BRAND IDENTITY

Life is complicated. Good design shouldn’t be. Especially when your brand is driven by purpose, sustainability, and a hunger to change the world.

Weaving those elements, and your brand essence, into a visual identity is what sparks connection and elicits opportunity — and it’s essential as the trees are to the forest.

So, what does your branding need to communicate? And how do you find your brand essence? Let’s find that out together!

Brand Story

Storytelling inspires and creates emotional connections with your audience.

Storytelling is a powerful tool for your brand’s communication. If you want to build meaningful relationships and create an elevated brand your people care about, you need a purposeful, authentic story to tell.

Here’s the structure for good storytelling:

PROBLEM:

Describe the difficulty, situation or problem that you set out to solve.

SOLUTION:

Describe how you solved it with your ideas and passion

SUCCESS:

Describe how your solution is making people’s lives better

Brand Purpose

To create a brand identity that is rooted in strategy, designed with purpose, and resonates with your ideal client, we must get into the WHY of your brand first.

Your brand purpose makes you irresistible to your target audience. It’s the foundation and the very reason your brand exists.

It goes beyond profit.

If used strategically, your why can be the driving force behind your brand’s success

Vision

Your brand vision states what your brand does for your audience. Think of it as the picture of where you want your brand to be in the future.

Your vision should be measurable, attainable, inspiring, unique, cultural, and straightforward.

The brands that are most capable of inspiring us and earning our trust are the ones that make us feel like we’re more than just another customer. They make us feel like we’re part of something even bigger.

Mission

Think of your brand’s mission as the route to follow to achieve your brand’s vision.

Your brand’s mission is what your business strives to do for your audience.

Think about what products and services you offer and the impact they have.

Values & Ethics

What does your brand stand for?

Values are at the core of your business. They influence how consumers perceive your brand and help them align with their own values.

Your ethics help define your purpose, personality, and visual style.

From the colours you use, your logo, your voice and customer service, everything should be meaningfully defined around your brand values.

Promise

Your promise is how you commit to every client. It’s the way that makes your brand unique, and it’s what your target audience expects from your business.

Your promise helps you position yourself in the market, as it sets customers expectations on the brand’s quality and feel.

Personality

Brand personality is a set of characteristics that your brand can purposely use to evoke the right emotional response and increase trust.

Brand personality is what humanises your brand and makes it resonate with your target audience.

Because we connect and purchase from brands we like and relate to, it’s important to define your brand personality to be engaging.

Audience

By knowing more about who you’re serving, communicating and connecting with your target audience becomes easy as a breeze.

Who is your audience and where do they look for when they find your brand? What are they searching for?

Customer Persona

Creating a customer persona allows you to understand your audience better and recognise key traits and patterns and how your brand can help.

RESEARCH:

Research the problems your ideal clients are facing. What do they look for? Where do they seek help?

DEFINE:

Define your customer persona. Think about age, interests, profession, routines, goals, aspirations, etc.

DETERMINE:

Map out their decision-making process and where and how your brand can help them.

MAP OUT:

Map out their decision-making process and where and how your brand can help them.

Colours

How your target feels about your brand is more potent than what they think about your brand. This means that your brand colours should be selected by their meaning, a preference is not enough.

Brand colours are a reflection of your brand identity and evoke a strong and immediate emotional response.

Typography

Like colours, your brand’s fonts can make or break your visual identity. After all, it’s not just what you say: It’s how you say it.

Selecting the right typography can help amplify your brand’s message and give your logo and overall brand identity a unique feel.

There’s a lot of information on the internet about ideal clients – why they are important and how to figure out who they are. If you’re reading this article, I’m going to assume that you know who your ideal client is or at least have an idea of who you do and don’t want to work with.

Knowing who your ideal client is is one of the most important steps in growing a successful online brand. If you don’t know who you are talking to, it’s impossible to create a brand that will propel your business forward.

What I want to talk to you about today is how to attract your ideal client and make them fall in love with you.

1. MAKE SURE YOUR OFFERINGS MEET THE NEEDS OF YOUR IDEAL CLIENTS

Do you know what your ideal clients are looking for? Do you know what problems they have and do you have the products and or services to help them resolve these problems?

Instead of thinking about what you want to offer, think about what your target market needs help with and create your offerings around this. For example, my ideal clients are not just looking to rebrand because they don’t like the look of their current brand. My ideal clients are looking to up-level their business and know that they need a strategic plan in place to go alongside the visual side of their branding. They understand that rebranding is so much more than how their business looks from an identity perspective. This is why I created The Flourish Experience and I only work with clients who are ready to up-level their brands in order to reach the next stage in their business.

2. KNOW YOUR WORTH

If you don’t value your knowledge and experience, how do you expect someone else to? An important step in attracting your ideal clients and making them fall in love with you is to feel completely confident in the value you give to your clients.

Often by not feeling confident in ourselves, we refrain from putting ourselves out there which brings me nicely onto step three.

3. START MARKETING YOUR BUSINESS WHERE YOUR IDEAL CLIENTS ARE

One of the most important things you can do is to just put yourself out there. Yes, having a strategy in place is extremely important in order to focus your efforts and grow your business. However, if you have been putting off marketing your business and increasing your visibility because you feel like you need a plan or you need a perfect looking brand identity, then please don’t worry about those things right now, just put your best content in front of your ideal clients.

Marketing isn’t something that quickly grows your audience overnight. Nurturing and growing your audience takes time so by starting to put yourself out there, whether that be a video on Instagram Stories or a blog post filled with value, you are taking those all-important first steps.

4. CREATE A CONSISTENT BRAND IDENTITY

You may wonder why I have put this as step four instead of step three and I have a good reason.

All too often as entrepreneurs, we allow things to stop ourselves from growing our business because they are not perfect. We refrain from putting ourselves out there because we don’t have a plan or our brand identity isn’t perfect or because we are consuming SO MUCH INFORMATION that we just feel overwhelmed.

Don’t let the fact that your branding isn’t perfect, stop you from getting in front of your ideal clients. HOWEVER, your brand identity plays a very important part in your brand growth journey so it is something that needs to be addressed.

If you don’t feel like your current branding is attracting your ideal clients then it’s time to change it. Whether that’s an entire rebrand or ensuring that you are consistent across all platforms.

5. PUT OUT QUALITY VALUABLE CONTENT FOR FREE

One thing that often comes up during my strategy sessions with clients is that they are scared of putting their best content out there.

There are two main reasons that I hear as to why this is the case.

The first being that they worry that by giving out all of this free information, they are going to do themselves out of business as their audience will just do things themselves. Well, I can tell you now that this isn’t the case. Yes, there will always be a proportion of your audience that will DIY but there will be those out there (your ideal clients) that will read and watch this valuable content, decide that you are the expert for them and hire you to do the job.

The second reason is they worry that their competitors will copy their content and replicate it for themselves. Again, yes there may be some business owners that are too lazy to think for themselves and will just copy an article they found online but they will never do well because they are not you. The whole point in building a personal brand is so that people buy from you. By simply copying what someone else is doing, they are not using their own unique voice.

So please, don’t worry that your potential clients won’t buy from you or that your competitors may steal from you, just keep putting out valuable content and position yourself as the expert in your field.

6. GIVE THEM THE BEST POSSIBLE EXPERIENCE

Client experience is a key element in building a successful personal brand. This doesn’t just mean from the moment that they are a client but from the moment they first come into contact with your brand.

Think about all the touchpoints that your audience have with your brand and how you can enhance their experience to make it as seamless as possible.

I hope that’s helped you to think of ways in which to attract your ideal client and make them fall in love with you.

Tag: BRAND IDENTITY

How to find your brand’s essence