A brand is more than your logo. Your brand is the experience your customers have with you and your business that leads them to buy. Your brand is determined by the reason or reasons why you do what you do…your values and beliefs.
This in turn influences everything encompassing your business, including the visual aspect of your business. Your logo, your colors, your website layout, your handouts, your fonts, your image choices, your communication style, etc.
A clearly defined brand will allow you to more easily connect with your target client and make it easy for them to say “yes” to working with you.
It’s time for a rebrand.
I started the Health Practices Online branch of my business back in 2010. Businesses naturally evolve and mine has changed significantly in the past five years…in ways I love! I’m long overdue for my visual brand to catch up to the service and experience I actually provide to clients.
Creativity and flushing out ideas from a different point of view….not exactly my strengths. Do you remember Kristen Domingue from the September event Your Wellness Business: From Practice to Profit? Happy to say I signed up with one of her programs to receive one-on-one insight into the changes I needed to make with my visual brand to better connect with my ideal client.
My education and background stems from being a dietitian. I worked hard to obtain my dietetic registration and I’m proud to be a part of the health field. It’s a natural fit for a significant number of my clients to also be health professionals. However, a majority of my clients do not come from a health profession.
I’m blessed that my client roster fills mostly via word of mouth referrals and returning clients. But imagine the impression someone gets when they visit my website or receive my newsletter and they do not work in the field of health. It screams THIS IS NOT FOR YOU!
Hence, the reason it’s time to rebrand to ensure I connect with both health and wellness professionals, as well as some of the other industry I enjoy serving.
The rebranding process.
Have you ever done a rebrand? I’ve been in business several years now and didn’t really know the right way to figure out the branding piece. I want to give you a highlight of the steps in Kristen’s branding process so if you are in a similar position you have some guidance on where to start.
As you read about my experience below, take it and flip it to think about you and your business.
- Get to Know Yourself – While I walked through a specific process with Kristen for this, there are many actions you can take to better understand yourself and your strengths and weaknesses. This can include asking for feedback from friends and colleagues, taking quizzes and personality assessments to identify your strengths, and narrowing your focus on the key skills you want to highlight in your business model.
- Get to Know Your Market – The second step in Kristen’s process is to get clarity on who your ideal client is. Again there are many ways to do this including surveys, studying other people’s sales pages and copy, and leveraging social media to learn what’s important to the market you want to serve. Research and ask questions to find out exactly where your target client is struggling.
This served two purposes.
- It allowed me to identify what needs I want to meet and what I do not. (ie what service do I enjoy providing and what do I want to make sure I avoid giving the impression I provide)
- It provided the exact words and phrases my target market uses to identify their needs. If you want your copy to “speak” to your target market you need to communicate with them in the words they use. Invaluable strategy to get that information.
- Writing new copy – After completing the first two steps of background research, it was time to focus on several key pieces. 1. New business name/URL. 2. New tagline. 3. New copy for my website. With the help of Kristen’s rebrand process, we located the keywords used by my target market and even better – which ones were used most often by all my ideal clients. These were the words and phrases I used to determine the new business name, new tagline, and then had to integrate into my updated copy. All copy. Home page. About page. Program sales pages. Etc.
New business name: Detail Project Management
New tagline: The detail management you need to say yes to more opportunities.
Elevator speech: I help online business owners and service providers with day-to-day project management so they can say yes to more opportunities and trust the details will get handled.
- Begin the graphic design – This is where I’m at currently in the rebrand process. All copy has been handed off the graphic designer and she began last Wednesday. I can’t wait for the first drafts! Fingers crossed there are elements that match what I have visualized in my mind.
I must say though, it’s about more than what I visual and like. It’s about selecting what will best speak to my target market. The colors selected for the rebrand are based off what colors do I need to convey the feelings/emotions I want potential clients to have when they visit my website.
The layout for the site is also based off the feeling I need to convey to best connect with my target market. Let me just state here, knowing the structure/layout/colors needed is not something I would know without having enlisted the input of a brand expert. Stick to what you’re good at and let someone else help you where you need it! :)
I’m very excited about this rebrand and can’t wait for the final version to be up and in use. Stay tuned for the unveiling…several weeks done the road. It’s anticipated all won’t be finalized until the start of the year. I must practice my patience.
Now, take the above and step back and evaluate your brand. Does your brand speak to your target client in the way it needs to? Do you need a full overhaul or just some tweaks…or maybe this confirms you have everything just right for where your business is right now.