Rushing into creating your brand is something that a lot of people do – when you start a business you think you need everything now now NOW and so you fling something together without too much thought and then … well, it often turns out that your brand isn’t cutting it. When you create a brand image for your business you need to think really hard about what you want. Not visually – to start with – what you want for your business, what matters to you, why people should buy from you in the first place, what your brand values are, who you want to help and what motivates them. That way you’ll create a brand that doesn’t go stale, that doesn’t suddenly stop working two years down the line, that works consistently, attracting the right clients and compelling them to take action.
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Here’s some things to think about to get you going in the right direction:
BE INTENTIONAL
I’ve blogged on being intentional before, it’s really important. Being intentional is about doing things on purpose so that you’ll get the result you want. So really, it’s about goal setting and then planning how that’s going to happen. So if you want to work with women over 30 who have their own successful business, they wear clothes from Joules and Boden and Seasalt and read Good Homes Magazine and you know that you need to work with two of them every month to hit your financial target -then you need to get inside their minds. Work out what you do, work out how that helps them and why they should buy from you. Work out your business values and then make a client profile for who you want to work with. What do they LOVE? How can you help them to be more attracted to your brand? What lessons can you take from the things that you know they love? Create a strategy that helps you to connect with those customers more.
YOUR BRAND IS MORE THAN JUST YOUR LOGO
Many people think that if they have a logo then they have it sorted. But have a brand image is not just about a logo. It’s not even all about the visuals. Colour, typeface and styles of imagery are just as important – more so in that your logo will appear in a corner and not be the main focus of most of your materials. The message that you want to give out, what you want to tell people about your business and how you get that information across is more evident and the thing that will draw people in. You might decide to inject humour in everything that you do or use black and white imagery. Perhaps you want to be a storyteller or a focus on the heritage of your products. Working on your brand means deep thinking and creative application.
BE REPETITIVE
This doesn’t mean being boring. Saying the same thing over and over in the same way with the same image. You don’t want to be DULL, you want to be repetitive. Consistently. With visuals this is EASY. Create a template with adaptable imagery and text and stick with it. Have a colour scheme and fonts that you use every time (you don’t have to use all of them at once! They should work really well together and apart). The best thing to do is to keep it simple – otherwise being repetitive is going to become a chore. Make a template in whatever you use to create imagery for your business – canva is awesome and lets face it you’ll probably need to make social media posts more than anything else right? Make it easy. Being repetitive makes you recognisable. Being recognisable makes you memorable. Being memorable means that when someone needs what you do they’ll remember who you are and want to work with YOU.
If you’re about to start your business or if you’re ready to improve on it then spend some time thinking about what it is that you stand for and the best way to get that across to your audience. Set your intentions and then take action on them, determine what it is that you want to express to your audience and then do that – repetitively – so that your audience is compelled to convert into clients.
Amy Purdie is the founder of Whiteacres (where you are now) she can help your business become irresistible to your ideal clients so that they can’t wait to work with you.
Amy has been enjoying designing logos, brand identities, illustration, print work and websites – since 2007 fuelled mainly by tea and chocolate.