A good brand is built with intention and purpose. When done well, a strong brand can support your version of success and bring more ease and enjoyment into your business.
When I first started our home renovation blog, North Country Nest, I would spend hours and hours redoing the logo and making tweaks to the website. I would then head over to my favorite bloggers’ websites and eventually find myself back to the drawing board with our own visuals. The ‘big’ bloggers, the ones who were doing it full-time, had this look and style and feel that was just next level. And as a newbie, that look and style and feel was what I wanted.
I would ask myself again and again, “How do I create THAT?”
As an outsider looking in, all I saw were the external facets of their brand and how everything came together so seamlessly. Their photography looked effortless. Their brand voice and how they communicated was so spot on with how they appeared. They had real engagement with their audience and the content they were producing was top notch.
It was this lack of understanding that ultimately led me to branding in the first place. I fell in love with the intention and strategy that goes into creating a strong brand and realized that instead of focusing my energy on writing DIY and home-focused blog posts, I’d rather do the behind-the-scenes work of brand building.
Which brings me to today’s topic: Good Branding.
While I fully believe building (and maintaining) a good brand is continuous work, I also believe that there are a few key items that go into the creation process. And that’s what we’re going to cover in this blog post.
In this Article
>> The cost of bad branding
>> What makes a good brand
>> How good branding supports your business
The cost of bad branding
I’m not a huge fan of the term ‘bad branding’ but for simplicity’s sake, that’s what we’re going with today.
At the most basic level, a bad brand is inconsistent, lacks cohesiveness and causes confusion.
But let’s dive a little deeper because it’s not just the external components that are affected by bad branding. Sure, you can have a shitty looking Instagram feed that is all over the board in terms of visuals and messaging, but what else is bad branding costing you as a business owner?
I mentioned this before but the main problem with having a bad brand is that it causes confusion.
When your brand lacks clarity, you’re making it even harder for your audience to buy from you. Whether that means they aren’t sure of your brand’s personality because your communication style is all over the board or they don’t know what you offer or who it’s for – any confusion puts a barrier up between you and that community member.
It’s like running upstream with a bag of boulders, versus walking over to dry land and using the paved road. Sometimes we can get such tunnel vision with our branding that we forget to look around and find the path of least resistance.
Okay, then what makes a good brand?
A solid brand strategy
Spoiler alert: A good brand is so much more than a snazzy logo, the right fonts or the latest color scheme.
Yes, the external aesthetics matter. Of course.
But, let’s go back to the Witt and Company definition of what a brand means: It’s how someone thinks, feels and acts in regards to the identity of your business.
Influencing those thoughts, feelings and actions happen when you’re intentional and strategic about your business’s brand experience. Creating a Good Brand that looks effortless and seamless means you have done the work behind the scenes – you didn’t just pick out a logo and slap it on your website. You’ve intentionally thought about your brand strategy (the plan for communicating your brand) and used that to guide how your brand will visually appear.
And the cool thing is that when you add in the intentionality, you remove those barriers between you and your community. When they understand who you’re for, how your brand is to be experienced, what you’re offering and why you’re doing the work, a relationship is easier to form because there isn’t confusion. There’s trust.
Showing up consistently
Why does consistency matter so much in branding? Because it creates awareness and expectation.
As a business, I’d argue that one of our main goals is brand loyalty. You know, the kind of loyalty that happens when someone can put something out into the world and their audience purchases it because they’re loyal to that person, that brand? Yea, that kind of loyalty. Well, the thing with loyalty is that it starts with trust. And the way we maximize trust-building as business owners is to provide a cohesive experience, to tell a consistent story.
The Good Brands, the ones that have a strong community, are consistent. Their brand experience is cohesive, regardless of where the brand touchpoint happens.
Why you should care; how a Good Brand supports your business
A Good Brand, a brand that has a clear strategy and provides a consistent experience, will without a doubt support you in reaching your version of success.
When you have clarity around your brand’s communication plan, you spend less time thinking about what to say and more time taking action. Which in turn, results in showing up consistently – both in time and experience. Meaning, you are able to create content and put yourself out there with more ease so you show up consistently, AND you are working from a clear strategy so the content itself is consistent.
And at the end of the day, consistency is what drives our business forward.
Ready to create a strong brand so that you can show up with consistency? Schedule a no-obligations consultation call!
Happy branding!
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