Intentionally Building Your Brand
With literally millions of businesses starting over the past year, it’s imperative to find ways to set yourself apart in the eyes of your potential clients. There are many ways to do this – messaging, client service, expertise in your fields, and service offerings – but one of the foundational aspects of your business is your brand.
Being intentional about building your brand is essential. Often, we think of our branding as the visual elements – our logo, brand colors, typography, and style. These are all important, but your brand goes much deeper than this. It also includes your Core Values, your client experience, and the presentation of products you choose to represent your company as gifts and swag.
All of these aspects come together to form your brand, or who you are as a company and a business owner. Intentionally building your brand (rather than haphazardly letting it happen) will benefit you at each stage of growth.
Creating Your Core Values
Winston Churchill once said, “If you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything.” He obviously wasn’t talking about building a brand when he made this statement, but the basic concept holds true. If you don’t know what you stand for – what your Core Values are – your audience won’t either. As a result, you’ll find it nearly impossible to attract the clients you really want to work with.
However, your Core Values also come into play in other ways.
When you are vetting new team members, it’s vital to make sure they align with your mission, your culture, and your current team. Including your Core Values in your job ad is an easy way to make sure the right people apply for the position.
Each week, dozens of decisions cross your desk – and sometimes, there isn’t a clear blueprint to work with. In those cases, your Core Values can provide quite a bit of clarity. Which option aligns with the values you’ve based your company upon?
At each stage, your Core Values will provide the basis of your brand. They’ll also be the foundation that allows you to grow!
Refining Your Client Experience
The next aspect of your brand that is often overlooked is your client experience. This not only determines how happy your clients are with your company, it also determines the results they’re able to obtain. In turn, it also determines the quality of testimonials and referrals you will likely receive.
Your client experience is something that must be intentionally planned and implemented – but it also needs to be refined as you grow. As you move into different stages of your business growth, both your team and your service offerings will grow and change, so your client experience will necessarily change as well.
As you go through this process, make sure to keep your team in the loop as to why various Polices and Procedures are changing – that the company is growing and you’re always seeking out ways to streamline things for them as well as for your clients.
This way, you’ll be able to get their input and keep them on board with implementing any changes!
Visual Branding and Swag
When you think of visual branding, you probably think first of your website and social profiles. These are important, and they should always be on brand, but your visual reaches further than that.
What about welcome boxes, thank you gifts, cards, and other items you send them throughout their time with you? Physical objects (anything from a mug to an entire welcome box) make a huge impact on your clients, so going the extra step to curate and brand them is often worth it.
This step does take more intentional planning, but having a Brand Style Guide on hand makes the process move a lot more quickly. This is something that you should be using internally, but it’s also very useful to give to any vendors you may work with. Having your brand colors, logo and watermark, typography, and a “feel” for your branding style will help them present your brand to your clients in some pretty amazing ways.
If you need to build your Brand Style Guide, we’d like to help! This is something we discussed in our February webinar this year; in the workbook that we gave to participants, we included a branding mood board template. To help you get your branding guide in place, we’ve created a full Brand Style Guide template – just click below to grab yours!