Are you ready to grow your audience, attract new customers and get more building-building opportunities on repeat? This episode is where I tell you exactly how. We’re ditching the ol’ “throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks” approach and shifting our focus to something more powerful and actually useful… branding.
Are you ready to grow your audience, attract new customers and get more building-building opportunities on repeat?
This episode is where I tell you exactly how.
We’re ditching the ol’ “throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks” approach and shifting our focus to something more powerful and actually useful… branding.
We’re diving into how branding is the umbrella that ties together ALL aspects of your business from design and marketing to systems and growth.
Plus how adopting a new approach to branding (where you realise it’s not just about logos and colours) can propel your creative business forward and help you elevate your brand and achieve sustainable and consistent growth.
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Ready to join the creative branding lab for artists and makers who are ready to grow their audience, attract new customers, and get business-building opportunities on repeat. Check out The Next Level Creative™.
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Do you want to grow your audience, attract new customers, and get business-building opportunities on repeat? You might have tried lots of different tips and tricks to make these things happen in the past, but the secret to making them happen and making them consistent is building a brand that brings customers and collaborators.
Today I'm going to talk to you about a new branding approach that will transform how you grow your creative business so that you can finally start seeing the sales and growth that you have been wanting and waiting to see. So if you are ready, let's dive into the episode.
First things first, I want to talk to you about why branding isn't just one of the many problems in your business that you need to solve.
It's actually the umbrella that all of these other problems and things in your business have. So it's the main thing that you need to get sorted out first before you can worry about anything else.
You have all these things to worry about, right? Design and email marketing and social media and copywriting and your website and sales and growing a team and packaging and customer service and all of these things, right? And branding is just another one of these separate problems in your business.
But when you work on one tiny piece of your business at a time, and you're not looking at the big picture and how it all fits together, it ends up feeling disjointed and there's not anything to tie it all together and therefore it doesn't have the full impact that you want. And chances are you are looking at all of these different problems and trying to solve them independently with lots of different resources, right?
You're looking at your social media and you're finding a resource over here like joining a program or finding a course to help you with your social media or you are getting a copywriting freebie or you are getting somebody to help you with your packaging, right? So you are getting overwhelmed with lots of information and conflicting strategies from lots of different places that are all coming together to create this kind of mishmash of results that don't really work together because they are not communicating with each other, right?
If you have one expert over here teaching you about one thing or one kind of strategy over here telling you one thing that is not communicating and telling you how they connect with each other. How does your customer service impact how you do things on your website how does your website talk to your social media and how do you get people from social media to your website and all of those things.
Nobody's telling you how to do all of those things and connect all those pieces together.
Nobody is telling you how to do those things and how to connect all of those things together.
So how do you fix that? You need to think about your brand as the umbrella that connects all of these things together and that everything sits underneath.
Here's your brand, and underneath you have one pillar, which is design.
And underneath design, you have your website, you have your packaging, and you have your signage. So you sit. Your brand and you decide this is what my brand is, this is what it sounds like, this is what it feels like, this is what it looks like, and that impacts what my website looks like, and my packaging, and my signage, etc.
Then you have marketing. Now I know what my brand looks like. sounds and feels and what I want it, the messaging to be, and all of that information, now I know what my marketing strategy needs to be, and who it needs to talk to, and all of that, so now I know what my social media marketing needs to look like, and my email marketing, and my copywriting, and how to do that, and how they all talk to each other, and how to use design or this pillar, how to use design in my marketing and how they connect to each other.
And then you also have a systems pillar. So I also know because of my brand, how my business needs to be set up in order to scale. So I know how to hire based on my values, based on like how I want my, Business to speak. I know how to outsource, I know how to set up customer service. I know what templates, automation and processes I need in order to make my brand experience.
fit with the rest of my brand and how that connects to my marketing and my design like the design templates I need, the marketing systems that I need and the processes that I need and all of this stuff becomes connected to your brand and connected to each other, right? So you need to start seeing your brand as the overarching backbone behind everything you do.
Everything else in your business all of the courses and the resources that you've been taking and you've been trying to use as fixes for the problems in your business Feel disjointed and haven't come together to actually grow your business Because you need this system to bring everything together your brand So when you build your brand first and you set up the system, you'll be able to like never second guess any part of your business.
Your brand becomes your compass and your decision-making guide for everything you say, create, and do. Grow your audience and bring in more customers.
So that kind of brings up the clarification that I want to make about branding. So it is not just design. Branding is a strategy. It's how you show up on social media.
It's how you do customer service. It's how you hire a team. It's the copy you write. It is the design. So much more. So when I talk about branding from now on throughout the rest of the episode, throughout any of the content that I create throughout anything you consume of mine from now on, know that I'm not talking about logos, colors, fonts, patterns yes, those are important.
Those are a huge part of your brand, but I am talking about so much more than that. I am talking about figuring out what your brand says, what your brand feels like, what your brand is like to engage with, what your brand is like to talk to, and what your brand is like to work with. what your brand goals are, what your brand values are, like so much more than your logos, colors, and fonts.
And so that's how your brand can impact so much more than just your visuals, right? So that's what branding is all about. So how can you? And what is different about my approach to branding other than what I've just told you? So the reason that you might have felt stuck with branding in the past, other than maybe just thinking about design is that a lot of people just do.
Branding once every three years or something, they look at their branding when it needs to be looked at, right? When they feel like it needs a refresh or a rebrand or when they figure out that it's not working, that's when they do it.
But that is why people get stuck because they will do their brand, it will work for a while and then it will stop working and then they plateau and this is where they get stuck plateau Is because they are not working on their brand. So the new approach that I want you to think about is what if.
Instead of doing your branding once every three years, once every five years, once every however many years, what if you made your brand better every day? Or what if you worked on your brand every month? What if you worked on your brand every three months? The point is, what if you worked on your brand more often?
What if your brand was something you were always? Working on consistently iteratively working on. This is the approach that I recommend if you want to consistently improve and grow your creative business. And.
This approach, my approach, The Next Level Creative™ Method that I have created has four phases.
So let's dive into these four phases.
Phase number one is brand strategy. This is where you figure out all of the things that I mentioned before about your brand values, your vision, your mission, and who you want to work with. Why you do what you do the direction you want to go in your messaging, your personality, all of those things.
It's the things underneath your visuals, Your marketing all of that stuff, it's really getting underneath that. It's the strategy underneath everything. So that is phase number one is brand strategy. Phase number two is brand design. So that's what you probably know and love about branding is the visual stuff.
So this is your logos, your colors, your fonts your patterns, imagery. Iconography, illustration, all of that good stuff, and then applying it across your business, so your website, your packaging, your signage, all of the things that are going to make your brand look and feel amazing. Then we have brand growth, so this is marketing your business, sharing it with the world, all of the ways that you can do that.
social media other ways of marketing, both online and offline, and all the wonderful ways we can do that in all the ways that work for you. So it's creating a marketing and growth strategy that is tailor-made for your business and built from your brand strategy and using your brand design.
And then lastly, we have brand systems. So this is setting up your. Brand for success and to allow you to scale your creative business So setting up systems and processes and automations and potentially people In place to let you grow your business. So yeah things like templates guidelines automations Systems delegation all of the things that will let you Grow your brand grow your business and scale your creative business.
All of these things are designed so that you consistently take your brand to the next level again and again.
The process for this is that firstly you want to set up each of these phases so at first you probably don't have these things or you might want to refresh these things if you have little pieces of them so you want to make sure you have a really solid brand strategy.
You might want to really refresh and set up a kick-ass brand identity. Make sure you have an amazing marketing plan and that you're ready to go with all your marketing and then set up some amazing brand systems and then in step two,
When you go around this method this framework the second time, it's like a cyclical process. So the second time you go around, it's all about revisiting each stage regularly.
now my brand strategy is set up and I'm going to, it's been like a month or two months or three months or however long I'm going to check back in and say, okay, how do I feel about my brand strategy? Is it working? Let me see how my messaging is working.
Let me see if my audience is correct. Let me see if, My copywriting is working checking in on your brand strategy and then the same with your brand design. Is this, am I happy with it? Do I need some more assets? Could I flesh out my brand guidelines?
Do I need to change anything? Same with your brand growth. And we do the same thing in checking in and always iterating, making changes, and working on your brand all the time. So we are always making progress, always making changes. Your creative business is better every single day, every single month, every single quarter, all the time.
Because what if you used your brand strategy every day? What would that do for your creative business? What if you reviewed your strategy intentionally every three months and made any changes that would benefit your creative business, that would help you target your audience more effectively would help you pinpoint your marketing even more specifically, that help you express your values more clearly,
Brand identity every three months. For example, make sure it was attracting the right customers that you created extra assets that were more effective, or that you added more templates that made it easier for you to create social media content more consistently and more regularly. What if you assessed your marketing plan regularly and audited the last quarter and planned the next three months of content in advance?
or realize that you could repurpose half of the content that you made in the last quarter because it was so amazing and you already did the hard work we can reuse it and repurpose it and it will save you time and will be really effective in Using the work that you did and being really effective with your work What if you routinely had a look at the systems in place around your brand and added?
tasks and delegated tasks hired help and Created automation that allowed you to scale your creative business doing these things for your brand regularly and intentionally allows you to check in, spot things early, and take control of your brand so that you can always be making progress towards your goals.
This means that instead of waiting until you realize that you're things aren't working and it's too late and need to overhaul the whole thing into a full rebrand and hire lots of help to fix all of these things every three years. You can be on the ball. You can fix things as they happen. You can make changes before they break down.
And you can always be making progress. You can always be growing your brand. You can always consistently take your creative business to the next level again and again. And this is what The Next Level Creative™ method is all about. And this is what my approach to branding is all about because I don't want you to be wasting time and like waiting three years to do a rebrand or to realize that you've been wasting time doing marketing that doesn't work.
Like I'd rather us check in every month or every three months or something. And figure it out now and change it like let's change it now and try something new now and see if that works and then we can check in another month and see how that went and change it again. I want to do it quicker so that you can make progress quicker and that you can succeed quicker because you deserve to succeed and you're Art deserves to succeed, I know that you can succeed you just need to not wait three years until your next rebrand, until, you realize that things aren't working and that you're trying to, Use all of these little fixes and trying to jigsaw puzzle them together to make it work I want to help you to Look at the big picture and figure out your brand and how that can help everything come together And you start thinking about it more regularly to figure out how to make things, improve regularly, often, and as this big picture so that you can make an impact now and make that impact big.
So This is a method that I wanted to teach you today. This is how you can consistently grow your audience, attract new customers, and get business-building opportunities on repeat by following this Next Level Creative™ method by working on your brand strategy, your brand design, your Brand growth, and your brand systems and working on them as a whole system As a whole big picture.
So looking at them individually But also as a big picture as your whole entire If you want to learn more about this and go a little bit more in-depth then you can watch the full training about this and learn about how I teach this in my program, The Next Level Creative™ via the link in the show notes.
So please go and check that out in the show notes. Other than that, I hope you have loved this episode and I will see you as always in the next one, but until then keep creating. Bye.