If you are the face of your business, it can be really important for your audience to get to know YOU through your marketing and branding.
But maybe right now your branding feels a little off, a little incomplete, and overall just doesn’t quite feel like it represents you. Maybe it did at one time or maybe it never did, but all you know is that your branding doesn’t reflect the level of expertise you bring to your clients.
I’m going to walk you through the process I’ve developed that’s gotten my clients saying “YES! You just get me.” They felt seen by our work together and represented in their marketing visuals and brand identity.
The phases I work through are:
Alignment: Deep reflection and discovery around how you want to be seen by your audience and how you want your audience to feel when interacting with you
Expansion: Strengthening your visual identity so that it’s distinct and memorable by creating specific brand guidelines, curating custom design elements, and creating templates
Consistency: Giving your audience an immersive experience with an aligned, consistent visual identity across all touchpoints
I see these phases as concentric circles, each part building on the one before. Alignment is at the center, Expansion is the second layer, and Consistency is the outer layer.
Consistency is surface-level, but it can be the easiest to assess and address. If you look at all of your marketing touchpoints as a collection, do they look like they belong together? Do they look mindfully designed, haphazardly thrown together, or eerily similar to other marketing graphics out there?
After we pinpoint the places where our visuals lack consistency, we often find that we simply don’t have a solid vision of what our visual identity should look like. We need more clarity around how to use our brand colors and brand fonts, and we need to quantify exactly what other design elements and imagery fit within our branding and should be used across our marketing materials. (If you’re here, you may have been branded and stranded!)
The Expansion phase solves this problem. In this phase, we get really specific on how we use all of the parts of our branding, and we find just the right design elements and imagery to use in our visuals. We also start to create templates and examples of how all these design decisions should work together, so we never really have to start from scratch when designing.
Ok, but how do we decide what colors to use as backgrounds and which are accents? How do we know which fonts should be headers and which should be for body copy? And how do we know what in the WORLD other imagery we should pull into our visual identity?
The answers to these questions are informed by the work we do in the Alignment phase. During Alignment, we ask and reflect on branding and business questions, to get ourselves into the right headspace for imagining what our visual brand could be. We discover what truly sets us apart from others in our industry, what values are most important to us in our work, and how we want our clients and audience to feel when working with us.
Imagining the impact we want to have through our business, making design decisions in line with that vision, and then applying those guidelines across all of our marketing touchpoints is how we make our branding feel like it truly reflects us.
If YOU’RE ready for a visual identity that truly feels like you, I created the Expand Your Brand Workshop just for you.
Expand Your Brand Workshop
Thursday, June 13, 2024
1pm – 2:30pm ET
Sliding Scale $35-$65
In this workshop, we’ll identify where your brand lacks consistency and distinction, and you’ll begin to describe the next level of your brand, so people see YOU in your marketing.
We’ll be covering:
- Why it’s important to have a consistent visual identity
- What visual touchpoints make sense for your business
- How to think about visual consistency so it’s not overwhelming
- Why I focus on your branding feeling authentic, rather than chasing market research
- How we can transform abstract ideas and feelings into the next level of your visual identity
This workshop is for you if:
- You feel lost or uncertain with your marketing visuals, unsure of your design choices, and tired of seeing the same generic Canva elements everywhere
- You have basic branding in place (logos, colors, fonts, website), but you’re never quite sure how to use it, or part of it feels off
- You and your business are closely intertwined, and how others see your business is tied to how others see you (AKA a personal brand)
- You feel like there is a disconnect between the level of expertise you bring to your clients and the impression that your marketing is giving.
- You’re ready to start imagining what your visual branding could be
Don’t miss this opportunity to transform your branding into a resonant visual identity, leaving a lasting impact on your audience! Register here.
PS – Is June 13, 2024 in the distant past while you’re reading this? Click here to see what other events I have going on, or click here to schedule a Brand Alignment Audit so we can work on expanding your brand in a 1:1 setting!
