.
Your voice is unique to you, so your brand voice should also be unique and stand out above the rest. Of course, not everyone will resonate with your message, but the objective is to ensure your aligned audience does connect with your message!
Again, my brand guide will also help you establish your branding voice as you start to identify what your brand really represents!
Customer Experience and Journey
One of the most important aspects of your brand is the customer journey and the experience they have with your brand. When they come away from working or buying from you, how do you want them to feel?
When they land on your website, what do you want them to do? When it comes to mapping out your customer experience, think about the “know, like and trust” factor. What do you want them to know about you, like about you, and how will you make them trust you?
From that, you also want to explore the "think, feel and do". What do you want them to think about your brand? How do you want them to feel when they work with you, and what do you want them to do (or feel inspired to do)?
Your website plays a huge role in how your customer sees you and your brand. Do not underestimate the power of your website. Your website is YOURS, so your content and the branding elements on your website need to speak to your audience and educate them on who you are and what you do!
One thing Suz talks about in the podcast is the “one thing”. What is the one thing you do and are known for? Is it a certain course or service?
Suz is known for the Brand Builders Academy, and of course, she does other things, but her one thing is what drives her brand forward!!
Limiting Beliefs with branding
When you are creating a brand and are creating content within your business, you will come across limiting beliefs. You will have days where you don’t feel confident to show up, or you doubt something you have created.
But as Suz said, it is just being super aware of what your limiting beliefs are so when they do surface, you know and can identify it as a limiting belief. You will never 100% overcome your limiting beliefs, but once you can acknowledge that is what it is, it makes it easier to give yourself the pep talk you need.
Of course, having a brand you are proud of and are confident in, makes it a lot easier to overcome these limiting beliefs when they do surface.
Key takeaway: be aware and know how to combat a limiting belief you have.
How to combat hate towards your brand
As an entrepreneur or business owner, you know you open yourself up to a difference in opinion. When people show hate or disagreement towards your message or business, you just need to remember, no two people are the same.
Someone will have a different opinion to you and often hate is an insecurity on their end, not yours. So first you want to identify why they have said what they have said. Then think of it like this:
Are they in your industry, or have they done what you are doing? If yes, have a conversation with them, and both educate each other. Not everyone will agree. If no, they shouldn't have an impact on you, they haven't been in your shoes or know what it is like to do what you do
Is the comment just for the sake of hate? If yes, think about that person. They are only doing this because they have underlying problems themselves. It is all about identifying why they would have done or said what they said. If no, go back to my first point.
When it comes to identifying hate towards your business, you need to educate yourself in emotional intelligence! I know the entrepreneur who can help you out:
My branding journey
So yes, I have had a branding journey, of course, I have. But just like many, I didn't have my branding clear, to begin with, either and mine is developing daily!
Values
My branding values were the one thing I did establish very early, but I always am reflecting to ensure mine are used within my content. I want to make sure people understand who I am and what my business stands for! My values include:
Fun
Growth
Knowledge
Loyalty
Openness
Once I did have these five-set in stone, it made creating content a lot easier! But also, they reflect who I am as a person.
Voice
Again, my branding voice is always continuing to develop, but being a content writer, I have the advantage of having confidence in my written voice. But with this, being open and expressing opinions online can be a daunting process.
This is where knowing my limiting beliefs and how to talk my way through those is important!
One of my major limiting beliefs is the word annoying, which I mentioned in a recent podcast episode and blog, you can find out more here.
Visual
The visual part of my brand was always something I struggled with. However, I did start off strong with an amazing logo design and branding colours/fonts etc. crafted by my amazing designer friend Kelsey Hutton. Those branding elements were so strong, but my website and social media graphics did NOT reflect me, and the amazing work Kelsey did!
In March 2020, I invested in a website designer to come in and use my brand to visually reflect who I was as Content Queen, and I’m sure you can agree, it looks amazing!
To me, it reflects being open and inviting with its prettiness and shows the fun aspects I always like to instil into my messages as I show up!
Once I had that, I could create the visual content on my social media to reflect my website design! Now I am obsessed and feel WAY more confident showing up online!
Final thoughts
Creating a brand is so KEY to allowing your audience to see who you are as an entrepreneur, business and person!
From the moment someone visits your site, you want them to know who you are and what you are about. In order to do this, you need to identify your visual brand, your brand values and your brand voice!!
For me, I needed to invest in a designer in order to help my visual brand come to life, and so my branding voice could reflect who I am and what I can offer my audience.
So now what you need to do is:
Do some auditing on your content and visual brand, does it tell the story you want it to?
Look at your customer journey, does the path resonate with you and your audience?
When you show up online, does it reflect who you are?
Once you have asked yourself questions you might need to:
Form more of a brand voice (you can see more here)
Invest in a designer or work on the design elements
Work on the content you write or hire someone to help you
When it comes to branding, do you think it reflects your business?
External resources
I want to provide you with some more knowledge on branding!
Of course, you can check out Suz Chadwick’s website and join her community, but when I was also researching branding, I came across some great articles to help!
If you want more information around branding, the definition is explained in great detail on the Entrepreneur website! But also, with a brand, have you thought about a branding strategy? Like a content marketing strategy, it is a plan. A plan on how your brand will look, sound and be relayed to your audience! Brands to Life have an amazing article on brand strategy.
If you also want some actionable steps for brand creation, you can also check out the ten simple ways with Small Business Rain Maker.
Don’t believe you need branding? Well if my article didn’t convince you, maybe Sigl Creative’s might.