How To Brand My Business And Be Irresistible To Ideal Clients
Do you look out at your peers (and their team of behind-the-scenes designers) with a touch of brand envy and wish your online presence could look as polished and gorgeous as theirs?
Is your Instagram grid a mishmash of different styles and doesn’t quite do justice to your professional abilities and how good your service is?
Do spend long, fruitless hours on Canva playing with templates but never quite happy with how they end up looking, because everyone’s using the same ones?
Are you wondering where to even start branding your business?!
It’s OK lovely, we all start there! When you learn your modality, no one shows you this stuff, but I’ve got you!
In this blog I’m going to help you break down the elements that form a brand so you can show up confidently and authentically and be irresistible to your ideal clients.
Quick Branding Quiz!
Let’s start with a quick branding quiz and get you thinking about some brands you may recognise and see what we can learn from their examples!
What is your favourite brand of make-up? Why are you a loyal customer – what it is about that company that means it’s your go to product to buy?
What comes to mind when you think about Harrods? Can you imagine the colour green they use in their bags?
What UK supermarket has the tagline “every little helps?”.
If you need to buy a sofa, what shop do you instantly think about?
Which brands don’t you like and why? What it is about them that repels you?
Now think of your own brand.
What do your loyal customers LOVE about your company, product or service?
What would your customers say are your company’s colour and symbols– is it instantly recognisable?
What words do you use often in your marketing repeatedly? Do you have a tagline?
What do your ideal clients and networking referral partners instantly think of you as the go to person for?
How does your brand communicate who you are not for?
Ces, a graphic designer at Inspired to Inspire, says “How you make your customers feel with your branding is really important. When you look professional and stand out in the crowd you can enhance perceived value and be easy to recognise. With a soulful, consistent aligned brand identity, you will attract exactly the right customers that you want to work with. Your ideal clients will just flow to you naturally”.
Make A Brand Mood Board
A brand mood board is a great way to start mind-mapping your ideas and bringing all the different elements of your brand together. Most corporate companies will have “brand guidelines” and they will detail the way in which the brand is represented. As well as the visuals, like the logo, fonts, colours, images, elements and icons, they can also include brand values and the tone of voice.
Branding is a way to bring the energetic entity, or archetype, of your business to life!
Here’s what to include in your branding guidelines:
- Brand Values
- Mission
- Logo
- Fonts
- Colour Palette
- Images
- Tone of Voice
- Graphic Elements
Pinterest is a useful tool to search for colour palettes and start mapping out your ideas for your brand.
A top tip is to create a “Branding “Elements” folder in Canva and save your logo, images, icons and elements that you use frequently there. In that way you can easily create consistent brand across all your marketing assets.
I love to go deeper and consider colour psychology and symbolism – check out this Instagram post where I share the meaning behind my logo.
I highly recommend checking out Ces’ work at Inspired to Inspire. Ces is a talented designer and specialises in working with wellness practitioners. Ces is our branding expert in the Healing Business Mastermind. We put together the Power Up Your Brand masterclass which includes a case study on how I created the Healing Business Brand. Connect with Ces at https://inspiredtoinspire.co.uk/
Start Where You Are
The purpose of creating a consistent brand is to give you more confidence to share your business with others and enable your ideal clients to get to know, like and trust you.
However, creating a brand is not an excuse to fiddle behind the scenes so that you can avoid being visible!
The key to a profitable business is to reach your clients, serve them and deliver incredible value and transformations. If you’re finding you’re using branding as a procrastination device or are stuck in perfectionism, take a deep breath and give yourself permission to start where you are now. Trust that your brand will evolve and you can polish and refine it as you go along.
Give yourself a deadline and make sure you are prioritising sales and client delivery alongside this creative work.
If you’re anything like me when I first started out, your design skills may need to catch up with the vision you have of how you want your brand to be! Canva is a great tool, but if your design skills aren’t quite delivering the quality or look that you want, get support from a designer and outsource when you need to. This will help to speed things up and you can focus on income-generating activity.
When you have created your brand you don’t need to go back and change everything all at once. If you look back through anyone’s Instagram feed, you’ll see how their brand has evolved over time. Let go of the need for perfection and take messy action in the right direction.
It’s Not All About You!
It’s important to separate “you” from “your business”. Your business has an energy of it’s own.
It’s a subtle distinction, and may be obvious, but as empaths we can sometimes merge energies which can negatively impact on your perspective and ability to set boundaries in your business. Your professional life is just one aspect of who you are as a whole person. You are not your brand. You are part of your brand – but it’s only one part of the story.
Don’t just choose colours that you like. Choose colours that showcase what your business is about and how they speak to and resonate with your ideal client.
For example, you might love florals and a soft feminine vibe, but your ideal client may still be resisting their femininity. They might prefer more of a natural, earthy palette. You could create a natural palette and add floral accents to blend them both and speak to the journey that you will take them on.
Or, you might love calm, neutral tones, but your business offering brings joy and vibrancy to your clients and so your brand would be better represented with bold statement colours.
Your brand is the sweet spot between what you love, what your business represents and what will appeal to your ideal client.
If you want your brand to have longevity, avoid jumping on latest trends that may go out of date. Create a classic look that will stand the test of time.
Next Steps
Branding journal prompts:
How confident are when sharing your brand with others? Are you excited for them to check out your website or social media, or does sharing it make your energy want to shrink or cringe?
What can that feedback in your body tell you about what you’d like to keep or change about your brand?
Is your brand voice and visuals consistent across all platforms? What is the one thing you can do to bring it even more into alignment?
What’s your next step? When will you take it?
Come and share your insights!
Come and share with your insights and next steps you’ll take to make your branding irresistible and please do share your mood board with us! Go to Healing Business Academy Facebook Group or drop a comment below. Would love to hear your how your brand makes you irresistible to clients!.