Ready to get clarity around your brand? One of the biggest areas we all struggle with as small business owners is knowing who we are, who we serve, and how we’re different from our competitors…
Well, we might not struggle when it comes to knowing these things, but we can struggle when it comes to knowing how to communicate these things to everyone else outside of our own heads.
Having clarity around your brand is essential to the success and growth of your business. It’s getting ahead of our business and providing the “north star,” or a direction if you will, to align our vision throughout our brand.
If we don’t know or understand our own brand, why should we expect anyone else to?
Brands evolve over time so we advise other business owners to regularly visit their brand strategy to make sure everyone still has clarity around your brand and that you are communicating your value clearly and consistently to everyone inside and outside your business.
Getting Clarity Around Your Brand
To see if what we know about our business aligns with how our brand is perceived or how we’re doing when it comes to communicating our value, here are a few questions we can ask ourselves…
If your brand was a person, could someone describe it to a friend?
If you asked someone what value your business would add to theirs, would they be able to?
If you were being introduced to a new business connection, would your business be described accurately or would you have to add in any information to clarify what it is you actually do?
When we talk about brand strategy, many people assume it’s about knowing how to use their brand colors on their social media, whether or not they should add their logo on a certain graphic, or what services to offer and how to price them.
While yes, knowing those things does give you a little bit of clarity, it’s really knowing why we make certain decisions for our brand and understanding how it helps (or destroys) the message we are trying to communicate.
There are so many different factors that make up our brand. It could be the stories we share, the content we create, how we market our services, how we design our brand visuals, who our ideal clients might be…
Knowing all the details serves a great purpose in our brand’s direction and value. When we understand the why, making future decisions about our brand gets a whole lot easier.
There are really four basic (but very essential) parts we should always think through in order for us to gain clarity around our brand. And when you know and understand the answers to these parts inside and out, you’ll be able to get clarity around your brand and start putting a strategy in place to communicate the value to our target audience.
Why
Start with your why.
Every great business coach tells us to start with our why. Our why is like our north star. It’s the core of who we are and why our business exists. Why we do what we do should help guide the rest of your business.
When it comes to our why, think about why we should have a business in the first place. Why did we want to start this particular business? Why should anyone care about our business? Why is it important for people to know what we do?
What
Define what it is our business actually does.
Every successful business should understand what it is they offer. Not just understanding what they offer, but also understanding what makes their offer irresistible to their target audience.
What is it that our business actually does? What problem does your business solve for people? And what is the solution you bring to solve this problem? We don’t want to know just the transactional aspect of our offer, but what is the value your business adds for your clients?
Remember, quality over quantity. It’s not about having a lot of things to offer. It’s more about having a clear focus on what our business brings to the table that’s unique to our competitors.
To dive deeper into the What, think through the unique qualities your brand has that your competitors don’t. What part of your brand do you love? What part of your business do you want your clients to love and experience?
Who
It’s more than knowing our business and who our ideal clients are. When we truly understand who we are and the people we serve, we begin to get clarity around our brand.
In this section, we want to clearly define who we are as a brand, what we believe, and who we want to be in the world. Knowing who we are determines our core values, our vision for our business, our brand personality, and what makes us unique…
If our brand was a person, what dreams and aspirations would it have? What are its challenges? What does it look like? Some can even describe what their brand would look, smell, and taste like!
It may seem over the top, but the more clarity we have in knowing and understanding who we are as a business, the more we can communicate our value to everyone else.
The second part of the WHO is focusing on who we want to help.
Honestly, this can be a tough question to answer. On the surface, it might be easy to define, but when we dig deeper, most people have trouble knowing who their target audience really is. It seems like most business owners have a general idea of who they help, but when asking about specifics, they don’t seem to really know who their ideal clients are. That’s why many people struggle with how to price their services, where to find new clients, or even know how to build their visuals. Yes, even knowing your ideal clients can influence the colors you should use in your branding!
Every little detail helps you gain brand clarity in developing a cohesive brand.
When we think through who our business serves, we should think through the personality traits of our ideal clients. What brands do they love? What do they do in their spare time? Do they have any spare time? What experiences would they appreciate? What motivates them? What do they struggle with? What does their dream life look like?
How
And finally the How. Knowing your value is one thing, but being able to communicate it is totally different.
In the How part of getting clarity around your brand, we should focus on the connection between our brand and our ideal clients. How do we attract our ideal clients? How do we get our ideal clients to enroll in our program? How do we deliver an amazing experience for them? How do we deliver the results we promise?
To get clarity around the How, we’ll need to think through the previous parts: Why, What, and Who. Understanding these fundamentals is where we’ll be able to determine how we market to our ideal clients. For example, by knowing where our ideal clients hang out online, we can post the type of content that they find useful and post that content on the specific platforms they love to use often.
Invest in your business by getting clarity around your brand.
Getting clarity around your brand in order to put an effective strategy in place is one of the most important things we can do for your business!
Some people want to brush past the hard work and start making cool visuals. We all love cool looking things! But this is where most of the problems lie. If we spend a lot of time on the colors and fonts and even on what our website looks like, but if those visuals are attracting the wrong types of people, that can actually hurt our business!
Some people miss the mark when it comes to getting clarity around their brand and start spending money on marketing because they want to get in front of more people right away. And we totally get it! But how much money are we willing to spend before realizing that our efforts might be going to the wrong places?
Getting clarity around our brand by understanding these four essential parts will help us grow a successful business. Knowing and understanding these fundamentals helps develop a brand strategy that maximizes our business growth and guides us as we make future decisions about our business.
Getting Clarity Around Your Brand
Knowing and understanding the four essential parts helps us define who we are. This includes our core values, our vision, what our brand personality shapes up to be, how we sound through our website, how we create our content, what our colors and fonts will be…
We’ll be able to understand who our ideal clients are and attract them to our business and craft our offers to be the perfect solution to their problems. We’ll know how to connect with them and let them know where to find us. We can create memorable experiences for them and deliver the transformational results they want and need.
We’ll be able to tell (and show) potential customers who we are, how we’re unique to our competitors, and why they should choose to do business with us. Especially if your market seems really saturated, you’ll be able to position yourself to stand out and communicate clearly why we’d be a better solution than our neighbor down the virtual street.
If you’re wanting a branding do-over, download our free Brand Strategy Makeover guide to help you get clarity around your business so you align, build, and cultivate a thriving brand!
Until next time,
Happy Branding!
