How to Brand Your Business
One of the biggest misconceptions that you may have about how to brand your business is thinking it means just getting a nice logo designed. Many people think having that one little symbol completes their “brand,” but that’s simply not true, because in reality, a logo is just one little visual representation of your business. And true branding is much more than that.
One of my favorite quotes on branding comes from branding guru, Marty Neumeier, and it goes like this: “Your brand is not what you say it is. It's what they say it is.” And that means your brand is what other people know you and your business for, sort of like a “reputation” for your business.
So your job as the business owner is to make sure you’re giving off the right perception of your business to appropriately brand yourself through anything that you put out to the public about your business – whether it’s your marketing, what you write about your business on social media, and even the photography that you choose to use for your business.
This way, when other people come across your business for the first time, they’ll get the right impression, instead of getting the wrong impression. Remember, the drawback of branding the wrong way and giving off the wrong impression is that you could end up attracting the wrong types of clients who aren’t the best fit to work with. So it’s best to make sure you're giving off the best impression possible to the types of clients that you DO want to attract, so you can book more of them in your business.
So without further ado, here’s the four steps on how to brand your business….
Step 1: Get clear on your brand values & how you want others to perceive your business.
The foundation on how to brand your business involves first having clarity on your brand values and exactly how you want other people to perceive your business. This determines every other decision that you make regarding your brand moving forward.
Back when I was doing custom brand and web design for clients, I started off every project with a brand strategy kickoff session. During the strategy session, we would get really, really clear on what the person's brand values were and what descriptive adjectives they’d want people to use to describe their businesses and their brand.
So as you’re working to get clarity on your brand values, take time to brainstorm about what you’d want people to think and feel when they come across your business. What feelings do you want people to walk away with after they work with you? What do you think makes you unique and different compared to others in your industry?
By thinking about all of this first, this informs everything else around your brand, and it just really helps you to make sure you’re able to stand out in your industry because the job of branding is to make you different.
And being different is important because no services that any of us sell these days are original. Everyone has other people who offer the same services that they offer. But the thing that typically can make you stand out no matter how saturated your industry is…is your BRAND.
So a quick example might be — maybe you're a career coach, but you want to put a fun take on it. So let’s say you want to be the career coach who infuses humor into your content and into the way you coach people. You don’t want to be the typical “buttoned up” super corporate career coach. You want to be someone who’s fun and encouraging and doesn’t take themselves too seriously.
Whereas somebody else may want to be the really “buttoned up” career coach. They may want to help people get to the executive level at work. So they want to come off as somebody to be taken seriously and someone who’s really professional.
So those are just two ways that people could be offering the exact same services, but because of the way they brand themselves, they’re perceived in two completely different ways and they can appeal to different types of people.
Step 2: Get clear on the kinds of target clients you really want to attract to your business.
A big part of your brand is knowing who you want to attract, so you can craft the right messaging that will appeal to them. This involves making a client avatar that describes the target clients who you want in great detail. You want to define things like:
Who are your target clients?
What do they care about?
What are their problems right now?
What are their frustrations?
What are their desires?
What do they really want?
Be as descriptive as possible when you answer these questions. You even want to include aspects of their personal lives with questions like:
What do they do in their free time?
Where do they get their news?
Where do they live?
How much money do they make?
I also love finding a stock image online that looks like the person I envision as my target client to really hit the point home for myself. And you can give the person a name. Then you can tell yourself that everything that you’re creating for your brand is for this person, with the name you came up with. X lives here, X does this, X wants this, etc.
So by being able to do this, you’ll have even more clarity on how to brand your business online. And anytime you're writing something or creating something for your business and your brand, you need to be thinking about your target client avatar in your head. This helps you to make sure you're creating content that appeals to people that you want to attract, instead of the wrong people.
Step 3: Clarify your personal brand & story.
Including a bit of personal branding into your business is extremely valuable because it helps set you apart when you’re working on how to brand your business. That’s because, no matter how saturated your market is, nobody is offering the services that you have with your story and your unique set of life experiences.
So you want to think about what elements of your story are relevant to your business with questions like these:
Why are you doing what you do in your business?
What motivates you to do this work?
What obstacles and challenges have you overcome that is influencing you to do the work that you're doing in your business now?
How did you get started doing what you do in your business?
What are some, I guess, motivators that are driving you, like, what's your why for doing this and all of that?
Those are just a few elements of a personal brand and story that you can share on social media or on an about page or bio. This also helps you attract like-minded, wonderful clients to your business, too.
Step 4: Create your visual brand.
Once you’ve laid the foundation for your brand with your brand values, defining your target client, and defining your personal story, NOW it’s time for the part that you probably think of first when you’re deciding how to brand your business — creating your visual brand!
Your visual brand includes what everyone typically thinks about when it comes to branding — your logo, color palette, brand fonts, photography style, etc. All of the different options for brand visuals have meanings subconsciously, when people see them. For example, different colors all have different meanings in color psychology. So you must know all of the foundational info on your brand first, so you can select the right colors, photos, etc. for your type of brand.
For example, if you want to be a joyful, fun career coach, maybe you choose to use yellow as one of your brand colors because it represents joy in color psychology. And maybe you choose to use well-lit, bright photos with people looking happy and smiling in them to convey a feeling of joy. And maybe you do your brand photo shoot with confetti, which will feel really joyful. Whatever visual hits home the message you want coming across in your brand, be sure to include it when you get your logo designed, select your color palette and brand fonts, and you select brand photos or get them taken.
In conclusion — Deciding how to brand your business is much more than choosing a logo. It includes a strong foundation like defining your brand values, knowing the target client who you want to attract, telling the story of your personal brand, and then choosing the visuals that illustrate all of that in the right way. And to effectively USE your brand, be sure to keep all these things in mind whenever you make any decisions for your business because the perception that you want to give off should oozing out in everything you do in your business! It should show in your copy, the images you select, the way you write on social media, how your website sounds and looks, videos, podcast episodes – everything should feel cohesive.
